The first sign that something was wrong was when a car followed him onto his street – a one-way cul-de-sac at the top of Nichols Canyon in the Hollywood Hills where the mansions start at a million dollars. He was driving back from Bad Boys Bail Bonds, where he’d just dropped three grand to spring one of his drivers who had gotten popped in Santa Monica on a routine haul. Earlier in the day, he had pulled off the kind of transaction that some dealers go their whole lives without seeing – 300 pounds of primo weed for $1 million, which had netted him a cool $90,000 for two hours work. His senses heightened, he could feel the vibe going sour as he steered his discreet rental car past his own driveway. Another 60 feet, and suddenly there were searchlights washing every street corner – at least 30 undercover police cars – with a helicopter swooping down on top of him in case he decided to make a run for it down the open cliff face.

“I hadn’t done a deal in six months,” says Oz (most names in this story have been changed), a 48-year-old ex-marijuana trafficker and big-time baller who once dominated the I-5 corridor from British Columbia to Tijuana, was responsible for 70 percent of the marijuana smoked in Los Angeles and saw $4 million move through his operation every two weeks. “They take me inside – they’re stripping the house, and here’s my $90,000 all out on the table. I said, ‘Dude, just shoot me now. I don’t blame you guys, but I’m not going to rat on any of my people, so I’d prefer to be dead.’ The Fed says, ‘No, man, I can’t do that. But we need to talk.’”

Cruising through the Hills in a tricked-out Lincoln Navigator, on loan from a fellow drug runner who got out of the game when he found religion, Oz can’t help but point the sites of his former glory: The Russian tanning salon in Hollywood where you could order up Vicodin or steroids on demand; the Melrose Avenue tattoo shop that moves 50 to a hundred pounds of weed a week; the Mexican restaurant that serves up kilos of coke with its carne asada. But he is less expansive when describing his life since the 2004 bust that curtailed his hand-built empire – and his uneasy resurrection as an undercover informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency. In the world he lived in for over 20 years, the worst thing you could be was a rat – a turnabout of fate that obviously weighs heavy on him. In the past three years, Oz has survived three suicide attempts – not counting his choice of livelihood.

Still retaining the hard angles and displaced muscle mass from his early years as a bodybuilder and protracted steroid enthusiast, Oz today most resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger if you put him through a threshing machine and then tried to spot-weld the bigger pieces back together. He’s had his bicep torn off from trying to break a guy’s neck in a bar, all his teeth are capped from being broken off in fights and he’s literally got screws in his head to hold his skull in place. He earned the sometimes nickname “Shrek” from taking so many punches to the face that his eyebrows calcified into scar tissue, leaving a large protruding ridge in his forehead. And in the kind of colorful anecdote that no doubt made it easier for him to do his job, he once bit his best friend’s ear off in the back seat of a limo.

“I have a short man’s complex,” admits the 5’8, 220-pound brawler, still capable of flashes of intense anger and pervasive menace, as well as intense emotion over the secondary victims of his chosen lifestyle. “I realized at one point that most people were my friends because they were scared of me. I’ve never killed anybody, but I’ve hurt a lot of people – and every one of them deserved it.”

A hyperactive kid who was expelled his first day of elementary school in suburban Washington state for biting a school bus monitor, Oz excelled in football and wrestling in high school, soon graduating to weight-lifting, bodybuilding (he once placed fourth in a statewide body building contest) and, later, the Tough Man bare-knuckle fighting tournaments that were all the rage in the early ‘80s. He bought his first gym at age 25, eventually co-owning a chain of seven. He also became a guru of sorts to anyone looking to shoot anabolic steroids, of which the average bodybuilder easily can consume an ungodly 12,000 milligrams in a week. This turn was earning him between $5,000 and $10,000 a month on the side, and the resulting spikes of temper quickly gained him the reputation of someone to avoid antagonizing.

Acting on a stray rumor floating through one of his gyms, Oz tipped off a 25-year-old stoner kid and client who was importing bales of pot from hydroponic grow houses in Vancouver that the DEA had him in their sites. To Oz’s surprise, “Mikey” offered $20,000 to spirit him out of the country. Facing litigation in the gym business from unscrupulous partners, and having watched much of his accumulated assets walk out the door with an ex-girlfriend, in whose name he had unwisely tried to hide them from the impending lawsuit, he accepted. He loaded a quarter-million dollars in the trunk of a rental car, drove Mikey and his girlfriend to Tijuana and walked them through customs without a hitch – the crime of smuggling cash into Mexico apparently being a sufficiently novel one. As a perc, Mikey awarded him a slot as a driver on interstate runs, where his boundless energy, business acumen and innate loyalty quickly allowed him to move up the chain, from driver to collector to distributor to kingpin.

“We had White Widow, a special strain that the Hell’s Angels liked, Purple Kush and Hash Plant, that went to Snoop Dogg and his crew, Green Goblin, Orange Crush and dozens more,” says Oz. “It would wholesale for $3,000 a pound, and when it got to the end users, they were paying twice that.” To receive the Canadian trans-shipments, Oz or his drivers would meet helicopter drops in the Great North Woods or fishing trawlers at prearranged secluded piers on the Puget Sound. Some importers would target their shipments to Indian reservations, hidden aboard logging trucks or in special compartments drilled into campers. On one occasion, he was told to park on a dirt road at a designated time with his trunk open, and four riders on dirt bikes tossed backpacks right into the car without ever stopping. Some drops took place at remote airfields in the middle of the night, where they would dump the duffel bags directly onto the tarmac. His key supplier would routinely convert his money into 200 kilos of cocaine and smuggle the new, deadly currency back across the border into Canada – a practice confirmed by DEA Special Agent John McKenna.

“Marijuana is the biggest money maker in terms of drug proceeds,” says McKenna. “In cocaine and heroin, the markup is not as much, it’s just easier to package and transport.”

In 2000, Oz relocated to Los Angeles, where he entered his “kingpin phase”: He owned a one-of-a-kind yellow Porsche Boxster, a black Cadillac Escalade, a private limousine and a blue Ferrari 360 Modena Maranello he bought for cash from a well-known NFL player. His “Miami Vice”-style drug lord mansion was actually a house within a house: Mirrors in the back bedroom disguised secret doorways to an entire other set of rooms with a lap pool and waterfall, where he kept a recreational cache of Ecstasy and Vicodin on hand for his club kid clientele and where a wine cellar housed his private safe and vintage machine guns. He had a network of 20 wholesalers he routinely sold to, and multiple safe houses scattered throughout the canyons as designated drop-off points. There was also the requisite string of stripper girlfriends, fat steaks at Mastro’s in Beverly Hills every night and VIP access to the clubs du jour. (A Hollywood nightclub promoter remembers him, saying, “He’s a scary dude, and I don’t want to be connected to him in any way.”)

But for all the menace he cultivated, it was an earlier act of kindness in the Seattle area that tripped him up. During Oz’s drug-running phase, a friend in his mid-20s named Casey went to the doctor for kidney stones and was diagnosed with inoperable testicular cancer that had spread to his abdomen. Desperate, Casey put together a last-minute ecstasy deal to raise the $20,000 for a spurious Mexican treatment, and lost his $12,000 investment to the Asian Mafia. Oz offered to let him ride shotgun and split his delivery fees, but just outside of Eugene, Oregon, Casey started coughing up blood. Leaving him at a hospital to complete the run, Oz flew back to take up a bedside vigil, and Casey died two days later. But unbeknownst to Oz, his friend’s ecstasy sales had landed him on the DEA radar, and they had photographs of every one who went in and out of the hospital. Soon after, 18 DEA agents showed up at his girlfriend’s house to question him, but Oz was ghost – skipping Rain City for sunny So Cal.

The multi-agency task force that finally took Oz down included the DEA, Homeland Security, the California Bureau of Narcotics, International Criminal Investigations (ICI), U.S. Customs and a handful of local law enforcement agencies. The fact that his case crossed so many jurisdictions is a testament to the magnitude of his crimes.

“They’d been catching all my Blackberries,” he says, “and they showed me a transcript of an argument I had with some Canadians a couple of weeks earlier that got really heated. This guy I used to work for owed $4 million to these Hell’s Angels that were tied to the Mexican Mafia, and I was supposed to drop to them the next day. So the Feds showed me the next transcript right after that, where the guy paged the Mexicans and said, ‘Yeah, he’s got the money. Just fucking take him out.’ These guys were going to try and kidnap me, take me back to my house and torture me until I gave up where the money was. The Feds said, ‘We’ve got you for about 35 years.’ At that moment, all I really cared about was getting enough room for me to kill myself.”

That night, Oz tried to hang himself in his jail cell, but he couldn’t go through with it. As a fallback plan, he agreed to go ahead with his scheduled pickups and drop the next day – just long enough to throw himself off the fourth floor of the Glendale Galleria. This was thwarted when DEA agents, taking no chances, handcuffed him to a table, and then made him do business on the ground floor. When the drop went as planned and the Mexican cartel fell like dominos, the DEA saw they had an unanticipated resource on their hands. Pressed for likely targets, Oz’s mind reeled back to a Colombian called Paco who early in his drug career had sold him 10 kilos of cocaine for his Canadian contacts that had inadvertently been soaked in diesel oil, then pulled a gun on him when he tried to collect. Oz wore a wire to a meeting with Paco, and they busted him with ten keys of coke and 20 pounds of crystal meth. Soon he was showing his newfound acolytes how a chop shop built secret compartments into the rocker panels of luxury vehicles (not unlike the ride his alleged former end-user client Snoop Dogg was recently busted with), or how to re-hydrate dry, inferior product with banana and orange peels to give it the desired sweet, sticky quality. He had to check in with his control agent three times a day, but he was walking the streets a free man, and slowly working off his time. (“When I was running a field group with 15 confidential sources,” says DEA agent McKenna, “we met with them daily if not more. I’d talk to them more than their own family.”)

“I snapped,” Oz says today. “I just went, ‘Fuck it: I’m exposed in my hometown, I’ve got nothing to do. I’m never going to eat the food I ate; I’m never going to fuck the chicks I fucked. I’m done, man. I can’t take this.’”

After a fight with his girlfriend when he was close to working off his beef with the DEA, he took 100 Valium and woke up in the hospital with a tube down his throat. Two months ago, before he had a chance to validate himself and tell his story, he washed down 150 aspirin with half a bottle of vodka and was in kidney failure by the time the Feds found him three days later.

“Afterwards, my DEA contact said, ‘Why did you do that?’” says Oz. “‘You’re getting five years, and they’ll put you on probation.’ So they sent me home to the Seattle area. They could have put me in witness protection, but it’s an expensive scenario, and they don’t want their informants identified. [“If an individual is in the program, we can’t use him,” says McKenna.] Six months later, my contact called me on my birthday. He sang ‘Happy Birthday’ using all my aliases, and then he laughed and goes, ‘Aren’t you glad you’re not in jail?’ So maybe I jumped the gun a little bit. In the end, I didn’t even get probation. And they offered me a job.”

It was also here that Oz realized he’d been looking at this all wrong. Rather than rat out his brothers in crime, most of them fuck-ups and sociopaths to begin with, this was his ticket to settle all the beefs he’d built up over a dozen years in the game: for instance – a rich girl they called Hot Pants who was reportedly tied in to the Israeli Mafia once beat him out of $120,000. Meeting her and four scary Israelis in a Hollywood supermarket parking lot, he checked their boxes of money and then headed for his van.

“I was supposed to say, ‘I’m going to get the van,’ and once I walked away, to put my hands through my hair. That was the signal. So the minute I ran my hands through my hair – there are dozens of agents swarming from every angle, and, as I’m strolling out of harm’s way, I’m hearing guns clicking and agents going, ‘Get the fuck on the ground!’ My orders were to continue to walk, cross the street, down the road, go into a Starbucks and wait there…” As a final humiliation for the broken drug wizard Oz, Hot Pants’ wealthy parents eventually got her sprung on charges and set her up with her own clothing line. “Once,” says Oz, “in a half-assed effort at making good with me, she gave me a dozen $1,500 designer dresses. I have to disclose everything to the Feds, and, laughing at me, they sold the dresses in asset forfeiture.”

To date, Oz has run successful stings on an Asian “Triad” syndicate operating out of the casinos, a Dominican cartel and fronted for a Canadian snitch to pop a local guy who had the good fortune to have a heart attack at the gym before they could take him down. Many more are in the works. He estimates that whereas street rats can make $500 for information, he stands to make as much as 10-25% of total assets seized (up to $250,000 a year), as long as he can keep from getting arrested again and exposing himself or another agent. But it’s not easy getting used to high-rolling on a budget.

“The Feds don’t give you flash,” he says, referring to the wad of cash that every player carries for instant credibility. “They’re broke. Flash to them is like a thousand bucks. Or you say, ‘I want 100 kilos now,’ and they say, ‘Great, I’ll send over five keys.’ They’re not going to stick a hundred grand out there to buy five keys, because they don’t have a hundred grand in cash that they can let walk away. They may make the purchase, but the sellers will get maybe a block away and they’ll pull the guy over. This is why they have so much trouble busting up major cartels: No money or drugs can walk.”

“If we’re certain there is going to be a conveyance, we cannot let the drugs hit the streets,” says DEA Agent McKenna. “We would stop them. Money, the same; we make every effort not to let the money get away.”

“Do not get locked up, don’t expose yourself or the agents, and don’t commit perjury,” says a former undercover police detective familiar with DEA-informant relationships and sting operations. “If he gets locked up while he’s working for them, that gives defense lawyers an out: ‘Why should we believe him?’ However, they are not heavy on moral turpitude provisions. If the guy fails to pay child support, they’re not going to axe him as an informant.”

Pulling onto the Sunset Strip, past Miyagi’s, the Body Shop, the Standard and all the other high-end hangs where the doormen knew him by name, Oz runs through a mental checklist of all the people he used to know: Mikey came back for a brief stint in the game before disappearing to Costa Rica. He was recently extradited, and Oz is expressly prohibited from contacting him. Most of his former business associates are broke, busted or betrayed by the handful of people they trusted. Some are junkies, waiting for the slow end. His ex-driver – the one who lost an ear – now drives a delivery truck.

“I’ve had some people do some bad things to me,” Oz says. “But I’ve always given them the opportunity to rectify it. This isn’t the white trade [cocaine]; people aren’t getting shot or stabbed, and they ain’t whoring their sister out. So I have to find my way through this. And I think I’m finding my way through this via telling my story. That helps me cleanse my soul. Being straight up with the Feds helps me feel some redemption. And I’m sure this is wrong, but being able to stand up for myself against some of the people that wronged me has also been therapy for me. But I also know that, if I stuck my head in a car and got shot, at least if I got killed in the line of duty; then maybe I could justify my existence, because I feel bad about what I did.”

At the light on Sunset, he rolls up his sleeve to reveal the enormous tattoos covering his entire bicep:

There’s a broken heart, with the Grim Reaper rising out of it. It says, “I’m still here.”

• This story was originally published in Maxim magazine. All rights reserved by the author.

“That’s just the kind of stuff the FBI could use for coercion, Mitch,” says the Brimley character. “So you watch yourself. I’ll do my best to protect you, and I know you’ll do your best to protect the firm.”

With a few key words changed, that’s as succinct a description of Scientology and its powerful hold over its credulous practitioners as one could hope for… READ MORE HERE

to: eddiehdeezen1
from: markebner59

Eddie – Please be advised that you are more than welcome to my crossword puzzle, but I challenge you to actually finish the one I’m saving for you on Sunday! Your long time fan, Mark Ebner – http://www.hollywoodinterrupted.com. PS: Hope you don’t mind me having some fun on Twitter…

–

from: eddie deepen
to: markebner59

THANKS MARK.

I LOVE THE L.A. TIMES FOR TWO REASONS- A GREAT SPORTS PAGE, AND THE BEST CROSSWORD PUZZLES.

THE SUNDAY ONES ARE TOO TOUGH, BUT I DO THEM MONDAY THROUGH SATURDAY.

THANKS AGAIN MARK- HAVE A GREAT REST OF THE WEEK & A GREAT SUMMER!

ALL THE BEST, EDDIE

In a country with an unofficial underemployment rate of 20%, the tiny railroad whistle-stop of Williston, North Dakota near the Montana border (population 17,000 and spiking) is currently at capacity: There’s not a motel room to be had in the city, housing prices are double what they were a year ago ($300,000 for a two-bedroom home), and the daily onslaught of new arrivals is reduced to living in their cars, RVs, sporadic tent cities or the rapidly proliferating “man camps” – clusters of trailers in an open field that pack in oil patch workers dormitory style, sometimes six to a room. Access to running water and simple sanitation is so rare that public businesses have had to lock their bathrooms to discourage makeshift sponge baths or the dumping of wastewater. Meanwhile, throughout the region, fast food professionals can make $15 an hour and waitresses start at $25 an hour, with a bonus if they’ll stay in the job for at least six weeks. (Pizza Hut brought in campers-vans just so its counter help could afford to live there.)

But mainly what they need are truck drivers: The same 18- to 25-year-old demographic that’s economically the hardest hit everywhere else, with nothing more than a high school diploma and a Commercial Driver’s License, are here racking up six-figure fortunes. (Williston boasts a 4% unemployment rate.) As one local developer put it, “I think they should round up all the Occupy Wall Streeters and bring them up here. Come up here and occupy these jobs. There are jobs everywhere.”

That’s because Williston, Watford City, New Town, Sidney, Montana and a handful of towns like them are located near the epicenter of the Bakken formation, a subsurface geologic strata thought to contain between 4 billion and 24 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Discovered in 1951, this potential windfall has been sitting for half a century like dinosaurs’ blood beneath a thick layer of marine shale, waiting for the magic bullet to arrive that could liberate it. That bullet finally appeared in the form of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technology – fracking – a controversial form of water-intensive high-pressure drilling that requires an average of a million and a quarter gallons of fluid per well and incorporates numerous toxic chemicals at potentially dangerous levels that critics claim can permeate the water table. About 1,800 wells are being added a year along the formation, with much of the oil sitting in tanks while crews lay track from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, and hundreds of empty flat-black tank cars sit gleaming in the attenuated daylight.

And like the original Deadwood, as depicted in the Pete Dexter novel Deadwood and the HBO series based on it, the volatile combination of red-blooded young men with their pockets full of money has attracted all those skilled technocrats expert at separating the latter from the former: There aren’t opium dens (that I know of), but a meth lab was discovered operating in one of the man-camps, and salvia (a Schedule 1-class felony) from a local head shop put some local partiers in the hospital. Gamblers haven’t flooded in by wagon train yet, but it’s rare to find a non-chain restaurant that hasn’t tricked out a back room or spare corner for a bar, video poker and a couple of tables of felt. There’s no trifecta of brothels on Main Street, but local police are seeing their first prostitution complaints in “some time” and CNN reported that itinerant dancers at one of the two local strip clubs (conveniently located next to each other) are pulling down two grand a night (even as area churches organize “prayer vigils” outside). And whereas adversaries in protracted disputes rarely face off in gunfights or feed each other to the hogs, you can easily pick up 9mm parabellum cartridges for your Sig-Sauer alongside a quart of milk and the baby’s Huggies (or a Mac-10 with silencer, which they’ve helpfully renamed a “flash suppressor”). Not to mention the pervasive overcast of dread in a place that has barely eight hours of sunlight a day. As I overheard a woman on a cell phone outside a hardware store say: “I don’t know whether to unfriend him on Facebook or just shoot him in the face.”

But that’s the last thing on the mind of this RV army that’s headed to Williston from all over the country, ready to cash in on what’s left of the American Dream. It’s the kind of place where you can see a middle-aged woman set an original Louis Vuitton bag up on the bar of a local dive. Where the hot twin waitresses at the local diner can earn $200 in tips for a split shift and family farmers can unload the right 60 acres for close to a million bucks (the tell are the shiny new grain silos, combines and pickup trucks visible from the highway). And it’s where the new Okies can dream of a new Big Rock Candy Mountain. This is either the Badlands made good or a good time gone bad, once the next bust inevitably arrives.

And me, I’m no exception.

I’ve driven a 24-foot Jamboree RV all the way from Los Angeles that I could rent out for $2000 a month if I was prepared to face the brutal North Dakota winter head on – especially with the six-month moratorium on man-camp construction that went into effect in September. Along the way, everyone from convenience store clerks to truck stop cashiers get a gleam in their eye when I say the magic word Williston. An African-American family in a U-Haul truck 30 miles out seems almost beside themselves to be this close. (Williston is 93% white, a bit of research I keep to myself.) When I pull into Williston to top up on propane, the girl at the all-night gas station volunteers, “Did you hear they raped a little girl in the Walmart parking lot and threw her body in a dumpster?” When I press her for more of the town’s dark secrets, she confides, “A guy was putting roofies in girls’ drinks at DK’s Lounge, and a bunch of local guys took him out, raped his ass and left him to die.”

I’m well into the 45-minute drive south to Sidney, Montana where I’m staying before I realize she easily could have seen my out-of-state plates and wished I’d just keep moving. (Although everyone I talk to will confirm some version of the above, Detective David Peterson of the Williston Police Department says for the record, “Within the last year and a half, I can confirm that there has been no rape reported on Walmart property, and I can tell you that no incident involving roofies and/or sexual contact has been reported at the DK’s Lounge.”) In January, Montana schoolteacher Sherry Arnold was abducted in Sidney, MT. Her remains were found near Williston in March.

On the housing front, I’ve lucked out. Although a patch of ice to park a camper can go for as much as $100 a night, the bartender at yesterday’s lunch spot in Livingston, Montana offered up his in-laws, Jesse and Frankie Burman, who charge me $25 a night, offer me use of their shower when my water pipes freeze, and invite me to Thanksgiving dinner. Jesse Burman is a rugged, middle-aged oil broker who is old enough to remember the last boom – the one that dried up in ’82 and left old-timers like him suspicious of the easy money now being spread too thin to paper over hurt feelings. Like most residents of Sidney, he’s annoyed at the local Main Street Mafia, who mark up certain luxury goods as much as 100%. But that’s a small price to pay to avoid the steady stream of gravel-haulers and big rigs that choke the state highways, routinely take two lanes at a time without signaling and are perpetually backed up half a mile at the main stoplight in Williston.

“It took me 30 years to get the job I got now, and yet we’re hiring kids out of college – 20, 25 – that are making the dead same wage I am,” he says. “Anybody that can spell ‘truck’ gets put behind the wheel. Just pull into the Walmart, stick a sign on your camper window – you’ll get hired. Halliburton, Schlumberger. And now exploration is way bigger than production… Rocks and dirt are the big thing now – for cement. Who’d have thought you could get rich selling dirt?”

(A husband-and-wife long-haul trucking team I meet later, licensed by the Defense Department, who can proudly boast of “two million accident-free miles,” claim they are “really upset about companies hiring anyone with a pulse up here.” According to the wife: “Our son went and got a job here, and he’s never driven a truck in his life. He took a written test, they gave him a commercial driver’s license instantaneously, and they hired him and handed him the keys.”)

Jesse estimates that roughnecks and roustabouts – the modified jarheads recognizable from TruTV’s reality series Black Gold – are probably 70% married. This is the Hillbilly Jet Set that works two weeks on, 12 hours a day, and then flies home for two weeks off at a thousand dollars a round-trip ticket.

He is dismissive of the anti-fracking sentiment that pervades much of the media, including reports of poisoned wells and dying livestock in Pennsylvania and a recent controversial EPA draft report that found water contamination resulting from oil and gas development in Pavillion, Wyoming.

“It’s too damn deep,” he says of local fracking efforts. “It’s ten thousand foot deep. They’re not fracking [chemicals] up to the surface water. The other ones, like down in Louisiana – they’re shallow-fracking. All you gotta do is run 3,000 foot of casing and frack under that.”

(For the record, Deborah Goldberg of Earth Justice, a nonprofit environmental law firm that frequently represents the Sierra Club and others, says, “That’s what the industry always says. That’s what they said about Pavillion… Experts have told us that there is potential for migration of gas and fracking fluids even with deep exploration. Over time, with the right conditions, there is the possibility for migration into ground water.”)

“Don’t get run over, “Jesse says to me as I’m leaving, obliquely referencing yesterday’s head-on collision when a pickup caromed off an unmanned semi-trailer into an oncoming dump truck.

In Williston, the infamous Walmart parking lot has apparently been cleared of the camper-vans and motor homes that are welcome at Walmarts across the country. One of the last renegades, a Tioga camper with Colorado plates and a “4 Sale $11,000” sign on it, has a guy on a cell phone pacing in front of it. This turns out to be David Forenza, a builder who is awaiting financing for some local homes, and who just concluded a cash transaction for his asking price, sight unseen. Like virtually everyone I’ll talk to in the next few days, he’s got a private get-rich-quick scheme – a decent Italian restaurant, now that the one out by the golf course has closed down – and in fact, everywhere you look, there seem to be opportunities staring you in the face.

“They’re really good – I’d say excellent,” he says of investment opportunities in general. “The problem is, no one is lending money. You have to go get private money to do anything, and then you have to convince the hell out of whoever you’re borrowing from that it’s definitely worth the risk.”

Surprisingly, he confirms having heard the rumor about the parking lot rape, and ups it with one of his own: “A guy died in his trailer last week from carbon monoxide poisoning. That’s why they kicked everyone out of here, but I never saw that in the news.”

Nearby, a brand new pickup truck houses a gorgeous wolf and wolf-coyote hybrid untethered in the back. A smart-looking woman in her early forties, Claire Helmberger, with thick brown hair and all of five feet, hoists a fifty-pound bag of dog food into the bed, which the hybrid immediately rips open and starts sampling.

“It’s the boom of the century!” she says, perhaps only half in jest.

Claire has worked in the oil fields in Colorado and driven an 18-wheeler water tanker truck. Currently, she and her husband are living in nearby Epping (their first house after two years of trailer living) and managing a salt-water disposal facility just north of town. Saltwater or “production water” is part of the flow-back that comes back up the well throughout the fracking process and up to two years afterwards, and are generally disposed of at special facilities. (Most of these substances qualify as E&P – Exploration and Production – wastes, and as such are exempt from federal hazardous waste regulations. I noted the local ballpark approach to official oversight as I watched a three-man team across from my campsite precariously crane-lift a huge propane tank onto a flatbed truck without a hardhat or OSHA inspector in sight.)

“It’s the boom of the century!” she shouts again as she drives away. It should be on her bumper sticker.

Here Come the Brides

Whispers is the oldest of the town’s two adjacent gentleman’s clubs, a Mom-and-Pop outfit of 30 years’ standing that, on the afternoon I first wandered into it, featured a local lovely on stage proudly sporting nothing but a G-string and a house arrest ankle bracelet. The owner’s son, who works the oil fields by day and moonlights here at night, explains the metal detector wanding at the front door by recounting the night a roustabout shot the urinal off the men’s room wall with a .45, and how a friend of his was stabbed three times in the parking lot. I squeeze in at the blackjack table next to a Vegas fast-talker who calls himself Adam the Dirt Man, a walking punchline to one of Jesse’s anecdotes: After years of hauling dirt from construction sites to quarries throughout Nevada, he’s made a hundred grand here so far and is fast-tracking a “super man-camp” on ten acres he picked up for a song just ahead of the moratorium.

“You’re looking for a story?” he says. “I’m the story. I’m going to have made my first million by the end of next year.”

Next door at Heartbreakers, the vibe is a little more corporate – a $10 cover charge to Whispers’ $5, with an ATM that juices seven bucks off my c-note as a matter of course. The girls here also look more professional, many of them on a circuit that stretches from the Pacific Northwest to Chicago.

One of these is arriving on Thanksgiving Day from Ft. Lauderdale, where she’s gone to shake the cold of her native Montana. She was born with the improbable and perfect stripper middle name “Nikki,” but dances under the name Karmen (“with a K”) because “they already had three Nikkis.” (Thanks, Prince.) Five-ten without her fuck-me pumps, and with long chestnut hair and piercing blue eyes, the 28-year-old mixed Italian beauty agrees to meet me at a Main Street diner where the burger du jour is called “the Frack Attack.” She orders a Grey Goose screwdriver to unwind before her first shift.

Nikki was born in a trailer in Las Vegas to hippie parents who quickly fled to the liberal redoubt of Missoula, Montana where they could grow pot. (Her father bought her the enormous dragon tattoo on her back for her 18th birthday and left her mom who now thrives as a copy editor) She did two years at the University of Montana as a liberal arts major with a minor in Asian Studies (her mother is Persian, and she speaks passing Arabic), with the goal of becoming an archaeologist. That’s when, at age 26, her natural wanderlust escorted her into the world of exotic dancing – first to the little big city of Butte two hours away (full nude, with alcohol) where no one would know her, and then in a kind of migratory pattern following oilfield workers to new strikes. (She plans to get her marketing degree in Florida.)

Her regulars in Butte kept telling her about the Williston boom, so she and a friend finally made the 10-hour drive and walked onstage at Whispers. By the time she got here a year ago, dancers were already banned at every hotel in town except the Vegas Motel, right around the corner from DK’s Lounge (of roofies rape fame), both of them known in local lore for their sympathy for the working girl. Staying in a cramped room where the blacklight revealed secrets about the bed sheets she would rather not know, she did a week at Whispers, then moved over to Heartbreakers, where she’s done periodic two-week stints ever since. (She now shares a tiny bedroom with three men – two of them restaurateurs she tended bar for in Butte – sleeping on the lower half of bunk beds. She passed on a chance to move into the “Williston Playboy Mansion,” a kind of log cabin travel lodge built by an eccentric local who got rich off his mineral rights and became a patron to the resident artists, renting bedrooms to dancers for $50 a night. “It’s just the way it is here,” she says.)

Nikki confirms the urinal getting shot off the wall at Whispers, but claims the most you can make on a good night here is probably $1200. “And I’m one of the top girls in the clubs,” she says. “But I also go by the rules. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff that goes on after hours [presumably meaning off premises]. A lot of the girls do that.”

She claims to have “crossed boundaries” on occasion, mainly in the heat of the moment during private lap dances, say – once with an Idaho state trooper she fancied. But she doesn’t seem as ambitious toward the possible combinations of sex and money as many in her chosen profession; she doesn’t have a website, for instance, or a Facebook fan page, or even a professional portfolio. She’s also in the early stages of a relationship – with an Air Force Special Operations Combat Controller currently deployed to Afghanistan, whom she got to know on a whirlwind weekend in Vegas. (She has his call sign tattooed on her nether parts – “the number he’s supposed to radio in when he’s going down for the last time,” as she charmingly puts it.)

“I feel like the money is too easy,” she says about this lifestyle in general. “And I’m a very sexual person, so it’s not a moral issue. I feel more like myself when I’m in there – more like who I really am. Dancing was the best thing I ever did for myself. But I’m very sincere in my interactions with people. It’s been very difficult up here because it’s so busy – there’s such a high volume of clients – that it’s hard to hang onto that sincerity. It’s like an assembly line.”

Nikki claims that although competition is high, the girls get along better here than anywhere she’s ever worked – mainly because the money’s so good, but also because the intensity bonds them – a mix of testosterone, acute homesickness and the palpable threat of violence.

“The sexual tension in this town is so heavy,” she says. “I once had a guy tell me he could smell a woman before he even saw her. I actually wore a fake engagement ring for a while, but it didn’t make a difference. There are guys here from Louisiana and Oklahoma and all over, a lot of them are ex-cons. So there’s this whole unstable atmosphere. But everyone is making so much money. Almost every night of the week, there’s a block of time when it gets packed – so packed they can’t let more people in. Everyone is drunk; there are fights outside all the time. But the club is like a neutral zone. Personally, my rule is that I don’t date guys who go to strip clubs. But these aren’t guys who typically go to strip clubs. They’re just there because there’s nothing else to do. A lot of times they’re going through some really hard stuff, and they want to talk about it: ‘Oh, my wife’s leaving me and she took our kids’ or ‘I’m a single father….’”

She says her lap dances – $20 per three minute song – oftentimes seem more akin to therapy sessions.
“It’s like the Wild West up here,” she says. “My challenge is to stay professional.”

When I stop by to see her at the club later that night, Nikki has completely transformed: Gone is the fresh-faced college girl in black tights and a hoodie, and in her place is an exotic creature with chestnut hair extensions, black lace garters and a Victoria’s Secret half-bra. The Williston Hef is at the bar in full hunting camo, buying Cherry Bomb shots for the girls (Red Bull and cherry vodka). When I buy Nikki a drink (ten dollars plus tip), the waitress seems mystified by my request for a receipt. “I wouldn’t know how to do that,” she says. I’m convinced that the establishment is skimming, but Nikki urges me to lighten up.

“She’s sweet, but…” Her voice trails off. Later she texts me that some guys with guns and knives showed up and threatened to shoot up the place, and they had to call the cops.

On the way out of town, I stop by DK’s to try and spot some real working girls in action. The bouncer is a compact ex-Marine in his early forties named Rocky Mahr – with a tour of duty in Grenada under his belt, who washed up here after riding out Katrina and the subsequent boom. He is surprisingly matter-of-fact in confirming the rumor of prostitutes shuttling between DK’s and the Vegas Hotel, pointing out an attractive black woman at the bar.

“That girl does alright,” he says. “She’s very nice, she’s intelligent and she doesn’t bother anyone. We don’t mess with them too much, as long as we don’t get dragged into it. We’re not promoting it.”

What he does object to, from his vantage point in the eye of the storm, is what he perceives as the arrogance of the oil companies – both in how they treat the community, and in how their employees treat the local talent.

“Halliburton, Schlumberger, Hess and a lot of these big oil companies are turning around and buying [rental] houses, and people who have been living in them are getting thrown out on their asses. They’ll snap it up and cram in two or three worker families, or make it man-camp.” (When contacted, Halliburton characterized its actions as having “added significantly to the available housing for its employees and their families” and making “significant investments in the communities in which it works.”)

“Another thing they keep under wraps here are all the oil rigs blowing up,” Rocky tells me. “Not even a month ago they had an explosion with fatalities. I had a buddy that was there and he said it felt like a damn bomb going off. Three guys died, and two got sent to a burn center in Minneapolis. Happens all the time out here.” (According to the Bismarck Tribune, the well belonged to Oasis Petroleum.)

“You know, I’ve literally stood here and watched an oil worker walk right up to a girl and say, ‘I want to fuck you.’ That’s the mentality. These guys come up here and think they can do whatever they want because they’ve got Halliburton, Hess, Nabors or Schlumberger on their shirt. They’re coming in, hiring the scum of the earth – they couldn’t get a job where they’re from because of their reputation or their mentality. And when this oil boom leaves – if it ever does – this town is gonna be a ghost town.”

Roughnecks and Puffnecks

Matt and Sara Feronti are perhaps typical of the new nomadic class on display in flashpoints like this one. They met by accident – literally: Sara’s best friend was killed in a car crash, and a friend recommended Matt as a good shoulder to cry on. They’ve been together seven years now, chasing the oil and natural gas booms from Big Piney, Wyoming at the base of the Tetons, where 300 head of elk would wander through the drilling fields, to tiny Colorado towns with colorful names like Rifle and Parachute, to here.

Matt is “in the grind” – a chain hand, one of the lower totem positions in a drilling rig crew hierarchy that runs from worm to tool-pusher and company man. That’s not to mention the service groups, hydro-testers, hot oil trucks and all the other secondary positions required – like his friend who’s banking $25,000 a pop pressure-washing rigs and derricks. Matt generally works one week on, one week off, often driving two hours each way on top of a 12-hour shift, and frequently dreams of turning wrenches in his sleep. He makes $70,000 a year for just six or seven months work total, and claims the only time his back starts to hurt is when he’s not working. He’s heard they’re predicting steady work in the Bakken for the next 15 years, and plans to ride the boom for at least the next five.

Sara works as a waitress when she can, and as an artist in her spare time, but despite her model good looks, she’s not above donning Matt’s greasers, the standard-issue oilfield coveralls, and helping him wrap cables while he breaks down a truck-mounted rig in the dead of winter.

“Any other woman would be sitting on her candy-ass in the trailer,” Matt says with obvious pride. “That’s why she’s my wife, man.”

Sara likes to unwind at the karaoke nights at a local club – she favors the classics: Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Jim Reeves and Johnny Cash – while Matt is more likely to go for Nas or Ludacris. They want kids, but for now they’re lavishing their attention on a baker’s dozen of pit bull puppies and a pound rescue Jack Russell terrier named Skipper. Like Jesse, they invited me to have Thanksgiving dinner with them, which they apparently do for many of the town’s strays. (“I know what it’s like to need,” Matt says when I ask him about it.)

When they first got here a year and a half ago, they spent two months living in their Jeep Cherokee with their Blue Nose pit bull in Matt’s tool-pusher’s front yard – a design strategy that did not get them into Dwell, but was briefly memorialized on YouTube. Their first camper was a ’79 Rogue 24-footer, which they briefly kept next to a friend’s horse barn, without electricity or running water, and with the closest service station bathroom three miles away. Later, Matt’s mom stayed in it with them for eight months with her pet Shih Tzu. (Once when he was relighting the pilot in the middle of a snowstorm, the heater blew up in his face and he thought he was dead.) Now they live in a comparatively luxurious 34-foot single-wide with a kickout that doubles as a kennel, in a double space they pay just $360 a month for with full hookups.

“We have an angel for a landlord,” says Sara. “You could put a friggin’ teepee up on your land and someone would rent it.”

“I had a friend who told us to pick him up at a motel,” says Matt. “I asked him what they were charging him to stay there, and he said, ‘I don’t stay at the motel; I stay in the bathroom at the park.’ With the winters up here? Last year we had 95-mile-an-hour winds that knocked out all the power. Anyone can work in an oil field, but if you can make it through a winter in North Dakota, you can make it through anything.”

But that’s only a small percentage of the bullets they’ve dodged in their time together. “We were staying in a man-camp down in Parachute, Colorado,” says Matt. “I was sleeping, and she comes in and yells, ‘Matt, there’s cars in the parking lot exploding!’ A meth lab blew up – an RV, two cars and two vans. We heard the tires exploding. They found two sets of teeth.” (Companies often conduct spot urine, saliva and hair follicle tests in the field – even though meth is undetectable after 72 hours. And although you can’t use your Montana medical marijuana card, prescription Oxycontin is apparently fine.)

Matt grew up wanting to be a firefighter, and sees the intrinsic danger surrounding him as just part of the job. He runs a finger across his front teeth. “I’ve had all of these smashed out,” he says. “I got smacked in the face with a chain, busted the bottom halves off. I spit them out into my hand. When I first started, I smashed my left index finger so that the meat was spurting out. The driller told me to put a Band-Aid on it – you know: ‘You’re a hard worker; don’t let me down.’ I put a sandwich baggie over it and duct-taped it, but the pain was just thumping and I turned pale. When they finally looked at it, all this blood ran out of the bag and they almost passed out.

“I’ve seen a guy get hit in the face with an ice plug coming out of a drill pipe that tore his eye out of the socket and ripped off half his face. You get a safety bonus of $2.50 an hour that you forfeit if someone gets hurt. I saw this kid damn near cut his thumb off, and his crew put Super Glue on it so they wouldn’t be out the $30 a man. My buddy cut his arm off, got it put back on and went back to work, cut his thumb off and got that replaced. We’re pretty hardcore. That’s why they take out a $250,000 life insurance policy on you as soon as you start. It is what it is. Back then it was roughnecks; now it’s all puffnecks.”

Matt has no love lost for Halliburton. “We call them the Red Army,” he says, referring to the company’s ubiquitous uniform and logo. “They’re just idiots. They’ll hire anybody.” He’s sick of all the scams: The fly-by-night construction crews who get half their money upfront and then disappear; the modern-day rustlers who raid construction sites for millions of dollars in equipment and utility vehicles; the con men who sell fake hay over the phone, preying on small-town folks for their credit card numbers or IP addresses. He’s sick of the pregnant hookers, the sketchy roustabouts paying $300 for a gram of meth, the “vultures” at the laundromat who routinely hit on his wife. He’s sick of paying $4.50 for a gallon of milk.

So he and Sara have an exit strategy: Alaska. Specifically, Kodiak Island, where they can buy some land and build a cabin, and Matt can work on offshore rigs as the opportunity arises.

“It doesn’t have to be Kodiak Island,” says Matt. “Just anywhere to get away from mainstream society. Society has a can’t-do attitude. They all want that money, but nobody knows what they have to do to get the job done.”

“It’s like every other boom that’s happened since the Gold Rush,” says Sara. “It brings out the assholes of the earth.”

“Still, this place is something to see,” adds Matt. “This is history in the making.”

Big Gamer Tobey Maguire gets more than his ego massaged

“Listen, here’s the thing: If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”
– Matt Damon’s first line in Rounders

A high-stakes floating poker game starring Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and a wealth of professional poker players, financial titans and household names became Hollywood’s worst-kept secret when a hedge fund manager who ran a $26 million Ponzi scheme was discovered with $5.2 million in canceled checks to Maguire, director Nick Cassavetes and 20 other players in the twice-weekly Texas Hold ‘Em games played over the past five years at the Four Seasons, the Peninsula, the Beverly Hills Hotel and various multimillion-dollar homes in L.A.’s high-priced canyons. Recently, a bankruptcy lawyer representing victims of the fund sued to recover assets, claiming a novel interpretation of the gambling laws. Although some of the extremely well heeled defendants have agreed to settle, Maguire stood pat until finally settling for pennies on his winnings ($80,000) last November, claiming a friendly poker game is just that, regardless of the six-figure buy-in or pots that often aggregate in the millions. But according to those who have paid to play, the games may be extralegal, highly capitalized, and are anything but friendly.

A photo-shopped Leo DiCaprio shills for a poker site.

Actor and lifelong poker player Kevin Pollak never played in Tobey’s game – so named because he is among its highest-profile participants and most faithful attendees. But he did play briefly with some of its mainstays, including Cassavetes, former nightclub impresario Chuck Pacheco (now Cassavetes’ producing partner) and Rick “Scum” Salomon, a featured player on Fox TV’s PokerStars Big Game, who once cleared Pamela Anderson’s quarter-million-dollar gambling debt in exchange for matrimonial favors. And he’s got the scars to prove it.

Funny man Kevin Pollak knew when to fold ‘em.

“Nick Cassavetes is one of the most dangerous players I’ve ever seen at a table,” Pollak recounts. “You have to have a certain level of fearlessness along with savvy. If you add in a reputation and deep pockets – that makes someone dangerous.”

Playing in a regular game that suddenly went from a thousand-dollar buy-in to $5000 virtually overnight, he found himself across the felt from Cassavetes and the others in what was now a full-contact sport.

“It was like being surrounded in the Old West by the best gunslingers in town, and I’m the Sheriff or something,” says Pollak, who was the original host of the long-running Celebrity Poker Showdown on Bravo. “I was like, ‘We’re gonna need a bigger boat to get out of this.’ I only played with them for three weeks – three games – and then I said, ‘I’m done kidding myself; you guys are insane.’ To them, it’s all relative. They play in their regular game [Tobey’s], and this is how they play. It’s a tactic – an investment in the future. Nick actually pulled me aside – I got up to go to the restroom, and when I came out, he was waiting for me. He took me into a side room and said, ‘Dude, you’ve got to lighten up. You could kill this game if you stopped being so upset about everyone playing like dicks. This is how we play, and you could be killing these guys, because half of them don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. They just know how to play like a dick. You actually know how the game works, so stop being so pissed off at everyone for over-betting 3-2 off, and take their money.’”

(Cassavetes declined to be interviewed for this story, as did many of the luminaries contacted.)

Tobey’s game has been around at least since 2006, dating back to the VIP section of the Viper Room on Sunset sometime after the 1993 on-site death of River Phoenix and subsequent divestiture by original owner Johnny Depp. Among those who are rumored to have graced the game on occasion are poker pros Phil Laak, Layne Flack and Doyle Brunson, pornographer-felon Joe Francis and Hank Azaria, a multi-character voice on The Simpsons. (A story making the rounds had Azaria showing for the first time with $5,000 cash, not realizing they would take a personal check.)

Convicted felon Joe Francis sucks at poker.

According to the FBI, Brad Ruderman, the CEO of Ruderman Capital Partners and its sister hedge fund operating out of Beverly Hills, was a regular player at the exclusive money game and moveable fleece between 2006 and 2009, before the financial meltdown exposed the degree of his fiduciary deceptions. Ruderman is now serving 10 years in a Texas federal prison for multiple counts of wire fraud, investor advisor fraud and willful failure to file taxes. The whole thing might have been just a missed opportunity for an Entourage episode had not court-appointed bankruptcy trustee Howard Ehrenberg, whose job it was to recover assets for defrauded investors, settled on the novel approach of filing suit in March of this year against 22 defendants who were players in that game, all of whom were conveniently paid by check.

Among those named in the lawsuit are Maguire ($295,000 plus interest), real estate mogul Bob Safai ($846,000), private equity billionaire Alec Gores ($445,000), poker pros David Garden and Lawrence Hahn, Cassavetes ($73,800), Welcome Back, Kotter’s Gabe Kaplan ($62,000), Salomon ($23,000), Pacheco ($18,000), C-Note Records honcho Cody Leibel, Las Vegas hotelier Andrew Sasson and
Dan “Blitz” Bilzerian ($100,000), the bad boy pitchman for the Victory Poker website who has called Maguire a “nit” (i.e., a tight-fisted, controlling player) and offered to sit for an interview for $150,000.

“Blitz” Bilzerian has lost everything but his abs at poker tables.

Already, a number of these have settled for roughly 45 cents on the dollar – Safai for $360,000, Garden and Hahn for just over $300,000 apiece, and Salomon and Pacheco for ten and eight grand, respectively. Cassavetes responded with characteristic vigor, telling anyone who would listen he was “not paying them one fucking dime,” even as his attorney, Ronald Richards, confirmed they were in settlement negotiations. But Maguire did file papers indicating that he would fight the lawsuit, perhaps transferring his hardball table tactics to the courtroom. As an opening gambit, he produced checks to Ruderman for $168,000 in apparent losses, which he claims should cancel at least half of any eventual liability.

Everyone familiar with the game attests to a staggering amount of money that passes through the pot. The buy-in is reportedly $100,000, with blinds of $1,000-$2,000. (For those who don’t play, in a flop game with shared cards, automatic “blind” bets in predetermined amounts are placed by the first and second players in place of a traditional ante.) Legendary player Phil Hellmuth said on television in 2007 that Maguire had cleared $10 million playing poker in Hollywood.

In a game in which card and pot odds are widely available to anyone, where the field of battle has been reduced to separating the player from his prepared reactions, it turns out the best actor has a strategic edge. Add to that the competitive streak necessary to transmute actors into stars, not to mention the mile-wide obsessive streak that channels so many of them into drugs, alcohol and extreme behavior, and you often wind up with poker-playing machines.

Director Rod Lurie, whose remake of Straw Dogs opened in September, recalls that actor James Woods spent every night out at the casinos when they were shooting in Shreveport. “There was one time at a table where somebody was really drunk and made the crack, “You’re a great actor, but you really don’t know how to play poker.” And Jimmy went around the table and explained what the odds were on everyone, told what everyone had in their hand and proceeded to win the pot. And he was right on everything. It was just like out of Rounders.

“I used to play with Kevin [Pollak], and Kevin is the same way. The thing is that entertainers entertain, and they make you forget that you’re in a game. Kevin used to deal poker, and he’d do it as Alan Arkin or Woody Allen – he’d have us laughing, and before you knew it, you were out of money.”

Cards have always been an idle pleasure of the Hollywood rank and file, where waiting is the one constant in everyone’s job’s description. Old-timers say that on any given day in the card room of the Friar’s Club in Beverly Hills, $30,000 would change hands in the many poker, pinochle and gin rummy games. In fact, it was gin rummy, seemingly the most benign of the three, which led to the biggest scandal in the Club’s 60-year history when in 1962, a member named Maurice Friedman imported a scam he had perfected at Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel and elsewhere in Las Vegas: By mounting an optical lens in a peephole in the ceiling, and installing a sound man in the narrow crawlspace above, he could fleece the unsuspecting high-rollers below. The scam only came to light five years later when one of the conspirators was arrested in a similar operation and spilled the beans to a friendly FBI agent. (West Coast mob fixture Johnny Roselli also managed to muscle his way into the operation, for which he served five years in prison.) Hardest hit were Debbie Reynolds’ husband Harry Karl (with losses close to $1 million), singer Tony Martin, Zeppo Marx and comedian Phil Silvers, who said at the trial, “Let’s just say I’ll be hitchhiking home.”

World Poker Tour host Mike Sexton, a WSOP winner and unofficial ambassador for the game, says, “My partner Vince Van Patten, his dad [actor Dick Van Patten] played poker for 30 years with Hollywood celebrities. Don Adams played all the time. Kojak [Telly Savalas] played all the time. The Odd Couple guy [Walter Matthau], he played a lot.”

Pollak once played with Adams in a famous house game hosted by sports agent Norby Walters. “He probably had the most famous game of the last 20 years,” says Pollak. “This particular night, there was Sharon Stone, Sid Caesar, Charlie Durning, Eric Roberts, Mimi Rogers, and a late arriver was Don Adams. This was probably six months before his passing. He walks in – it’s Uncle Joe moving slow. It takes him ten minutes to get from the door to the table it seems like. Doesn’t say a thing after he sits down. It’s heartbreaking, really. There’s a round table of stories, but he’s not really participating. Finally Eric Roberts has to leave – he’s got an early flight to New York. He says his goodbyes. Now it’s like six minutes later, and it’s Don Adams’ turn to deal. He’s got to stand up so he can get the cards all the way around the table. And he finally speaks for the first time in three hours and says, ‘Is it just me, or is that kid actually better looking than his sister?’ Sharon Stone was crying, she was laughing so hard. It was a bombshell. The timing was sick. He set us up.”

Director Mike Binder’s regular Wednesday-night game routinely featured Larry David, Rod Lurie and local Fox weatherman Mark Thompson, who had to leave at 10:45 to do the weather. “We’d all sit there waiting for his poker reference in the local weather report,” Binder says. “‘It looks like the storm front is bringing in a full house rain.’”

“The big game was Johnny Carson’s game, with Chevy Chase and Steve Martin. That was the big game for years. And they used to have a really good game in the back, upstairs at Planet Hollywood. They would feed us and take care of us. It was awesome.”

Hank Azaria, Simpsons’ co-creator Sam Simon, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Macaulay Culkin have all hosted prominent house games in the past 20 years. But Maguire’s game is widely considered the biggest – both in stakes and in prestige.

Hank Azaria wonders if they’ll accept checks at Tobey’s game later.

For contemporary Hollywood, the film Rounders in 1998 did a lot to galvanize interest in poker, quoting emeritus figures like Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim and Jack King’s Confessions of a Winning Poker Player, and coining half a dozen aphorisms in the process: “Generally, the rule is, the nicer the guy, the poorer the card player”; “The game attracts the rich flounders, and they in turn attract the sharks”; and the sanguinary, “It’s like the Nature Channel: You don’t see the piranhas eating each other, do you?”

But it was roughly 2003, with the Stateside introduction of the pocket cam that could broadcast players’ hold cards, and its documentation of that year’s World Series of Poker win by Chris Moneymaker, the first world champion to ever qualify via an online gaming site, when this latest generation of Hollywood poker players came of age.

“It started around the time of the Moneymaker win,” says screenwriter Brandon Boyce (Apt Pupil), an avid poker player. “Ten years ago, everybody was playing backgammon.”

Maguire was one of those who people remember pulling in a pretty good supplementary income playing backgammon with the crew on his earlier pictures. Boyce also remembers Maguire approaching a table of a dozen people or more at a restaurant one time and saying, “I can set the line for how many [produced] writers are sitting at this table.” As Boyce remembers it, “I said, ‘Go ahead,’ and he said, ‘Four.’ I looked around the table, and he made the line perfectly. There were four produced writers at the table. He’s that good of a gambler.”

Professional poker poster boy Daniel Negreanu, whose wholesome Canadian image belies ruthlessness after the cards have been dealt, is credited with mentoring Maguire and other young Hollywood players, although he downplays his contributions. But like a lot of those queried, he expresses admiration for the actor’s poker skills, and describes an early experience facing Maguire across the felt.

“One of the first times I played with Tobey, he did something that was really sharp in a pot where he was bluffing,” Negreanu says. “He did something to act like he had the absolute nuts, and he knew I would pick up on it. And I saw it, and I was like, Okay, and I threw the hand away. And then he ended up showing me the bluff. He has the ability to fake weakness or strength, which is definitely an asset when you play poker.”

The dispute came down to what Ronald Richards (attorney for three of the defendants) calls “a disagreement of the law.” Basically, if it’s a friendly home game, it’s legal in Beverly Hills and L.A. County, including West L.A.; illegal in Los Angeles proper, but rarely prosecuted; and legal under California state law, which means local laws would be overturned were they prosecuted and successfully appealed. (Pollak once had a DA tell him, “Unless someone in the game is shooting heroin and the drug dealer comes to your house and there’s a shootout, there’s not a cop or court in the land that has time for your bullshit.”). However, a home game is illegal in any jurisdiction if it’s a “controlled game,” requiring municipal or state licenses. And the difference is the presence of something called “the rake.”

“Raking the pot” is where the house takes a fixed percentage of the winnings, presumably in exchange for expediting the hotel suite, tables, dealers, refreshments and any other amenities required by the players. Which is why the lawsuit is focused on $473,200 in 19 separate checks, ranging from $700 to low six figures, which Ruderman made out to the unlikely name “Molly Bloom” – apparently not a character in James Joyce’s Ulysses, but rather the 33-year-old sister of Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver and former Olympic skier Jeremy Bloom. Miss Bloom is an “event planner” who used Ruderman’s half million dollars to take care of things like chips and peanuts, as well as the decidedly more exotic-sounding “massage girls.” (For the record, massage girls are common in high-end casino environments, often administering rubdowns right at the table, and are generally separate from prostitutes and their many florid varieties.)

Molly “The Poker Madam” Bloom

Labeled a “poker madam,” “sexy Manhattan poker princess” and a “stunning brunette” in the tabloids,” Bloom’s tale took a particularly lurid turn in June when it was reported that, after relocating to Manhattan in 2009 and organizing similar games for the financial community, two reputed Russian mobsters had “pushed her around a little bit.” More recently, Star Magazine reports that Alex Rodriguez, celebrated third basemen for the New York Yankees, played in at least two games in 2009 organized by Bloom – one in Miami, one at the L.A. home of record mogul Cody Leibel (one of those being sued), and both of which ended with players refusing to cover their substantial losses. A-Rod may face disciplinary actions stemming from these allegations, with further revelations almost certain to come. In legal documents, Bloom claims she “acted for the benefit of third parties,” transferred “a large percentage of such transfers to those third parties” and “served as a mere conduit for funds.”

“Trustees have in the past filed actions against casinos to get money that was used to cover markers,” says attorney Howard Ehrenberg, defending his legal strategy. “Under bankruptcy law, if the recipient of the money had no knowledge of where the money came from, than that can be a defense against having to return it. But in this case, because the game was illegal under California law, the recipients are not able to use the good faith defense. That’s the key distinction… It was not a friendly game – it was a game where the organizer was being compensated for running the game.”

Ehrenberg accepts Maguire’s argument that losses might offset his liability, but only if the money was paid directly to Capital Partners and not to Ruderman himself (as seems to be the case). He claims he tried to handle the matter discreetly and without publicity, but was rebuffed by counsel.

“She got tips for providing services contingent to a poker game,” says Richards, Bloom’s attorney. (He also represents Chuck Pacheco and Cassavetes) “That’s what an event planner does. It’s not an illegal game. At the time, Brad Ruderman was a well-respected hedge fund manager. There has never been a prosecution of the players in a home game, rake or not. And I could not find one against an operator. It’s very rare. By the way, the statute of limitations has long run out.”
Among the close-knit poker community, sentiment understandably runs strongly in favor of the players.
“You charge everyone $200 when they first come in, then the winners have an option to tip whoever the girl was that called the players to put the game together,” says Mike Sexton, who has played in that game. “They don’t rake the pots. If you want to tip the girl at the end when you win, then that’s what happens. To say it’s an underground casino and all that is nonsense.”

In fact, you would have a hard time finding serious poker players who even consider it a form of gambling.
“If poker was gambling, there wouldn’t be successful professional poker players,” says Lurie in a frequently expressed opinion. “It is absolutely a high-skill-level game.”

Nor do they readily accept the Vegas argument. Dan Sverdlin, a talent manager and poker semi-pro in his mid-fifties, says, “There’s been cases where guys have burglarized casinos, or they burglarize liquor stores, and then they drop the money back in the casinos ten minutes later. No one has ever gone after the money in a game before. They would have to be setting a precedent here.”

This is complicated by the fact that many of the alleged recipients of the tarnished funds are famous. “Tobey Maguire, Ben Affleck, Leo DiCaprio – these guys can’t go to a public casino setting and just sit down and play like a normal person,” says Sexton. “They are besieged by autograph and photograph hunters. Everybody would know their business; they’d be tweeting [actual hands] all over the place. These guys have to play in home games.”

And then there’s the Zen defense, best articulated by Pollak: “If I’m representing Tobey, I’d say, ‘Give me every single transaction that you lost in the six months after you received money from this dickhead. Let me show that those same funds went elsewhere.’ That’s the ebb and flow of poker.”

“Unless they’re keeping track of every single hand, which I doubt,” adds Joe Stapleton, host of the canceled Fox series The Big Game, “I don’t know where they’re getting their information. If Tobey Maguire wins $100,000 off Mr. Ponzi, he could realistically give $75,000 of it back to him on the next hand. Or to someone else at the table – the very same night, in the very same game. You’d be hard-pressed, having sat there for six hours, to then go back to try and piece together how much money was traded.”

One of the enduring questions surrounding this legal showdown is how a con man and common criminal could have gained access to the rarefied elite of Hollywood players. “This guy obviously was vouched for by somebody,” says Sexton. “Generally in house games, when someone brings someone to a game, they stand good for the guy, which means they gotta pay the losses if he doesn’t pay them. That’s generally the way it works.” Why wouldn’t a small community with something to lose – money or access – have exercised more due diligence?

The answer, says someone who has played in the game but refuses to be identified, is less complex than you might think. In fact, they say, that may be the whole point.

“In 2006, this game was created by a financier,” says the source that has not only played in the game since its inception, but also claims to have routinely staked in a name professional player. “The game was created at the Viper Room to blow up high-end L.A. citizens. But the reality is that there are a few L.A. citizens that can actually play Hold ‘Em. Affleck is not my friend, but he’s a good fucking player [as is Tobey]. They have a lot more money than me to toss around – at least they do now… It was a serious game. It wasn’t ever opulent; it was well maintained. There were ladies giving massages; there was always whatever you wanted; there was cocaine. Nobody fronted money [cash] – it wasn’t a money game. People wrote checks to each other.

“The first year was about boys who were in the mix. In 2007, it got to the point where it wasn’t just about the boys. There was a desire to have extraneous money that could be turfed. They wanted to bring boys in who could be trashed. They wanted to blow people up. These guys were trying to ruin money guys who were playing in this game – create some drama for themselves. That could only last for so long. There’s a secret senior money crew of people, four billionaires [who] are the guys who managed this game. I don’t know what the number was, but I know that it was so substantial that it was a primary consideration in their lives. [Soon] there were people showing up at that game – this was 2008 – who fucked the whole thing up by writing checks that were too big. It got too high-profile.

“I met Ruderman at the game,” says the source. “Met him – I never played with him. ‘Blah blah blah blah… I’m the man… blah blah blah.’ If your check clears, it’s easy to get into that game. They want someone who is going to be a hack.”

In the poker world, they have a name for this: Dead money. Money that is out on its feet; money that can’t distinguish between accident and agency, or a pristine watering hole and one where predators lay in wait.

“A lot of people don’t know this, but entire poker games are sometimes dealt around one guy,” says Stapleton, whose The Big Game (reconstituted online after the advent of Black Friday) takes this observation as its premise: A qualifying amateur is staked a hundred grand to face off against four pros as the designated target. “There’s a spot at the table, and you attack that spot. That’s what keeps the game going. You want that guy in to cannibalize and divide his money. Sometimes, a vouch might be, ‘Hey, this guy is dead money.’”

“Poker players certainly like to see drug dealers in games in Las Vegas because they don’t care where the money came from – they’re just happy to see a live one sitting at the table,” says Sexton. “Whether it’s Las Vegas, big-time tournaments, home games – the strong play the weak. You look for the limping gazelle.”

It doesn’t have to be as overt as what Stapleton calls “meta-gaming” – playing with such deep pockets that you’re virtually fearless. Nor do players need to physically gang up on a player and raise him out of a hand, just to chop up the pot between them later – a practice known as “whip-sawing” that, according to someone who has played with him, Cassavetes has outlawed in his own game. It can be as simple as what legendary Senior Poker Hall of Famer Robert “Chipburner” Turner calls “collusion,” an us-vs.-them mentality useful in separating the haves from the have-laters. And if you have any doubts that poker-lovers might sully their enthusiasm for the game by targeting the money, then go out to the Hustler Club in Gardena some night and watch Larry Flynt play for forty grand a hand against top poker professionals, and then wait till he rolls to the bathroom. The game stops cold.

The source names Bloom as the one who provided women and other amenities to lure high-rollers to the game. (“The guys I knew weren’t trying to get hooked up,” he says. “The guys who wanted to get hooked up with girls were the fall guys. We had girls.”) But counter to published reports, he identifies a man known only as Jeremiah as Molly’s employer and the true organizer of the events.

“Jeremiah is this host for that game,” he says. “He runs the full poker business in L.A., and no one has ever brought his name out. I don’t even know his last name: 5’9”, Mexican, bald head. He’s a huge Dodgers fan. Lovely guy, by the way. He ran the poker rooms with another guy, and they funded all of these fuckers. They were the credit line, because there was never ever cash fronted in those games. He was the collections. In fact, a big Chinese guy would show up at my house and be like, ‘Hey, can you write a check?’ So I wrote a check to Jeremiah and [his] people, and about a month later I get a call from the FBI. The FBI said, ‘This check went to buy twenty keys of cocaine.’

“The more interesting story is, my ex-girlfriend, who was the biggest hooker in the world – I actually enjoyed her being a hooker – she used to go down to this game in Newport Beach that was ten times bigger. The money they had there at that game was so criminal. I went down there once and she said, ‘You wanna take these guys’ money?’ I like to play cards, but I don’t play with people who are hit men, saying, ‘I’ll shoot you.’ These are not people I want to fuck with. And these were the guys that Tobey and the guys would get involved with. They got so aggressive trying to win money. They thought they were so above the game. I told my guy [a game backer], ‘I don’t want any part of the shit you guys are trying to pull off.’ That was the end of my relationship with them really. They all went nuts.”

He claims the games are still going on, and offered to get me a seat in a game at the Peninsula for a $100,000 buy-in. [He also recounted in excruciating detail an extremely bad beat where he lost $250,000 at the Four Seasons – he went down in flames with aces, the odds of which he calculates at 1.8% – and is convinced the game was fixed, but suggests the high-profile players don’t realize it. They’re there to bait the hook, and are convinced they’re really winning. He names Michael Bay, Charlie Sheen, Robert Downey, Jr., Brandon Davis, Megan Fox, Shannon Elizabeth, Mark Cuban and the late Steve Jobs as other household names who have played in the game, claims William Morris/Endeavor agents were frequent railbirds/looky-loos and says they once had to haul Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan out of the bathroom after he OD’ed on heroin.]

The name Jeremiah rang some bells in the poker community: Chipburner Turner says, “Last year there were a couple [of high-dollar games] out in Encino, and Jeremiah was the name that popped up running those games… Some of the press about [Tobey’s] game makes no sense at all. Just the handling of the books is a big headache unless you had a piece of the action.” And a high-end poker dealer says, “I can absolutely confirm that Jeremiah organizes games in L.A. The game I dealt was a large game – not as big as Tobey’s, but with some of the same people – and he organized and, as you say, financed the credit for it… To be more specific, what Jeremiah really does is guarantee that you’ll get paid if you win. If you ever once don’t pay, more than the threat of anything happening to you is the threat of never again being able to play in L.A. again.”

The dealer also identifies a large Malibu game as Jeremiah’s. He finds it highly unlikely that dealers would be cheating, since the Jeremiahs are getting their money off the top and there’s no way they would jeopardize the golden goose. Dan Sverdlin has played in that game, and often steers juicy money their way. “They’re a lot lower limit games than Tobey’s, but they have plenty of billionaires there who will play you heads-up for 60 grand. Rock bands, billionaire industrialists, everyone. They have a chef. The girls will show you their tits and rub your back, and I imagine that if you gave them enough money they’d do other things. They have a rake. They pay me a finder’s fee for sending someone up, and there’s a lot of money locked in a cabinet.”

But someone who once organized one of the A-list Hollywood games gives Bloom her due. “Molly was the queen of poker in L.A. before Jeremiah or I or anyone else had games,” he says. “She was around longer than all of us. The big game [Tobey’s game] was hers, not Jeremiah’s; he had his own games. And it started out as a no rake game, but eventually she monetized that game, and she was run out of town for raking pots without the players knowing, until someone figured it out. She was cutting out $300 on every pot, and demanding tips of ten percent of the winnings. I don’t know how she’s gotten out of this mess.” And before we feel too bad for Tobey Maguire, whose Spidey sense seems to have failed him, the former rival gamekeeper reports, “He won $4 million in a game last week. He hasn’t cooled down at all.”

When I called the number my source gave me, a man named Jeremiah answered and responded to my mention of poker and the lawsuit. When I identified myself as a journalist, he asked me to text message me my contact information, and hung up. Jeremiah never called.

Ronald Richards also confirmed the existence of Jeremiah, saying he was a competitor of Bloom’s and not involved with the game in question. “She would say she was in the same business as Jeremiah, though,” he says.

A poker room floor manager surveying a half-empty card room on a Saturday night at Hollywood Park Casino, where Maguire has played a number of times, tells me, “These high-end home games are definitely cutting into our action.” When asked whether such home games are guilty of raking the pot, he grows suddenly animated. “They’re cutting thousands a night,” he says. “Thousands!”

Boys will be boys. And with DiCaprio recently topping the Forbes list of highest-paid actors (with $77 million), and he and Maguire starring in an upcoming remake of The Great Gatsby, the classic Fitzgerald novel of Jazz Age wealth, abandon and the retroactive wages of sin, the tendency to blow off top-dollar steam while toeing the line of social propriety is not likely to stop any time soon. After all, one of the perennial rules of show business has to be: If you want to have good friends, they’re going to cost you.

“One of my bigger theories about poker,” says Stapleton, “and this may be especially true for Tobey, is that poker is a great way for dudes to hang out without really getting to know each other. You don’t really find out what people’s hopes and dreams are, and you don’t really get attached. I mean, you’re buddies and you’re chummy, but Tobey is a super private dude, from what I understand. He doesn’t give interviews, even though people think it’s a big deal when a huge star plays in a tournament. I think for him, it’s a social thing where he doesn’t have to let people in.”

In the mountains of Guanajuato, Mexico sits a picturesque community favored by artists and tourists. But for American-born Jayne Valseca and her husband Eduardo, son of a legendary Mexican newspaper publisher, it became a hell on earth when Eduardo was ambushed by strangers and kidnapped in the summer of 2007.

Jayne knew that in Mexico kidnapping was a pervasive and lucrative business-a burgeoning criminal industry with few happy endings. This time the merchandise was her husband. Sealed in a dark seven-by-six, two-feet-wide box, Eduardo lived for seven months on little more than eggshells and chicken bones. He was subjected to the most cruel and humiliating mental and physical torture imaginable. He had no reason to believe he’d ever be found alive. As the ransom escalated, so did the stakes. But Jayne refused to be a pawn in the kidnappers’ sick game. She decided to become a player. If she was to get her husband back alive, she’d have to be more cunning than the kidnappers and be cool, calculated and determined…

Purchase book HERE

Media Schedule:

We Have Your Husband: One Woman’s Terrifying Story of a Kidnapping in Mexico
By Jayne Garcia Valseca with Mark Ebner
Berkley May 3, 2011

May 9, Monday
“Lanigan & Malone” 9:10AM EDT WMJI-FM 105.7 Cleveland, OH Live
Host-John Lanigan & Jimmy Malone

May 17, Tuesday
“Mancow Muller Show” 7:00AM EDT Nationally Syndicated: Live
Host-Erich Muller 32 stations, various times http://mancow.com/stationfinder

“Culture Shocks” 1:00PM EDT Nationally Syn: various Live
Host-Barry Lynn times and stations

“Afternoon Heartscape” 12-12:30PM EDT WQBQ-1410AM Orlando & Live
Host-Michelle Wargo Daytona, FL

May 18, Wednesday
“TODAY” 8-9:00AM EDT NBC National TV Broadcast Live

May 19, Thursday
“FOX & Friends” 7:50AM EDT FNC National TV Cable Live

May 20, Friday
CNN Feature Piece 10:00AM EDT CNN National & International Tape

Rafael Romo will interview you on this day-Air Date TBD

June 14, Tuesday
People en Espanol Feature Story Nationally Dist Magazine