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

  CHAPTER 22

  Three thousand miles, eight days. One hundred twenty cars racing from London to Vienna to Budapest to Belgrade, then everyone loaded onto airplanes and set back down in Phuket, Thailand. Racing again, Phuket to Bangkok, then back on the planes to fly halfway around the world to Salt Lake City. Back on the road from Salt Lake City to Vegas. A concert at the Hard Rock by the rapper Snoop Dogg, then on to Los Angeles, right down the middle of Rodeo Drive—and a wrap party at the Playboy Mansion.

  It was the ultimate fantasy, yet it was entirely real; the Gumball 3000 wasn’t a race so much as it was a party on wheels, attended by royalty, the ultra-wealthy, movie stars, rock stars—and one group of frat brothers from Montana in AbsolutePoker.com blue racing jumpsuits, flanked by a dozen girls in matching blue tube tops.

  Six hours into the wrap party, Scott found himself standing next to his father on the back lawn of the Playboy Mansion. He was wearing sunglasses, though it was well past midnight, and he was shivering, despite the temperature being in the midsixties. Then again, he was soaking wet; his rented tuxedo clung to his legs and torso, and his cummerbund and bow tie had gone missing. If he had to guess, he’d say the bow tie was floating somewhere in the infamous grotto. When he and Phil had stumbled into the rock-walled cove, he’d recognized the place immediately from the magazine. And just like in the magazine, the grotto had been filled with girls, many of them actual Playmates, all of them topless. Scott had done the only sensible thing—he’d jumped right in, tuxedo and all. Phil had followed. He’d only wished Hilt could have been there too, but Hilt was in the UK, meeting with investment bankers.

  So now Scott was soaking wet, but nobody at the party was going to care; it was the Playboy Mansion. And at the moment, Scott had the run of the place. He knew that parked somewhere out front was an F430 Spider, gunmetal gray—the Absolute Poker logo painted across the hood, that AP diamond in the center clinging to the car’s perfectly precise curves. He knew that the Ferrari, on its own, would be a spectacular sight; and it was next to a row of some of the most expensive, unusual cars in the world. A Lamborghini Gallardo, a Rolls-Royce Phantom, even a pink Range Rover.

  Hef himself, and his bevy of girlfriends, had greeted Scott and his friends at the front door. As premier sponsors of the Gumball, they were at the top of the food chain. Hell, in Vegas, Scott had signed a dozen autographs for being CEO of what was now on its way to being one of the biggest companies on the Internet.

  “Soak it in,” he said, really to himself as they watched a group of Playmates wander toward them from the direction of the miniature zoo Hef kept on the premises. “A little while longer, and we’ll all be living like this—”

  He was interrupted by a commotion from behind, and he turned in time to see Garin being half led, half carried from the direction of the grotto. Garin had a foolish grin on his lips and a stream of blood coming from his scalp. One of the security guards who was helping him along was holding what looked to be a bikini top against the wound, trying to stifle the bleeding.

  “What the hell?” Scott said as Garin was ushered past.

  Garin looked back over his shoulder.

  “I guess there’s a no-diving policy. There should be a freaking sign.”

  And then he was gone, on his way to the front exit.

  Phil was laughing hysterically, and Scott was just shaking his head. They’d collect Garin on the way out; he’d just have to do his best to keep from bleeding to death, because this party was going to go all night.

  CHAPTER 23

  Now, that’s what I call service,” Brent said as he stood next to Hilt in the entrance hall to their lavish two-room suite, staring at the man in the doorway. The man was wearing a gray-on-gray uniform with too many buttons to count and white gloves, and he was holding Brent’s perfectly ironed tuxedo shirt out in front of him like it was the flowing cape of a matador. “I called down to ask for an iron, and they send me a guy instead who irons my shirt in five minutes flat.”

  The man bowed, handing over the shirt, and Brent fished in his pockets for a handful of euros. The man bowed again, taking the tip, and Brent shut the door after him.

  “I mean really,” Brent continued as he went back to the floor-length mirror on the wall by one of the room’s many closets. “You don’t get service like that in Costa Rica. Or Montana, for that matter.”

  “In Costa Rica—” Hilt started.

  “The guy would have blown me for that many euros,” Brent finished for him. “Fair enough. But he would have done a shit job ironing my shirt.”

  Hilt laughed, going to work on his bow tie. His tuxedo had come out of his suitcase with the creases perfect and the lapels straight. Brent had no idea how Hilt had managed the feat, especially considering the distance they’d just traveled. Costa Rica to London to Nice, and then, of course, the helicopter. Brent had never been on a helicopter before. The rotors were surprisingly loud, even through the cushioned headphones he’d been given by the pilot. Still, there was something so incredibly upscale about a helicopter trip; he couldn’t help thinking the whole time, This is how rich people live. It didn’t hurt that the view down through the bubble-glass windows was one of the most spectacular on earth: the pristine beaches, twisting roadways, anachronistic castles, and craggy hills of southern France flashing by at 150 miles per hour. Brent would have asked the pilot to slow down if they hadn’t already been late for the party.

  Nowadays, it seemed like they were always late for a party. Probably because there seemed to always be a party. The Gumball 3000 and the Playboy Mansion had been just the beginning; now that they were throwing themselves heavily into high-profile sponsorships and events, they were charting up the frequent-flier miles on a near-daily basis. Celebrity golf tournaments, major rock concerts, television specials, and, of course, huge poker events, all over the world. Brent had seen places he’d only read about before—Paris, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong—and now Monte Carlo, which from the air had looked like something out of a Disneyfied fairy tale, a gilded little enclave of castles and ornate mansions dug right into the top of a mountain. The cab ride from the helicopter landing pad up to their hotel only amplified the fantasy, the taxi twisting up that serpent’s tail of a road. It was not lost on Brent that once a year these same roads hosted the premier Formula 1 race—the Grand Prix—which began and ended right in front of their destination, the famous Hôtel De Paris.

  Lavish did not begin to express what the hotel was like. Situated across a manicured plaza from the famed Monte Carlo Casino, the 150-year-old building was a palace of jutting domes and spires, elegant marble columns, arched windows, and ornate stone carvings; a veritable army of bellmen met them at the front steps, ushering them past the statue of a mounted Louis XIV, through the cavernous lobby, and beneath the massive chandelier that hung from the domed skylight, crystal tentacles painting the very air in strokes of reflected light.

  Their suite was only slightly less impressive than the lobby: antique furniture, canopied beds, a miniature version of the crystal chandelier hanging from the arched living room ceiling, a balcony with a view of the courtyard and the equally palatial casino. And the party they had come halfway around the world to attend was presumably already in full swing in one of the many private gambling parlors—swank caverns of velvet and marble.

  Fitting, that the event was being held in the most famous casino in the world—since it was sponsored by Neteller, the now billion-dollar Internet payment processor that had become the de facto financial pillar of the online gambling community. Nearly three-quarters of AbsolutePoker.com’s deposits went through Neteller, and Brent guessed the numbers were similar for all of its competitors—certainly Party Poker, PokerStars, Full Tilt, and Greg Pierson’s Ultimate Bet, which had become the big four in terms of revenue, with AP following in fifth.

  “If anybody should be blowing us,” Brent continued, taking his shirt into the marble-lined bathroom just beyond the entrance to the suite—one of two similar bathroo
ms, each nearly as big as Brent’s entire old apartment back in Montana, with a soaking tub the size of his first car—“it’s the guys from Neteller. They did hundreds of millions of dollars this year, a lot of it facilitating online poker deposits. It’s no wonder they sprang for a helicopter. If it wasn’t for us, they’d be hustling porn like the rest of the Internet.”

  Brent exchanged the collared shirt he had worn on the trip from San José for the tux shirt, watching himself in a backlit mirror as he went to work on the buttons. He noticed that the floor was particularly warm beneath his bare feet. Heated marble tiles, he realized. They really hadn’t spared any expense. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Neteller was a class act—very different from most of the other payment processors Absolute Poker did business with when Neteller wasn’t available to handle a percentage of their accounts.

  It was funny—a year before, Brent had never heard of Neteller, or of any payment processors—hell, he hadn’t even known that there were businesses that processed credit card payments over the Internet. But now he was fast becoming an expert in the financial gymnastics of the online world.

  After he’d shifted from customer service to fraud and bank security, he’d assumed that his job title would remain stable for the foreseeable future; when one of the banking guys walked into his office not three months ago and placed a stack of papers on his desk, he had thought it was just more financials to look over for instances of potential credit card fraud. But then the guy had asked him if he’d be interested in yet another job change; he and Scott wanted to know if Brent would want to be responsible for payment processing—essentially, handling all aspects of the movement of money in and out of the company from players, via the middlemen processors such as Neteller and PayPal.

  Brent had jumped at the opportunity. It seemed like a great area for growth, and a chance to learn about the inner workings of a business that was integral to how online commerce functioned. On his very first day, looking through those papers, he realized that Neteller had been overcharging them on transactions; they’d been taking 8 percent off all deposits to the company, when the number should have been closer to 4. One phone call, and Neteller had immediately handed AP a three-hundred-thousand-dollar credit. It had been just that easy—there was so much damn money coming through the business, nobody was going to haggle over a few hundred thousand here or there.

  The deeper Brent dug into the processing world, the more he realized that the class acts such as Neteller and PayPal were an exception to the rule. Most of the other processing companies were extremely shady—appearing and disappearing overnight, often incorporated out of island territories that Brent hadn’t even heard of and run through banks he wasn’t even sure existed; these were companies you gave your credit card numbers to at your own risk. But sometimes they were also necessary; the flow of player money moving in and out of the poker site was constant and hungry, and the middlemen made that flow possible.

  Of course, it was only Brent’s opinion, but some of what these processors did struck him as taking place in a bit of a gray area—shady, if not outright illegal. As some bigger American banks enacted in-house rules governing the use of their credit cards for online gambling—even though there was no clear U.S. law concerning Internet gaming, other than sports betting—some of these middleman processors set up accounts that effectively hid where the money was actually going. Instead of online poker, the middleman processors would earmark the credit card deposits for items such as T-shirts, golf balls, even online flower delivery. That way, the banks profited from the transactions, Absolute Poker could still earn its rake, and the players could enjoy their poker.

  In Brent’s mind, even though the means were a little bit shady, when properly implemented, the result didn’t seem to hurt anybody. The customers who were giving their credit card numbers to the processors were doing so willingly, because they wanted to play poker. And Brent didn’t believe that the banks were actually being fooled; one day their credit cards were being used to deposit a million dollars in money earmarked for an online poker site; the next day, the same million dollars was deposited to purchase T-shirts and golf balls? They knew exactly what was going on, and they didn’t care. It was just the way the business worked.

  The banks made money. Absolute Poker made money. The players got to play poker. And Brent got an all-expenses-paid trip to Monte Carlo.

  Brent came out of the bathroom and retrieved his tux jacket and bow tie from where they were hanging by the bedroom dressing table. Hilt looked ready to go; he was standing by the door to the balcony, bathed in the glow from the plaza lights, the reflected glory of the ancient casino. Hilt glanced at Brent, who had finally gotten his bow tie to sit straight and was straightening his sleeves over his cuffs, and smiled.

  “You look like you’re about to get married.”

  Brent blushed. He knew Hilt wasn’t just talking about the tux, or the party they were about to attend. Brent had been opening up to Hilt during the whole trip from Costa Rica; Hilt knew that the new job wasn’t the only thing that had changed in Brent’s world over the past few months. Right before they’d left for Monte Carlo, his personal life had gone a little bit crazy.

  He’d first gotten the news while in Vancouver—he’d gone to Canada as soon as Pete was there, and the team had gotten the new headquarters up and running, on the third floor of a sleek office tower in a prize corner of that city’s financial district. Brent had been settling in for an indefinite stay in the Canadian city. The team had really set up a first-class operation, hiring a top-notch CFO with an MBA from one of the elite Canadian schools—a genial six-foot-three, 250-pound Fijian transplant who’d just ended a stint running the accounting department of a Fortune 500 banking giant—and Brent had been looking forward to living in a city where everyone spoke English and the power stayed on twenty-four hours a day. And then, quite accidentally, he’d run into a friend who’d just come from San José; the man had mentioned that he’d recently been at a party back in Costa Rica and had seen one of Brent’s ex-girlfriends—a beautiful Colombian national Brent remembered fondly, even though they’d only been together a few months. The friend had casually mentioned that the woman had just had a baby boy—and then, still in passing, he’d said, “And he looks just like you.”

  It was something Brent couldn’t ignore. An hour later he had called her up.

  “I heard you had a baby,” he’d said.

  “I had your baby,” she’d responded. “If you want, you can come see him. If you want to never call me again, that’s fine too. It’s up to you.”

  Brent had gotten on the next flight to San José. When he met the kid for the first time, he just sat there, staring at him, thinking he looked more like some sort of wrinkled alien than a baby. He’d actually poked the kid a few times, just to see if he was real. And then all he had wanted to do was hug him and hold him. Deep down, he knew. He was a dad, and nothing else in his life would matter as much as that.

  Hilt might have been joking, but Brent knew, after the trip to Monte Carlo, that he wasn’t going to be returning to Vancouver. He’d be going back to Costa Rica. And it was early to say for sure, but he didn’t think marriage was out of the question. That kid had changed everything.

  “Let’s see how the party goes first,” Brent responded, following Hilt toward the door. “If you treat me right, we can skip the wedding and go right to the honeymoon.”

  Five hours later Brent found himself stumbling down a cement spiral stairwell, out-of-his-mind drunk, searching desperately for a bathroom. In the portion of his brain that was still functioning, he knew he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere back in the casino, but the minute the fifth shot of sambuca had hit the back of his throat, all reason and sense of direction had gone out the door, and he’d become a man on a mission, navigating entirely on determined, if faulty, autopilot.

  The party had been beyond extravagant: a buffet that seemed to go on for miles, offering everything from piles of stone-crab le
gs the length of baseball bats to vats of beluga caviar that could have filled a sandbox; four working bars staffed by a half dozen staggeringly beautiful bartenders, all amazonian Eastern Europeans who looked like they’d stepped off the set of a James Bond movie. Everyone in tuxes, and everyone on their best behavior. Except maybe Brent himself, who wasn’t sure when he’d gone from happily buzzed to frighteningly blitzed.

  When that last shot of sambuca hit, he’d known what he needed to do—just not where he could do it. He’d stumbled around looking for a bathroom for a few minutes, before pushing his way through a heavy curtain and into the stairwell—and now he was descending into what appeared to be the subterranean depths of the Monte Carlo Casino, looking for somewhere to throw up.

  One more step, foot after foot—and suddenly, his leather loafer slipped on the concrete and he went down, landing on his ass. Then he was sliding forward, step to step, and the motion was simply too much for his stomach to handle. He leaned to the side and the warm vomit spewed out, splashing down the cement stairs right next to him.

  Christ. He slid a few more steps down the stairwell, vomiting as he went—and then landed on the floor of a hallway, dazed, head spinning. There was a door right in front of him, another to his right. He knew he had to make a choice. One of them might be a bathroom, he supposed. Then again, it was just as likely that it was some sort of torture chamber, where they took people who had the gall to vomit all over the most famous casino on earth.

  He slowly staggered to his feet. He was about to open the door directly in front of him when he heard the crackle of a radio from behind it; he couldn’t understand the French words, but the radio definitely gave him pause. It sounded like the sort of thing a security guard would carry.