US News

Couple ‘bet’ on mob: DA

An Arizona couple’s sports-betting software made them $20 million in licensing fees — and the mob more than $1 billion in illegal gambling proceeds, law-enforcement sources say.

Robert Stuart, 53, and his wife, Susanne, 50, accused of creating and licensing software used in illegal sports betting from California to New York, were hauled in handcuffs yesterday into a Manhattan court.

Each faces a single count of felony promoting gambling, although their company, Extension Software, licensed the software only to bookmaking operations based in Costa Rica, the Caribbean and Canada — where such betting is legal.

Susanne Stuart’s brother, Patrick Read, 53, is similarly charged. Prosecutor Michael Gates told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Bonnie Wittner that the defendants made at least $2.3 million in three years — but their real haul is 10 times that, a source told The Post.

Sources say New York’s four crime families — the Gambinos, Bonannos, Luccheses and Genoveses — are among the biggest users of the software, even if they don’t license it directly from the Stuart family.

The software “allows the mob to move out of the back rooms of Bensonhurst and into offshore gambling and the 21st century,” a law-enforcement source said.