By MARTÍN ADAMES, Associated Press

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) — Baseball and bets go hand-in-hand in the Dominican Republic, where professional athletes, musicians and even legislators go public with their wagers.

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But for every legal bet in the Caribbean country, officials say there are countless more illegal ones.

It’s a widespread, multimillion-dollar industry that has come under scrutiny following U.S. federal indictments of Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz. They are accused of taking bribes from unnamed sports bettors in the Dominican Republic to throw certain pitches and help those bettors win at least $460,000, according to an indictment unsealed Sunday in New York. Ortiz and Clase have both pleaded not guilty.

The accusations have dismayed and embarrassed many in the players’ native country.

“The case of Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz tarnishes the image of Dominican baseball players,” said José de los Santos, a fan of Dominican and Major League Baseball. “Actions of that nature put Dominican and Latino players in the spotlight.”

The DR has 3,500 registered betting shops, and those are just the legal ones

Sports betting shops are widespread in the Dominican Republic, a country of more than 11 million people where baseball is king.

According to data from the Dominican Association of Sports Betting Shops, there are about 3,500 registered businesses, and countless more illegal ones.

Quico Tabar, head of the country’s national lottery who was tasked by the president to regulate gambling, recently stated in a public letter that officials have been working for years to regulate betting shops but that “circumstances beyond our control” have not allowed that to happen. He did not elaborate.

For Raymond Jiménez, a self-described frequent sports gambler, it’s all the same.

He said he chooses the biggest and closest businesses that allow big wagers, regardless of whether they’re legal or not.

“I don’t know of any illegal betting shops,” he said.

Jiménez said most bets in the Dominican Republic focus on sports including MLB, NBA and NFL games.

“I’ve been gambling since 1998, when I was underage,” Jiménez said. “I used to jump the school fence to go into a betting shop at 14 years old. I’ve heard everything, from athletes who sell themselves to gamblers to others who bet against them.”

Gambling persists amid corruption

Legislators in the Dominican Republic are debating a bill that would create a new entity to regulate and oversee gambling and establish penalties for non-compliance.

Meanwhile, chatter about the Clase and Ortiz cases continues to dominate the news and social media, as does the case of Oscar Chalas, the Dominican Republic’s former director of casinos and gambling. He reached a plea deal with prosecutors in late October and admitted responsibility in collecting money from illegal betting shops to allow them to keep operating.

Chalas told a judge that each illegal shop paid up to $100 a month, but that he didn’t remember the total amount collected because there were “so many” of them. He also claimed that a former treasury minister knew and approved of the scheme, according to local media reports.

The pace of legal and illegal gambling is only expected to surge as local teams and fans prepare for the Dominican Republic’s Professional Baseball League final early next year.

One of the country’s most famous public bets involving the local league took place earlier this year. Hall of Famer and former Red Sox star David Ortiz offered fans a 1 million peso ($16,000) wager on social media in favor of the team that went on to win the championship — he ended up with 15 million pesos ($240,000) on the line. That included a 2 million peso ($32,000) bet with Dominican urban singer Bulin 47, but Ortiz forgave him after winning: “You’re good to those who are poor,” he wrote.

OAKLAND, Calif. — Authorities arrested a 27-year-old Oakland man early Friday in the Laney College campus shooting of legendary Oakland football coach John Beam, multiple sources told this news outlet.

The arrest, which the sources said happened at about 3 a.m. at the San Leandro BART station, caps an intense manhunt for the suspected shooter of the longtime coach, who gained national fame in 2020 when his Laney College Eagles football team was featured on the Netflix show “Last Chance U.”

The suspect was identified by multiple sources as Cedric Irving Jr., but it was immediately unclear whether he had any prior connection to the famed coach.

Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee confirmed the arrest in a statement issued later Friday morning.

“I’m grateful to the Oakland Police Department and our dedicated law enforcement partners for their swift work in making an arrest in the shooting of Coach Beam,” Lee said. “This arrest is a testament to the effective collaboration and dedication of our law enforcement community.”

Beam was hospitalized after the shooting, which took place just before noon Thursday inside Laney’s Field House, which houses the college’s administrative offices and other facilities near Fifth Avenue and East Eighth Street. He was severely wounded and hospitalized in critical condition, multiple sources said.

The shooting happened less than 24 hours after another school shooting across Oakland at Skyline High School, where a 15-year-old boy was shot in a bathroom after a confrontation. Two teenagers — a 15-year-old a 16-year-old — were later detained in the shooting, while investigators recovered two semi-automatic firearms from around the scene.

Motives for both shootings, which authorities say are unrelated, remained unclear Friday.

Beam himself coached football at Skyline High School for 22 years — the vast majority of them as the school’s head coach, where he garnered a legendary reputation while winning league championships nearly every year from the late 1980s through early 2000s.

He left the school in 2004 and went to Laney College, where he continued to find success — most notably winning the 2018 California Community College Athletic Association title. He coached at the college until 2024, when he left the sidelines to focus on his job as the college’s athletic director.

League One Volleyball, which bills itself as the largest community of youth clubs in the country, is adding a Minnesota team to its nascent professional league, LOVB announced Friday.

The Minnesota team is expected to begin play in January 2027. With teams already in Atlanta, Austin, Houston, Madison, Nebraska and Salt Lake City, the expansion also will include a team in Los Angeles.

Keegan Cook, head coach of the 20th-ranked Gophers team, called it “a wise and thrilling decision by LOVB leadership.”

“Minnesota is not only a thriving professional sports state but a passionate and committed volleyball community,” Cook said in a release. “We cannot wait to welcome LOVB to the Twin Cities.”

No potential sites for games were announced during a news conference on Friday.

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By DEEPTI HAJELA, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — The images are as current as now and as old as a century ago: people in custody, sometimes behind bars, at times in shackles, under the watchful eyes of those in charge. Sometimes as backdrops, sometimes in the foreground, always at the decision of someone in authority.

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They’ve been a visual hallmark of President Donald Trump’s administration, part of his agenda to crack down on immigration and carry out mass deportations. They can be seen in the ads that aired in cities around the country as part of recruiting efforts for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and in social media posts from the White House and federal government agencies.

A particularly vivid example came earlier this year, when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited the notorious high-security prison in El Salvador, where the Trump administration had sent some Venezuelan immigrants.

Dozens of shirtless, tattooed men, their heads shaved, lined up against the bars of a sweltering cell in the notorious Salvadoran prison, as cameras clicked and video rolled. Standing in front of them, Noem warned other immigrants in the U.S. they could be next in line for deportation.

The images from March drew anger and outrage, derided by some as propaganda that further punishes detainees.

But the playbook is not new.

It goes back almost as far as photography

Such images have been used for more than a century to demonstrate political might and the power of the criminal justice system.

— Photographs of convicted men at work in the sewing room at Alcatraz federal penitentiary in the mid-20th century.

— Images of Black men holding farm tools under the watchful eye of a guard at Mississippi’s oldest prison, Parchman Farm, dating to the early 20th century.

— A 1988 presidential campaign ad created by supporters of Republican candidate George H.W. Bush against Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis, which used the image and criminal history of Willie Horton, a convicted felon, to paint Dukakis as soft on crime.

Showcasing the images of people in detention or the criminal justice system has served multiple purposes over the years, says Ashley Rubin, associate professor of sociology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Rubin cited “Wanted” posters and photographs documenting executions.

And some have been about sending a larger message.

“Historically we’ve used images of various kinds, whether it’s actual photographs or paintings, wood types, sketches and that sort of thing, to indicate either the functioning of power or the functioning of a well-ordered state,” Rubin said. She pointed to prison tours organized by authorities to underscore the caliber of the conditions inside, and suspects being brought before the media to showcase a successful law enforcement effort.

But is it ethical?

Visuals are powerful because humans “believe what we see,” at times over the things we are told, said Renita Coleman, who researches visuals and ethics as a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Photographs, we know they work. They get into our brains a different route than … words do. And they get processed faster. They have an emotional component,” she said. “You see a picture, you feel something before you think about it, and that colors everything.”

And an observer’s opinions also can influence how they understand what they’re seeing, Coleman said. With images of detainees, “political ideology is going to affect how people interpret these photographs. To some people, it’s ‘Law and order is a good thing,’ and other people will see people being … used for political messages.”

When detainees are photographed, they generally are not asked if they are willing nor are they in a position to refuse, according to Tara Pixley, assistant professor of journalism at Temple University. Being incarcerated goes hand-in-hand with being considered less than and dehumanized for breaking the law. It’s the officials running things who decide.

But “consent and permission, permission from a person in power and consent from the person being photographed, are two completely different things,” she said.

Politics and prejudice combine

Prejudice and bigotry have gone some way toward making prisoner and criminal justice imagery potent for tough-on-crime rhetoric in electoral politics over the decades, said Ed Chung, vice president of initiatives at the Vera Institute, a criminal justice-focused organization that advocates against mass criminalization.

“Historically, this type of political propaganda has worked to win elections,” he said, citing the ad featuring Willie Horton, a Black man who committed crimes while out of a Massachusetts prison through a furlough program. Dukakis was governor at the time.

Joseph Baker, a professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at East Tennessee State University, says the issues of race and class that run through American society are part of our feelings about those being detained or imprisoned, and how they’re treated.

“There’s a heavy class dimension, but there’s also a racial ethnic dimension to it. That is a big part of why people feel it’s OK. Because we’re punishing these people who don’t look like me or don’t sound like me or any of that stuff and that sort of allows them to think, ‘oh, you know, good, get those bad people out of here,’” Baker said.

Chung’s organization is trying to educate elected officials and the public about the prison system and advocates for the dignity and humanity of incarcerated people. He’s hopeful those efforts have been making some positive inroads in areas like the push for more and better resources for former prisoners returning to their communities, as well as how crime and safety are talked about.

“When you’re able to step back from the political rhetoric,” he said, “that creates change.”