On January 18th, 2014, the New Jersey Department of Gaming Enforcement cancelled the opening event ($2 million guaranteed prizeopool) of the 2014 Borgata Winter Poker Open after concluding that someone had used a significant number of counterfeit chips in the tournament.
A few days after the tournament had been cancelled, Associated Press reported that Day 1C chip leader Christian Lusardi, 42, had been arrested in Atlantic City in connection with the Borgata chip cheating scandal after investigators found $2.7 million counterfeit chips stuck in the toilet drain pipes of his hotel room at Harrah's.
Lusardi, now 43 years old, was earlier this week sentenced to 5 years in prison and ordered to pay $1.1 million restitution for buying and selling large quantities of bootleg DVDs. According to a press release on justice.gov, Lusardi became a suspect in 2012 after the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center and Customs and Border Protection concluded that he had ordered several boxes of counterfeit DVDs from China.
His home was later searched and over 35,500 counterfeit DVDs were found. It was later determined that Lusardi had sold DVDs in both the United States and Canada and received over $1.3 million in his Paypal account between June 2010 and July 2012.
In regards to the cheating scandal at the Borgata Open, Christian Lusardi has still not received any punishment for his alleged crime. The tournament was cancelled when 27 players remained and all participants, besides Lusardi, received their $560 buy-in back. The remaining 27 players received about $20k each.
source: highstakesdb and justice.gov
