When the two men met up in Sydney in August 2011, he told Hanson he was uncomfortable with the arrangement when Hanson tried to hand him $2.5 million in cash for the tables. Related Ex USC Athlete Owen Hanson Gets 21 Years in Prison for Drug Trafficking Hanson pleaded guilty to racketeering and conspiracy to distribute drugs back in January 
 
 Within an hour of getting settled in his suite at the Four Seasons, however, there was an unexpected knock at the door. One day she phoned Cipriani out of the blue, and told him she knew of an American businessman who wanted to bank roll Robin Hood 702's charitable efforts. Four years later, on September 9th, 2015, a former football player at the University of Southern California named Owen Hanson stepped onto the manicured fairway at the Park Hyatt Aviara Golf Club, in Carlsbad, California, a resort town on the Pacific coast 90 miles south of Los Angeles. Born and raised in Southern California, Hanson had been a walk-on tight end on the 2004 championship-winning University of Southern California football team, a squad coached by current Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll and featuring future NFL players Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart. Court records indicate he collected around him a crew of enforcers with nicknames like “Tank” and “Animal.” Hanson named his crew after himself: “O-Dog Enterprise.” With his ill-gotten proceeds, Hanson built himself an opulent house in Redondo Beach, Calif., with a pool and the walls covered with a silver-plated AK-47 pressed with the Louis Vuitton logo, Rolling Stone reported. The winner of a Super Bowl with the San Francisco 49ers in 1994, and two more, in 1997 and 1998, with the Denver Broncos, he now stands accused of selling cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and ecstasy as an Arizona-based member of Hanson's alleged racket. It begins, however, in Sydney, where back in 2011 Hanson, inhabiting his alter ego as DeLuca, showed up at Cipriani's room at the Four Seasons with $2.5 million in Australian dollars (worth $2.7 million in U.S. dollars at the time) stuffed into suitcases. And in the federal government's sweeping case against Owen Hanson, it is Cipriani, a confidential source nicknamed "Jackpot" by the FBI, who serves as the man who provided some of the most incendiary evidence about how Hanson pursued his extralegal affairs. The two had met in June of 2011, when Cipriani first traveled to Sydney to drum up media interest in his forthcoming escapades as Robin Hood. The way Cipriani remembers it, he had heard about Hanson from a woman he dated years ago in L.A. "Mexican, smoking hot, used to being given $25,000 Hermès bags," is Cipriani's description. “We went upstairs and he had a suitcase already just sitting there,” Cipriani told the magazine. “He goes, ‘Here, I’m gonna give you a million dollars.’ And I said, ‘Bro, you don’t even know me and you’re gonna give me a million dollars?’ 
 
 “And he goes, ‘Yeah, but I heard a lot about you, I have a feeling.’ And I say, ‘But you understand that there’s a chance that I don’t win?’ He goes, ‘Look, I’ll tell you what, I believe in you so much …’ And he opens this cabinetry that literally was stacked with $50 bills in Australian dollars. No locks, no keys, nothing! He grabs some more and says, ‘I’m giving you a million and a half.’ ” 
 
 Hanson’s idea was that the gambler could easily cash drug money into chips at a casino, play for a while, then cash out the winnings in return for a casino check. "I can't begin to tell you how many people have offered me money; put up money for me to gamble," Cipriani told nine.com.au, recalling the cash exchange with Hanson. Around the time Hanson was lining his pockets with Australian drug money, Cipriani was branding himself as Robin Hood 702, a kind of philanthropist who would win money from the casinos to give to the poor. Hanson said he would give the high-roller his cash and whatever profits Cipriani made he could give away to the needy. Hanson added an image of himself into the pictures of the tarnished graves, then sent them to the gambler. “You’re going to do this, you understand?” 
 
 To get out of the situation, Cipriani proceeded to blow through Hanson’s $2.5 million. But in Australia he had decided to “leave it with the gambling gods,” as he would explain later, uncharacteristically dropping maximum bets of $20,000 on every hand he played at the casino’s VIP tables. When Hanson learned his money was gone, however, he began relentlessly threatening the gambler to pay him back. But he declines to go into detail given that he, too, is also under federal indictment, charged with collecting gambling and drug proceeds on Hanson's behalf. "If you wanted something you went to O-Dog," says someone familiar with the group. “Coke, steroids, you name it.” 
 
 After college, Hanson got heavily involved in sports betting, working as a bookie for clients in Los Angeles. "Words cannot describe the horror my wife went through watching every frame of the beheading video. Cipriani praised assistant US attorney Andrew Young, FBI agent Brett Fenoglio and two other undercover agents, known only as John and Nick, for believing the information he had on Hanson, and who had orchestrated the downfall of the crime boss's smuggling operation. He didn’t want to be involved anymore. “He ran his gambling business like drug dealers run the drug business,” a former customer told Rolling Stone. "If you're short a little money they'll kill you – that's the attitude that he brought. It took all of us off guard. We are all educated pussy white dudes. We thought he was one of us, but he acted like an Italian gangster from Queens.” 
 
 Hanson eventually branched into drug dealing. It finally gave me and my wife closure because there was a fear that Owen Hanson was only going to get five years or ten years.' At his side stood an Australian that Cipriani would later learn was a man named Sean Carolan, reportedly a former cage fighter and racehorse trainer who was acting as Hanson's muscle. As the bloody short film booted up in the laptop, a sinister figure in a black balaclava appeared wielding the kind of sub-machine gun favoured by drive-by shooters in the US. I never thought in a million years that Crista Velarde would set me up with her husband who happened to be a very, very big international drug dealer," he said. When Cipriani received a call from Carolan demanding that Cipriani meet in room 3026 of the nearby Hilton Hotel, Cipriani instead took a cab to the airport with Leventhal, calling Hilton security en route and reporting – anonymously, falsely – that there was man with a gun in room 3026. When the police arrived, they did not find a gun, but they did find Sean Carolan and a suitcase filled with $702,000 in Australian currency. (A curious sum, Cipriani points out, given that he says it was intended for him – a gambler who calls himself Robin Hood 702.) Haeusler, when interviewed, told authorities that he and Hanson bet on NFL games together in the U.S. His business continued to thrive with a reliance on threats and intimidation – much of it, according to court records, directed at Cipriani. A man holds gun and threatens RJ Cipriani and his wife Greice Santo (pictured right) in the DVD that was sent to them by Owen Hanson. A man in a van – later identified as Jack Rissell, the enforcer referred to in the indictment as "Animal" – was often stationed outside Cipriani's Santa Monica home. "It made me think," Cipriani says, "that he was trying to whack me." That fall, around the same time that Hanson was being questioned by Australian police, Cipriani received a photograph of his parents' graves in a cemetery outside of Philadelphia; the tombstones were splattered in blood red paint, and photoshopped into the image was one of Hanson himself, wearing a Mexican wrestling mask and holding a shovel, as if to imply that Cipriani would soon be joining his family if he failed to pay. A few months later, in January of 2013, Cipriani received a DVD in the mail from Hanson that contained gruesome footage of two men being beheaded with a machete and chainsaw. Pay up a $2.5m debt to a US cocaine kingpin with links to Mexican and South American drug cartels or a grisly fate awaits, warned the man in the DVD. Undeterred he took it to the San Diego field office and they had launched an investigation. He had a reason to want to lose. You have him bragging to an undercover agent about how he sold kilograms of coke in Australia for $125,000, not to mention the five kilograms of cocaine and another five of methamphetamine that initially got him locked up. His lawyer, Michael Croke, who also represented Hanson in Australia, has been arrested for his role. Was Hanson truly a cunning kingpin, as charged by the federal government? When he drove across the country, he claims, it was only to take a photo of the tombstones, for which Hanson paid him $5,000. When Cipriani first approached the FBI in Philadelphia, they did not believe his story.
– Owen "O-Dog" Hanson played on the same championship-winning USC football team as future NFL stars Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart, but he would ultimately take a very different career path. The 35-year-old California man was sentenced to more than 21 years in prison Friday after pleading guilty to racketeering and conspiracy to distribute drugs, reports the Washington Post. His fall from grace is a wild tale: While at USC in 2004, Hanson began selling drugs, including cocaine and steroids, Rolling Stone previously reported. After college, he started working as a bookie in Los Angeles. Years later, his wife would tell a former boyfriend, professional gambler RJ Cipriani, that Hanson wanted to put up millions of dollars to fund his efforts at casinos in Australia, per 9 News. The money was to be returned with a casino check, though Cipriani could keep any winnings. Authorities say it was a scheme aimed at hiding money from Hanson's illegal dealings in Australia, where he could sell cocaine for ten times as much as in LA. Cipriani claims he figured this all out and was purposefully reckless at the casino tables to get out of the arrangement; he ended up losing $2.5 million. But his escape plan wasn't that easy. Cipriani says Hanson threatened him and his wife, including by sending them a video of two men being beheaded. "If you don't pay us our money, this will happen to you," an attached note read, according to prosecutors. The US gambler eventually went to the FBI and Hanson was arrested in 2015 in a joint operation with Australian police. He pleaded guilty in January, and has now been ordered to forfeit $5 million in assets. More than 20 of Hanson's associates have also been charged with crimes related to gambling and drug trafficking.