NEW YORK · More than two dozen people, including a professional baseball scout and a Florida-based, high-stakes poker player, were charged Wednesday in connection with a billion-dollar-a-year gambling ring that rivaled casino sports books.

The illegal betting scheme was orchestrated through a Web site called Playwithal.com, run by the poker player, James Giordano, 52, of Pine Crest, according to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Queens District Attorney Richard Brown.

Charges also were brought against three companies that allegedly helped Giordano develop and secure the Web site: Primary Development Inc. of Farmingdale, N.Y., Prolexic Technologies Inc. of Hollywood, and Digital Networks SA Inc. of Davie.

A break in the case came last year when investigators secretly hacked into a laptop computer that Giordano had left in a Long Island hotel while attending a wedding, police said.

He was arrested early Wednesday by FBI agents who had to scale the walls of his fortess-like Florida compound.

Also arrested was Frank Falzarano, 52, of Seaford, Long Island, identified by prosecutors as a scout for the Washington Nationals and a former scout for the San Francisco Giants.

He allegedly was a top earner in a network of 2,000 bookies who took more than $3.3 billion in cash wagers since 2004 from tens of thousands of customers nationwide.

"This is the largest illegal gambling operation we have ever encountered," Kelly said.

"It rivals casinos for the amount of betting."

Though the gambling ring relied on a Web site, it was different from the online betting operations targeted by recent federal legislation.

The scheme involved placing sports bets through bookies, who would assign bettors a secret code to track their wagers and monitor point spreads and results through the secured Web site, say investigators.

The bets were taken on all kinds of sports, including football, baseball, basketball, hockey, car racing, and golf.

The defendants allegedly laundered and stashed away "untold millions of dollars" using shell corporations and bank accounts in Central America, the Caribbean, Switzerland, Hong Kong and elsewhere, Brown said.

The prosecution is seeking the forfeiture of $500 million in assets, "among the largest such cases ever filed," Brown said.

A total of 27 in New York, New Jersey, Florida and Nevada were charged with enterprise corruption, money laundering, promoting gambling and other counts.

Giordano had waived extradition in Florida and was expected to be arraigned next week.