Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Lesson in Florida's scalping law costs Bears fan plenty

By SUE CARLTON
Published May 12, 2006

Last Thanksgiving weekend, Michael Williamson stood outside Raymond James Stadium hoping he would soon be watching his beloved Chicago Bears pummeling the Bucs.

He never got to see a play.

Williamson, a 52-year-old retail sales rep from New Mexico, was here visiting family in South Florida, where he too once lived. He and four family members drove up for the game. His family already had tickets; Williamson was hoping to score his at the stadium.

Savvy scalpers were selling tickets for $200, $300 and up, Williamson says. Finally, he found a pair for sale for $150. He bought them.

But he needed only one to get in. So, he says, he put the spare in his hand and held it up to resell it.

Which turned out to be a rather large mistake.

Two guys walked up and asked how much. As Williamson tells it, he offered one for $100. The printed price on each ticket was $71. That meant he would have made a $29 profit over the ticket's face value.

"It wasn't like I was trying to get rich off it," he said.

Didn't he know that under Florida law, you weren't allowed to make more than a buck off the resale of a ticket to a sporting event? That this was an actual crime, even if it sounded contrary to things like capitalism and a free market?

"No, I didn't," he told me. "I didn't have a clue it was the law."

He was quickly educated. And handcuffed. "Just handcuffed me and walked me through the crowd like, "We caught a big one here,' " he says.

Since scalping was a misdemeanor, Williamson thought he might be given some sort of notice to appear and released. But no. Local rules say out-of-towners must be booked.

"Plus," he said, "I had a Bears shirt on."

He was taken to the jail facility in the bowels of the stadium. Later they put him in a van and drove him to the Hillsborough County Jail.

Other inmates asked what he was in for. Scalping a ticket, he said.

"They just kind of roll their eyes and look at you," he says. "It's not a pleasant experience."

His worried family paid $250 to get him out. Weeks later, he had to fly back to Tampa to stand before a judge. (He thought about wearing his Bears shirt, but why press his luck?)

Prosecutors offered to let him into a diversion program that would keep the charge off his record. As part of the deal, he had to pay a few hundred dollars in costs, including $75 to a victims assistance program. He's still wondering who exactly the victim was.

Williamson figures holding up that ticket that day cost him about $1,000.

They told him he could work his 16 required community service hours back home in New Mexico. So he picked up cigarette butts and trash outside the local Red Cross office, then stuffed pamphlets into giveaway bags. The Red Cross people were nice, but even they laughed when they heard what he was in for.

The whole thing left Williamson smarting. And not planning a trip back to Tampa for a game any time soon.

Probably it didn't help when I called to ask if he had heard that Florida lawmakers just voted to change the scalping law - a law that never made sense to me except as applied to big-scale, organized scalpers.

The new version says a guy standing outside a stadium can make a 25 percent profit when he resells a ticket, not just a dollar more than the original price. (Technically, that would have allowed Williamson a profit of $17.75 that day, but maybe police would have kindly overlooked the extra $11.25. Or, maybe not.)

He does have a single, satisfying moment from the now infamous Thanksgiving Bucs-Bears Scalping Debacle of 2005.

"The only good thing to happen over it?" he says. "The Bears won."

Sue Carlton can be reached at carlton@sptimes.com

[Last modified May 12, 2006, 00:55:11]