A high-stakes game that started off at Tobey Maguire’s house launched the career of Molly Bloom, poker hostess. Now the government, on the trail of a vast gambling ring involving the Russian mob and Carlyle Hotel gallerists, wants to end it.
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Illlustration by John Ritter
(Photo:
Karwai Tang/FilmMagic/Getty Images (McGuire); Patrick McMullan
(Francis); Louis Lanzano/AP Photo (Bloom); Alamy (Bartender); Tom
Szczerbowski/Getty Images (Rodriguez); Sharky/Splash News (Ivey))
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Until this past spring, you couldn’t have picked a more likely prospect to be the next United States ambassador to France than Marc Lasry. The co-founder of the $12.4 billion Avenue Capital Group was supremely wealthy and well connected: He had a net worth of $1.4 billion, counted Bill Clinton as a close personal friend (Chelsea worked for him for a while), and hosted a $40,000-a-head event for Barack Obama in 2012, when much of Wall Street had abandoned him for Mitt Romney.HT: Longform
True, Lasry would’ve had to have made some major sacrifices to get the appointment—disclose or divest certain stock holdings, maybe even sell his entire stake in Avenue to his partners—but after conquering Wall Street for decades, he was more than interested. He told the people around him he was ready to move his family overseas.
But Lasry, like other hedge-fund executives, played poker. David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, for example, arguably the best Wall Street poker player around, won third place and $4.35 million at a World Series of Poker event in 2012, only to announce that he would give the prize away to charity. Lasry wasn’t like Einhorn. For him, the game wasn’t interesting unless there were high stakes. And so on at least three occasions in the past year or so, Lasry found his way to a suite on the twentieth floor of the Plaza Hotel. Inside was the most expensive, exclusive private poker game in New York.
The suite was never crowded—at most there were enough people for one table of players—and the table itself was custom-made with a recessed card-shuffling machine. Bottle-service girls were recruited from nightclubs to work the room. Players ate filet mignon and sushi and drank Johnnie Walker Blue. The buy-in just to get through the door was $10,000. The game was Texas Hold ’Em with no-limit pots often growing to $200,000. The “blinds,” or mandatory bets to stay in the game, started small on quiet nights but grew larger when whales like Lasry showed up.* Running a poker game for profit in New York State is merely a misdemeanor unless the proprietor charges a “rake,” or pulls a certain amount of money out of every pot.
The hallmark of the Plaza game was that, while it was raked, everyone there was too wealthy to care by how much. And while the raked Plaza game was illegal, as one regular put it, “it’s perfectly legal to play. Everyone knows that.”...MORE
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