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.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” I replied.
He was in jail less than four years later for extortion.
SOLDIER CHARGED (sorry for hollering)
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.”
Front page news right there.
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.
Insiders insidering
A few months ago, Polymarket’s Shayne Coplan probably would’ve been crowing about how this is a good thing, how it’s proof that prediction markets work, how it’s proof they are sources of truth, how they are the “most accurate thing we have as mankind right now.”
Not so much today. Today, Coplan and crew were crowing about how the fact Van Dyke was caught proves the system works to prevent insider trading, which Coplan used to say was a feature, not a bug.
To be clear, here’s Polymarket’s official X account yesterday:
Here was Coplan less than six months ago: “What’s cool about Polymarket is it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge information to the market.”
So yes, sure, we can easily make the argument Polymarket has found some religion and is now against insider trading and the system worked and …
Except for one thing: The only reason the system worked is because Van Dyke was (allegedly) not too smart about how to go about doing this.
Namely, he bought the contracts himself. From his Polymarket account.
What if Van Dyke had instead told a trusted friend to make the bets, buy the contracts?
I’ll just let that one sit for a minute.
Van Dyke getting caught is less about proof of the system working and more about serving as a warning to future insider traders: Namely, at least try to put a little distance between your bets and your knowledge. Literally, just ask a friend. Not brain surgery. Heck, I’ll do it. Once I figure out how to do the whole VPN thing.
Not a red letter day
Listen, I’m not saying that this case is going to all of a sudden turn the tide totally against prediction markets. I’m not saying Congress is all of a sudden going to put aside partisan differences to pass a bill. I’m not saying Trump would even consider signing such a bill.
At least not today.
But being on the front page of the Drudge Report — and NPR, and Politico, and the Washington Post, and on and on and on — isn’t exactly the PR push the prediction market world was hoping for.
The average American scrolling through the internet today — someone outside our little bubble — well, they’re probably horrified.
You don’t want to be on the front page of The Trentonian.
You really don’t want to be on the front page of the world.
It quite simply attracts the wrong kind of attention.
