Signs are posted for online ticket entry to Guaranteed Rate Field for the Chicago White Sox home opener against the Kansas City Royals on April 8, 2021. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune)

       Tickets will surely be at a premium next week when the division champion Chicago White Sox open up their playoff run at Guaranteed Rate Field.

       But another contest involving Sox tickets will already be underway — this one at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse.

       That’s where a former ticket broker is scheduled to go on trial Friday on federal fraud charges alleging he and two former White Sox ticket sellers ran a sophisticated scheme to sell thousands of fraudulently created game tickets through a fence on the online resale forum StubHub, costing the club at least $1 million.

       The 14-count indictment filed last year alleged Bruce Lee, 35, the owner of Chicago-based brokerage Great Tickets, earned more than $860,000 by selling nearly 35,000 tickets over four baseball seasons from 2016 to 2019.

       The charges alleged that the White Sox employees, James Costello and William O’Neil, used identification codes belonging to other team employees to generate complimentary and discount game tickets in exchange for cash payments without receiving the required vouchers.

       Costello and O’Neil then provided the tickets to Lee, their middleman, who sold them on StubHub at prices below face value, the charges allege.

       Among the evidence prosecutors plan to present to the jury is a recorded conversation between Lee and Costello in March 2019 at a pizza restaurant near Sox park, according to court records.

       At one point, Lee assured Costello that the source of the Sox tickets could not be traced because the barcodes changed when he posted the tickets for sale, according to prosecutors.

       “I just sold them on StubHub, so nobody could see, like how much I paid for the tickets, that’s why I always told you … no way they could see it,” Lee was quoted by prosecutors as saying.

       When Costello said using his operator code was like putting his signature on the tickets, Lee assured him, “that’s why I put them online, because they could see that (expletive). You understand what I’m saying?” according to the prosecution filing.

       Lee, of Chicago, was charged with 11 counts of wire fraud and two counts of money laundering. Costello, 67, and O’Neil, 52, both of New Lenox, both pleaded guilty to their roles in the scheme and are cooperating with the investigation.

       Lee first got the attention of the feds in 2018 when White Sox officials spotted the mind-boggling number of tickets he was selling and realized something was amiss, according to a search warrant affidavit filed in the case.

       According to the affidavit, the White Sox analytics team first noticed the strange anomaly in data shared between StubHub and the team through a partnership with Major League Baseball.

       The number of tickets sold by Lee through StubHub stood out because it was thousands of times greater than anyone else on the site, according to the affidavit. In 2018 alone, for example, he sold at least 11,000 White Sox tickets on the site — 10,871 more than his closest competitor, the document said.

       But it wasn’t only the massive volume of tickets that alerted the White Sox front office. Nearly all the tickets Lee sold involved complimentary “ticket vouchers’' given by the team to friends and family of the players, youth groups and commercial sponsors, the records show.

       Seeing the irregularity caused a senior team vice president to suspect Lee was getting inside help so the vice president contacted the FBI.

       The White Sox also found evidence that Lee was able to use inside information to capitalize on fan interest in a particular game, according to the FBI document.

       For example, just hours after the White Sox announced in August 2018 that highly regarded rookie pitcher Michael Kopech was going to make his debut against the Minnesota Twins, Lee began posting tickets to the game for sale, winding up with more than 500 sales. Online baseball records show the official attendance for the Tuesday night game totaled 23,133.

       The federal investigation isn’t the first time Lee has found himself in trouble over illegal ticket sales, court records show. In 2007, Lee pleaded guilty in Cook County court to a misdemeanor count of “selling tickets not in a box office” and was sentenced to a day in jail, records show.

       On two other occasions in 2007 and 2008, he was charged with ticket-related offenses, but both cases were dropped.

       jmeisner@chicagotribune.com

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