I spent over 25 years at The Trentonian, a tabloid newspaper in the style of the New York Post. While we never did anything as famous as “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR” on our front page, we did have some winners.
HEAD HAD AIDS was a famous example (decapitated head found at golf course tested positive for the disease, obviously), and I even came up with one that ended up in Sports Illustrated’s weekly feature concerning signs the apocalypse was upon us.
HE TOOK IT IN THE BUTT, read the headline after Roger Clemens was accused of taking steroid injections in his posterior.
Those were the fun ones, you know? The ones that made people chuckle.
But day to day, our headlines were equally ruthless, and they most often centered around local issues, local people, local controversy.
Let me be perfectly clear: You did not want to be on the front page of The Trentonian. If you were, believe me, you were going to hear about it. Usually from the authorities.
We had such notoriety in our coverage area that when I sat down for an interview with a newly elected mayor of Hamilton Township — the state’s ninth-largest town — he asked me, point blank, how to stay off of the front page.
He was in jail less than four years later for extortion.
I couldn’t help but think of my time there when the news broke Thursday that a U.S. Special Forces soldier, Gannon Ken Van Dyke, was arrested for placing bets on Polymarket — oh gosh, sorry, for buying event contracts on Polymarket — concerning the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
According to the feds, Van Dyke was part of the “planning and execution of the U.S. military operation to capture” Maduro.
He allegedly bought over $33,000 in contracts and cashed out $409,000. He was charged with “unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction.”
And if I’m a prediction market bull, if I’ve been riding the wave of investment and gushing fluff pieces and presidential nods, I’d be a little nervous this morning.
SOLDIER CHARGED WITH BET ON RAID is what the Drudge Report is leading with as I type. Screaming red letters to boot.
You didn’t want to be on the front page of The Trentonian. You don’t want to be on the front page of Drudge.
Heck, even President Donald Trump, whose son Don Jr. is an advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket, didn’t exactly have anything nice to say about “predictive” markets in the wake of Van Dyke’s arrest.