Sixty-year-old New York man Robert Brandel was charged with a scheme to defraud and falsely reporting an incident after he was discovered tied up in his pickup truck in a parking lot 30 miles north of Buffalo. New York state troopers say they discovered him in the backseat of his extended-cab truck with a rope tied around his neck and attached to the headrest, his hands and ankles bound with duct tape. He told officers that two men who were involved in a Super Bowl squares betting pool he ran had stolen $16,000 from him before driving him around for two days and then leaving him in the parking lot. “This elaborate story was fabricated because Brandel was running a $50,000 payout Super Bowl pool in which he made up names on some of the squares hoping to win and take most of the winnings,” according to a police statement.
