Straight Flush: The True Story of Six College Friends Who Dealt Their Way to a Billion-Dollar Online Poker Empire--and How It All Came Crashing Down . . .

by Ben Mezrich

  The closest officer held up a hand, palm out.

  “Are you Brent Beckley?”

  Brent nodded. The man turned his hand over.

  “Passport, please.”

  Brent fumbled with his coat for a second, then retrieved the single-day passport and gave it to the officer. The officer checked it, showed it to one of his colleagues, and then all six moved forward, taking positions around Brent. The lead officer gestured with his head—and suddenly they were moving forward through the terminal in what appeared to be a diamond formation, with Brent right in the middle.

  Christ. It was the most absurd feeling. The officers were walking fast, and Brent was nearly skipping to keep up. People stared as they went past—pointing, whispering, a few even snapping cell phone pictures.

  The mobile diamond advanced unimpeded through Customs and out into the main baggage claim area. On the other side of baggage claim, the officers finally broke formation, and Brent was handed off to two middle-aged men in white shirts and dark ties. One of the men showed Brent an FBI badge, the other a badge marked HOMELAND SECURITY. The officers were exceedingly polite, but by this point Brent’s heart was pounding so hard, he could barely understand what they were saying. They walked him out of the baggage area toward the terminal exit.

  Frigid air splashed against Brent’s cheeks as they stepped outside onto the sidewalk, shaking some of the fog out from behind his eyes. He immediately saw a vaguely familiar face, a woman in a dark suit hurrying toward him from the curb, a forced smile on her lips. Brent recognized her as one of the low-level associates from the law firm he’d hired to handle his criminal proceedings. While Brent stood between the officers, she retrieved his briefcase and overcoat. Then the FBI agent pointed at his watch.

  “Better take that too. And his belt, and cuff links.”

  Brent swallowed, then slowly went to work on the watch. He suddenly noticed that his fingers were shaking, and it took a good minute to get from the watch to the cuff links. His belt was a little easier, though his pants felt strange without it; luckily, he’d put on an extra pound or two in the anxiety-filled weeks leading up to his surrender.

  After he handed over the items, the FBI agent reached into his back pocket. Out came the handcuffs, like a fist to Brent’s gut. When the cold metal touched his wrists, then closed—tight, too damn tight—Brent fought the urge to break down. It all seemed so goddamn unfair.

  But instead of complaining, Brent didn’t say a word. He let the officers lead him to a waiting black sedan. The Homeland Security officer got behind the wheel; the FBI agent slid into the back next to Brent. A moment later they were off, tires rolling against pavement, winding their way out of the airport and onto the Jersey Turnpike.

  Brent tried to find a comfortable position, but the tight handcuffs made it nearly impossible. Instead, he tried to concentrate on the sound of his own breathing. His chest felt constricted, his mouth dry as cotton. He felt himself losing all sense of time as the gray turnpike flickered by outside the tinted window to his left. Was it still morning? Afternoon? How long had they been driving? Were they in New York, or still in New Jersey?

  Eventually the silence began to get to him, and he quietly cleared his throat.

  “So, are you guys just here to process me today? Or have you been working on my case for a while?”

  The agents shared a look in the rearview mirror. Then the FBI agent grinned.

  “We’ve been onto you for a long, long time, Mr. Beckley.”

  Brent forced a smile of his own.

  “Well then, I guess it’s nice to finally meet you.”

  As he turned back toward the window, the sight of something in the distance made him blink. Tall, rising out of a faraway mist, reaching toward the sky: the Statue of Liberty. Brent was seeing it for the first time. Handcuffed, sitting next to an FBI agent. He felt the haze of unreality coming back. Once again, he lost all sense of time.

  The next hour went by in flashes. An FBI processing center, somewhere in midtown Manhattan—they’d driven in through a gated basement entrance, then gone up in an armored elevator to a cubicle-filled office full of printers, copy machines, and many more agents in white shirts and dark ties. Fingerprinted, photographed, then back into the elevator, returned to the sedan—and on to another faceless building, another gated basement entrance. At that point, the two officers handed him over to a pair of U.S. marshals, who took him into a similar elevator. The marshals were decidedly less polite than the two previous agents; they were large, burly men, with crew cuts and matching cruel grins. When one of them noticed Brent’s expensive shoes, he pointed a thick finger at the silver clasps.

  “I’m gonna need to rip these off,” he said. And a second later the marshal was on his knees, yanking at the clasps with his meaty paws. After a few minutes of grunting and groaning—while Brent did his best to keep from toppling over—he eventually gave up.

  Then they were in another processing center—more fingerprints, more photographs. Brent was handed off to different officers and eventually led via a tunnel to another building. Finally, nearly eight hours after he’d taken off from Costa Rica, he arrived in a jail cell.

  Barely larger than ten by ten, it had a low ceiling, white walls, a pair of steel benches suspended beneath a tiny barred window. There was a scruffy-looking man sleeping on one of the benches; as the barred door slammed shut behind Brent, the man momentarily looked up before going right back to sleep. Brent moved a few feet into the cell, then just stood there, staring at the walls, the window, the bars. Everywhere he looked, he saw rivets, some of them rusted, some of them shiny. Rivets, thousands of rivets, running up the corners of the walls, around the window, along the door. So many goddamn rivets.

  Brent felt his shoulders begin to sag.

  He truly hoped that he was doing the right thing. Because it was suddenly very obvious: he wasn’t getting out of that cell until somebody came and let him out. It was maybe two in the afternoon; he had a whole day ahead of him. He was barely thirty years old; he had a whole life ahead of him.

  It wasn’t supposed to end like this.

  It wasn’t supposed to have ended at all.

  In the beginning, it had been something so special, so wild and cool—and simple. A group of best friends and two brothers, who had set out to do something different.

  None of them could have ever imagined how quickly something so simple could become something huge—or how equally quickly it could all come crashing down. They had risen so far—Christ, at one point, they had been days away from being billionaires.

  Now Brent was counting rivets in a prison cell, his brother had sequestered himself on an island the size of a Minnesota shopping mall, and the others had scattered all over the world, facing futures as uncertain as his own.

  No, Brent thought to himself as he once again shut his eyes, picturing his wife and his two little boys.

  This isn’t how it was supposed to go down at all . . .

  CHAPTER 2

  SEPTEMBER 1997

  Here they come, boys. Give me your tired, your hungry, and your wretched. Especially your wretched. Some of my best friends are freaking wretched.”

  Garin Gustafson grinned as he rose from the front stoop of the SAE fraternity house and tossed a half-empty beer can over his left shoulder. The can arced upward like a Scud missile, hung in the air for a full beat, then spiraled down in a flash of spinning aluminum. Pete Barovich and Shane Blackford, seated two steps up the dilapidated front porch of the aging frat house, cursed as they ducked in tandem. The can hit the edge of the step behind them, then pinwheeled back into the air, spraying beer as it went.

  “The only thing wretched is your aim,” Pete said, coughing. “It’s no wonder you’ve stayed with the same girl since high school. You can’t hit the side of a barn with a tin can. What chance you got making a college girl smile in the dark?”

  Garin held up a middle finger without turning around.

  “If I’d been aiming f
or the barn, you’d be picking shingles from the roof out of your hair. I was aiming for the two chickenshits on the front stoop. I’m hearing a lot of squawking, so I couldn’t have been too far off.”

  Garin raised his arms above his head, stretching his spine, as his two friends wrung beer out of their Sigma Alpha Epsilon sweatshirts. Goofballs. And they had the temerity to question his aim. He had taken the house to how many intramural hoops wins in his two years with the fraternity? He could have put the beer can right through the second-floor window above the porch, set it down smack in the center of the desk in Shane’s nearly OCD-level, immaculately clean room.

  Not that Garin wanted to put another hole in the sagging, multistory monstrosity they called home. As much as it looked like a pretty white barn, all gussied up for the first night of the University of Montana’s infamous Greek Week, structurally, the frat house was as rotten as a cow with intestinal worms. From the outside, it was something right out of Pleasantville, fitting in perfectly with the dozen other frat and sorority houses that lined the bucolic stretch of suburban Missoula, kitty-corner to the main campus. But if you stuck your head past the door frame, craned your neck just a little bit—well, it was a different story. Loose wires hanging from sparking sockets, stairs that disintegrated beneath your feet, ceilings that drizzled down plaster, toilets that backed up sewage every seventh night like it was some sort of Sabbath ritual—one more beer can through a window might just bring the whole goddamn thing down, and how the hell would that look? Garin’s first Greek Week as house rush chair, and him responsible for the demolition of the SAE house? While Pete, SAE president, and Shane, maybe the most liked member of their class, looked on?

  That wouldn’t do at all. Garin would never intentionally do anything to harm his beloved SAE. He could still remember the first time he stepped into that house after he’d survived its notorious Hell Week and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the guys who would become his brothers overnight. Hell, back then he’d been straight out of farm country, plucked from a small town in the middle of nowhere called Conrad, way up near the Canadian border. A place where life revolved around high school sports, farming, and cows. He’d been a wide-eyed kid, shocked by nearly everything he saw. To him, Missoula had been a damn big city.

  He’d changed a lot since then; he was more confident, better with the girls. He’d kept his six-pack and his farmer’s tan, but he liked to think he wasn’t nearly as naive. He certainly wasn’t the same bumpkin who’d sold a cow to buy his first car—a rear-wheel-drive Mustang that was completely pointless in the Montana winters. But he was still, at heart, 100 percent country.

  He wasn’t social chair because he could play basketball. He was the one they sent out onto the street during Rush Week because inside, a part of him would always be that wide-eyed, small-town kid.

  “Well, you’d better get cracking,” Shane chimed in. “Find us some new pledges. Someone’s got to pay for the upkeep of our coop. Us chickenshits get restless, and when we get restless, things get broken.”

  Garin jibed left, even before he heard the can whistle toward his back. It spiraled harmlessly past his shoulder, then skipped across the loosely paved street that ran between the frat and sorority houses. He laughed, then followed in the can’s wake, finally taking up position a few feet past the edge of the curb, facing the campus.

  It really was a beautiful sight. The whole block was congested with college kids, most moving in large groups, some in twos and threes. Everyone seemed to be coming down the center of the tree-lined street, which had been closed off to car traffic for the occasion. On either side, beyond the mailboxes, manicured hedges, and the odd pickup truck sporting bales of hay shaped into a patchwork of Greek letters, the houses were alive with everything that made this place the center of social life at the state’s biggest university. Parties were already sliding toward full swing at nearly every other house on the block, even though it was barely 6 P.M. and still reasonably light outside. But SAE liked to wait a bit before tapping the multiple kegs lined up behind the bar in the basement. Pete liked to say, you have to let the night breathe a bit, like a fine wine, before you started popping corks. From Garin’s vantage point on the street, it looked like corks were flying all over Greek Row. But he wasn’t worried. SAE had a reputation that drew a respectable crop of pledges every season. By 10 P.M., he knew, the house behind him would be throbbing with good music, foaming with decent beer, and, most important of all, teeming with pretty girls. And girls, of course, were the currency that held the whole system together.

  At that very moment, he knew, two stories above his head, a trio of sorority sisters were taking their seats on the deck that jutted out above the SAE front porch. All night long, the girls would smile and wave at the groups of guys wandering by—a little tease of the night to come. Girlfriends of three of the fraternity brothers, the girls gave the place a bit of a Mardi Gras feel. Of course, the balcony babes had been Pete’s idea. Garin had to give him that: he was one hell of a marketing genius.

  And already the girls were working their magic, as the first few groups of guys passed by. The girls laughed and waved, and the freshmen ate it up. Garin had to smile—he understood those freshmen; he knew them well. They were all pure Montana, from Billings, Missoula, and the thousands of smaller towns scattered across the wide farm and ranching state. Mostly lower-middle-class kids from squat in the middle of a depleted country economy—not on food stamps, but not rich either. Maybe their parents made forty thousand a year. They played sports, they drank beer, they liked cars, and they loved girls.

  Garin let the first group move by without stopping any of them, then did the same with a second. He wasn’t being picky; they were all good prospects. The truth was, this particular year it would mostly be a numbers game. The house was falling apart, so they needed lots of new blood. Basically, a minimum number just to pay the bills. But Garin didn’t want to start his first recruiting night with just anyone. He was a born athlete, had been playing sports at a near-elite level since before he could read, and he knew what it meant to build a winning team. His job as social chair was to put together a pledge class that would last, as brothers, for a lifetime. And every athlete in the world knew that a good team began with a strong anchor. Garin intended to start his night by finding that anchor.

  So he did his best to ignore Pete and Shane, who were shouting epithets in his direction—a mix of idiotic insults taking aim at everything from his elongated physique to his small-town origins. No matter how hard they pushed him, he was going to do this right.

  And then, right in front of him, not four feet away, moving down the center of the street at the tail end of a group of guys—this kid was definitely something different. Big eyes, intensely green, flicking back and forth as he took in everything around him, like it was all just a show put on for his benefit. Chiseled features under longish locks of auburn hair. Good-looking but not effeminate, obviously an athlete of some sort, though not as tall as Garin or anywhere near as ripped. At the same time, there was certainly something off about the kid, especially in the way he was dressed.

  He was wearing a black leather jacket that was at least a size too small for him, the sleeves barely reaching halfway down his forearms, over a white polo shirt with the collar popped up, partially obscuring what looked to be a thin silver necklace. Below the jacket, faded dark jeans, torn and scuffed around the knees, but not in the stylistic way that you might pay double for at a department store—torn because at some point those jeans had seen him through some sort of trouble. And then, below the jeans, brown boat shoes with no socks.

  Who the hell dressed like that? And yet, though the kid looked absurd, he didn’t seem insecure at all. In fact, he appeared positively cocky, grinning, puffing his chest out, cracking jokes to anyone who would listen. The kid made a damn good first impression.

  Garin waited until his target was just a few feet away before making his move. He stepped forward, effectively blocking the street, and
offered a hand along with his most gregarious smile. At six three he towered over many freshmen, but he was lean enough not to be threatening. Not that this kid looked like he could be easily intimidated. He nearly crushed Garin’s hand with his own.

  “Garin Gustafson,” Garin said. “Rush chair, SAE. How’s your night shaping up?”

  “Got some idea how it’s gonna start, no idea how it’s gonna end. So I say it’s shaping up pretty damn good. Scott Tom. Nice to meet you.”

  Garin laughed. “I’m sure you’ve heard about us, so I’m not going to bore you with some clipboard crap about diversity, history, or school spirit. SAE is a great bunch of guys who like to have a whole lot of fun.”

  Scott pointed toward the girls on the balcony.

  “Is there more where they came from?”

  “Right to the point,” Garin said. “Save the small talk for the ladies—I like that. Come back in about four hours. The party should be in full swing by then. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”

  There was a flash of mischief in the freshman’s eyes. “I just might take you up on that. And I hope you’re right—you wouldn’t like me when I’m disappointed.”

  Garin couldn’t tell if the kid was joking. It was such a strange thing to say. Before Garin could respond, the kid was already moving away, catching up to the group he’d come with. Garin made a quick decision and took a step after him.

  “Hey, if you’re thinking of heading downtown to pregame, maybe this will help you out.”

  Garin fished in his shirt pocket and pulled out a plastic card. It was a Montana driver’s license that he’d found floating at the edge of the river when he was out tubing with a beer cooler earlier that week. Most likely a fake ID that someone had discarded after a drunken night—maybe the original owner hadn’t had the confidence to pull off the role of a twenty-four-year-old organ donor from Billings. Garin was pretty sure Scott would not have that problem.