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 Internet,” Garin said, grinning. “Of course. Lots of websites talk about him—he’s supposedly the best gaming consultant in the area. Supposedly works with most of the sports books, and people say he used to be a little involved with Paradise when they first opened up here. He’s also pretty cheap.”

  “You had me at cheap,” Scott interrupted. “Now, shut the fuck up. We’ve got three days to learn everything we can about this place, and he’s as good a guide as any.”

  The recon trip had been Scott’s idea; even though they were still far from reaching their financial goal of $750,000 in investment seed money, they were at the point where they needed to make some firm decisions. First on that list, now that they had a company domain name, was settling on a location for their headquarters—a home, as it were, where they could incorporate and begin building their brand.

  Costa Rica seemed the natural first choice. Paradise Poker was located there—and in addition, the country seemed to be ground zero for the online sports book business. Which meant there would be a lot of experienced people who knew the tech and the industry. As with many Central and South American countries, Costa Rica could also provide lots of cheap labor—but in Costa Rica, that labor would be well educated. From the research they had done, Scott had learned that it would be fairly easy to get incorporated in the country and to secure a gaming license. The location lent an air of credibility. And from the pictures he had seen in the guidebooks Garin had brought home from the Seattle library—well, it didn’t hurt that the place was a tropical paradise. The idea that they could all move there—start their company, breathe life into AbsolutePoker.com in such an exotic locale—it was pretty fucking exciting, and very fucking cool.

  The bizarre-looking consultant was breathing hard when he finally reached them.

  “Welcome to Costa Rica, gentlemen. We have a full schedule, so let’s get moving. The car is just outside. Ignore the taxi drivers, they’re just part of the place’s native charm.”

  And with that, the man spun on his heel and strutted back in the direction from which he’d come. Scott glanced over at his team; they all seemed about to crack up, and he scolded them with his eyes. This was serious business, and they were supposed to be acting professional. Even if, from the looks of their skeletal consultant as he moved away, they were about to embark on something akin to Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

  Eight hours later, the ride was beginning to feel a lot more like a merry-go-round than a roller coaster. The five of them were jammed into Eric’s bright orange Fiat, speeding along palm-tree-lined highways, with Eric all the while aiming a hand left, then right, then forward, pointing out buildings that ranged from low, boxy warehouses, to ranch-style houses, even to the odd multistory apartment building. Each one, according to Eric, was the home of a sports book or an online casino. They asked him repeatedly about Paradise Poker, and eventually, as they were riding along one of the steeper roads leading up to the base of the hills above San José, he pointed toward a two-story house with gated windows and white shutters, mostly hidden behind a high security fence. He told them that the guys who ran Paradise Poker were essentially shadows in San José; everyone told stories about them, the gringos who lived up in the hills and rode around in black Escalades, throwing money around like it was toilet paper, always traveling in packs protected by bodyguards, surrounded by girls. Nobody ever really saw them, and who knew if the stories were even true? But supposedly, these were their offices, behind that security fence.

  Unfortunately, Paradise wasn’t one of their destinations that day. Instead, Eric had arranged for them to meet with a slew of sports book owners who were bringing in the lion’s share of business in the gaming industry. And even though Scott had repeatedly explained that they weren’t interested in sports gambling, Eric had maintained that the sports books were the place to start.

  So again and again, Eric parked the Fiat in front of one of the nondescript warehouses or the low ranch houses and ushered the four of them inside. Each time the setup was the same. Cubicled call centers spread out across bland spaces—hell, if you walked into a call center at Hewlett-Packard or Cisco, you’d expect to see the same thing. Once they got into the back offices, they found that most of the operators behind the sports books were Americans, while the front-office staff was usually Costa Rican.

  But the most remarkable thing about the sports books—and the thing that they all seemed to have in common—was the seedy element at the top levels. Most of the American operators seemed like criminals—the way they dressed, the way they spoke, the way they offhandedly mentioned associates back in New York and Vegas. By the third and fourth book they’d visited, the seediness was reaching almost cartoonish proportions.

  Around 4 P.M., at the last stop before they were to break for dinner—and start a night of festivities that Eric had assured them would rival anything they had experienced at the fraternity house—they pulled up in front of a warehouse at the edge of an urban sprawl of similar rectangular buildings. Eric parked the car and led them through the front door, past a security desk, then a pair of secretaries who didn’t even bother looking up from the Spanish newspapers they were reading. Then through an unmarked wooden door and into a corner office. And there, the man behind the desk was right out of a Martin Scorsese movie.

  Overweight, in his midfifties, with an angry, pug-like face and a ring of graying curls barely covering the expansive dome of his skull, he was wearing a polyester suit right out of the seventies, all brown and burnt orange, and he was holding the biggest cigar Scott had ever seen.

  The minute they sat down, the guy started in on them—the same broken-record song and dance they’d heard from every sports book owner they met. Poker is a lost cause. There’s no money in poker. Sports gambling is where it’s at. You’re going to lose every penny of your investment money . . .

  When Scott pointed out that running a sports book as an American citizen was clearly illegal, that sports betting was clearly against the Wire Act, the man just brushed his concerns aside.

  “It’s a new era. The Internet changes everything. We’re not bookies, taking bets off of some pay phone in the back of a bar. This is the Wild West. And I don’t see any sheriff knocking at our door.”

  As he spoke, Costa Rican employees filed in and out of the room, putting papers in front of the man for him to sign. Most of the time he just waved his cigar at them, only pausing now and then to add his scrawl to a paper he deemed important enough to warrant his attention. Scott had no idea who the employees were, but he got the feeling from the way they were dressed that at least a couple of them were lawyers.

  His suspicions seemed to be confirmed when Garin pulled a small tape recorder out of his pocket and placed it on the man’s desk in front of him. Garin had been using the tape recorder to help them keep track of everything they were supposedly learning, but it was the first time he’d taken the thing out midconversation.

  Almost immediately, all hell broke loose. The two Costa Ricans who happened to be in the room at the time began shouting in Spanish, one of them waving his papers so violently it seemed he might take flight. The sports book owner looked up, saw the recorder, and jabbed at Garin with his cigar.

  “You want to holster that, buddy? My guys get a little antsy around wires.”

  The type of people who referred to a tape recorder as a wire weren’t usually paragons of good business practices—and for Scott that pretty much summed up the visit. The sports book business was shady, and it didn’t look like it had changed much since Robert Kennedy had gone after it with the Wire Act.

  Scott wasn’t interested in sports betting. Poker was his interest, his passion—and that was all Absolute Poker was going to do. If there wasn’t real money in online poker yet, it was simply because nobody had done it right.

  I don’t think we’re in Montana anymore.”

  Scott would’ve traded every colón in his pocket—and half the blackjack chips stacked in front of him at the se
micircular gaming table—for a photo of the expression on Garin’s face. Garin had gone from young American businessman in a shirt and tie to shocked farm boy in the space of less than two seconds. Scott couldn’t blame him; it wasn’t so much that the girl had reached out and grabbed Garin’s crotch—it was the nonchalant way she had done it, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. She had been walking by their table, hanging on the arm of a guy who looked like he was at least sixty, and she had just reached out with a smile and given Garin a little squeeze.

  Even more bizarre—the guy on her arm hadn’t cared. In fact, he’d laughed, and given Garin a thumbs-up.

  “You weren’t kidding about this place,” Phil said. Scott’s dad was seated to Scott’s left at the blackjack table, Eric standing right behind him, hands crossed against his narrow stomach. The dealer was in the midst of shuffling, but even he cracked a smile.

  “There’s something for everyone at the Del Rey,” Eric said, quite seriously. “People come from all over the world to take part in what’s on offer here. Which, if you haven’t guessed, is just about anything.”

  Scott had to admit, Eric hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d promised to show them a time they’d never seen before. When they’d first pulled up in front of the seven-story, 1940s-style pink building at the corner of a narrow, crowded street in San José, Scott hadn’t expected much. But once he and his crew had pushed their way through the street urchins, past more of those damn ever-present taxi drivers, and finally through the glass entrance into the Del Rey’s lobby, he could see that Costa Rica was going to leave Rio in the dust.

  With three bars, a casino, a dance club, and a restaurant across the street, as well as a 108-room hotel above, the Del Rey might have looked like any retro Central American resort in a brochure, but three steps into the place, Scott could already tell that it was much more than that. The front area had a sort of tropical sports-bar feel, with soft couches, carved mahogany furniture, potted plants, and televisions blaring from every wall. But the clientele was mostly women—and damn, every one of them was eyeing Scott and his group with palpable intensity. Hot pants, tight jeans, belly-baring halter tops, hair spray, bright red lipstick, and so much silicone you could take your eye out if you weren’t careful—there was no question in Scott’s mind what this place was all about.

  Ahead of the lobby area was the cashier’s cage, and next to that, a floor-to-ceiling mirror—in front of which stood a few more girls, checking themselves out, making minor adjustments for the night ahead. Beyond that, the small casino, filled with table games, a roulette wheel, and a handful of slots. On the other side, the Blue Marlin Bar, which, Eric reported, had the hottest bartenders in all of Central America. And beyond that, the hotel reception desk, staffed by a handful of Costa Rican natives. Eric explained, as they pushed forward, that it was ten dollars to the hotel for each girl you took upstairs—and around a hundred bucks more to the girl, though that was often negotiable.

  “On a good night,” Eric said, “there could be two hundred girls in here, all for the choosing. From Colombia, Panama, Dominica, even Eastern Europe.”

  “Holy crap,” Shane responded, taking a deep swig from his beer bottle. He had been drinking since they’d sat down at the blackjack table; they’d chosen the relative calm of the casino portion of the resort, because it seemed that the girls were mostly congregated in the front lobby, the bars, and by the hotel desk. But obviously, with so much talent in the place, nowhere was really off-limits.

  “It’s like Disneyland for whores.”

  “In that analogy,” Scott said, “I think we’re the whores.”

  Shane reached out and grabbed another passing girl—about five foot five, built like a water slide, with blond highlights, a denim skirt, and glitter shining from every inch of exposed skin.

  “Hell, yes, we are!”

  Scott had to laugh. It was amusing seeing Shane—usually the most self-contained of the group—losing his shit like that. But it wasn’t surprising. This place was the new Wild West, and it seemed like anything was fair game. The girls, the gambling, the booze—as Scott focused more closely on his surroundings, the more he let his eyes adjust to the frenetic motion, the deeper he could see into the crags and corners of the place. Girls handing off little paper bags in exchange for a handful of bills, customers palming plastic-wrapped cubes that were either green and leafy or white and powdery—even the odd plastic pipe, shoved into a back pocket. From the guidebooks Garin had shown him, Scott knew that unlike prostitution, drugs were illegal in Costa Rica. But from what he could see, just sitting there at a blackjack table in the most festive bar he could imagine, the place looked pretty damn lawless.

  He glanced over at Shane, half off his seat, the girl he’d grabbed now draped across his lap with one hand gripping his thigh. He looked at Garin, who was chatting up a pair of Colombian girls who could have been sisters, sporting matching red hot pants, leather boots, and strikingly identical silicone bolt-ons. He saw his father, leaning away from the table as he lit up a Cuban cigar.

  Christ. Building a business here was going to be a unique experience, to say the least. Scott and his friends unleashed in a place with no restrictions, no rules—it was more than a little terrifying to think about. But it was also kind of perfect.

  He wasn’t opening a hardware store; he was launching an online poker site. He was there to break ground. He intended to turn an industry on its head, build a business around a game that everyone was telling him couldn’t make money. The energy around him, the Wild West feel—it was exactly what he needed.

  Poker, the way it was played in America, had been born in Mississippi in the Wild West era. But Scott intended to take it into the modern age, to turn it sophisticated, to make it as tempting and addictive packaged in electronic bits and bytes as it was on a felt table over a sawdust floor.

  Sports betting—that was a different business. It was call centers taking phone calls all day long; it was dirty, mobbed up, and illegal. Poker was sophisticated, young, and hip. To capture that, Scott knew the key was going to be the game itself—the software.

  Now that he had his core team, was on his way to finding financing, and knew where he was going to build his empire, the next step was to figure out how.

  CHAPTER 10

  Mission accomplished,” Garin said as he rejoined Scott in the waiting area of Sea-Tac’s international terminal. He pulled a plastic bag out of his duffel, which was slung over his left shoulder because his right shoulder was still bruised up from an impromptu pickup basketball game they’d gotten into in a corner of the basement the night before while Hilt had booked their last-minute plane tickets—coach, damn the cheap little bastard.

  “Blue Label, baby. Class all the way.”

  Garin lifted the neck of the bottle of Johnnie Walker out of the bag so that Scott could nod his approval. Two hundred bucks, but if the information Garin had pulled off the Internet was correct, it would be money well spent.

  “If we can keep our hands off of it for the fourteen-hour flight, at least we won’t walk in empty-handed.”

  Garin reached into the bag and pulled out a second item—a Seattle Mariners baseball cap, emblazoned with the number 51.

  “And this too. An Ichiro Suzuki hat. They’re gonna love it. Hometown hero and all.”

  Scott stared at his friend.

  “Dude, Ichiro is Japanese. We’re on our way to Korea. They’re different fucking countries. And I think they hate each other.”

  “Shit.” Garin tossed the hat back into the bag. “We’ll leave it on the plane.”

  “You can be pretty stupid sometimes.”

  “It’s because I’m so athletic,” Garin joked. “I never had to do no learnin’. Seriously, Korea, Japan—aren’t they all Asian?”

  The airport intercom coughed to life above their heads, letting them know that their flight—Continental, nonstop to Seoul, Korea—was getting ready to board. Scott reached for his own duffel, tucked betw
een his feet against the dull green carpet. It felt light—even for a forty-eight-hour trip, most of which was going to be spent in the air. One professional outfit, including a single dressy shirt—that was pretty much it. Like the recon mission to Costa Rica, this wasn’t a pleasure trip; it was pure business. And besides, they were on a shoestring now; as much as he wanted to give Hilt a hard time for the coach tickets, he knew they couldn’t blow any of their budget on extraneous expenses. Especially after the check they’d just written.

  Fifty thousand dollars. Even now, days later, after Scott had gotten the chance to digest the number, it still seemed insane. A fifty-thousand-dollar check, made out to some dude in Korea they hadn’t yet met, who ran a company they knew very little about. But the little they did know had forced them to move forward—because without the Koreans, they had nothing but a domain name.

  It was Shane who had first made the connection with the Koreans; he’d been searching the Internet for poker and gaming software and had kept coming up with addresses in Seoul—over and over again. It seemed that most of the good software was being written in Korea. Eventually he’d narrowed down his search to a company run by two brothers—C. J. and Christian Lee. The materials on their website looked pretty good, and on the phone, C.J.’s English was almost flawless, and his presentation good enough to convince them that he was competent, somewhat experienced in gaming software, and, most important, eager to help them launch a unique site. The thing was, he had insisted on being paid up front—fifty thousand to start, with another fifty thousand when he delivered what they were looking for—the beta software—and then yet another fifty thousand when the software was complete.