DA’s ex-adviser denies poker club scam
Ogg’s former consultant: Gambling rooms created claims to force dismissal of charges
A former consultant to Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg denied he helped defraud a private Houston poker club of $250,000 in a scam to create a city ordinance regulating gambling establishments. Amir Mireskandari also said he did not direct representatives from Prime Social Poker Club to donate thousands of dollars to the political action committee he used to support Democratic candidates in the 2018 elections, as the club’s attorneys alleged in a July 17 news conference.
Mireskandari said he believes attorneys for Prime Social and a second private gambling room, Post Oak Poker Club, concocted the accusations to force Ogg to dismiss criminal charges against their clients.
Ogg did dismiss the charges two weeks ago, citing multiple conflicts of interest, including a former contract employee and political fundraiser, whom attorneys for the defendants identified as Mireskandari.
“I’ve lost more friends in the last four days, and become a persona non grata, for accusations where I believe they are completely false, fabricated, out of context,” Mireskandari said in an interview at his Tanglewood home on Friday.
Beginning in February or March 2018, Mireskandari said, he was paid $10,000 per month by private investigator Tim Wilson to draft a city ordinance that would benefit Prime Social and other game rooms. Prime Social had hired Wilson to provide security at the club, located on Westheimer.
The ordinance would have set parking, lighting and security requirements for clubs to improve safety, Mireskandari said. It also would have allowed the city to collect a licensing fee from clubs, which would benefit larger establishments such as Prime Social because they could more easily cover the added expense.
Mireskandari said he accepted
Wilson’s offer because it paid handsomely — $120,000 in total, he said — and believed he was wellsuited for the job because of his relationships with Democratic elected officials as a campaign donor and fundraiser. He said he planned to build relationships with city candidates and then pitch the ordinance after the municipal elections this fall. He said he never discussed the proposal with any current city elected official.
Mireskandari said he ceased working on the ordinance in November 2018 after an uncomfortable meeting with representatives from Prime Social over breakfast at the posh Post Oak Hotel. Three men from the poker club said they were dissatisfied with Wilson, Mireskandari recalled, and one grew angry about the lack of progress on the ordinance.
“He just lays it into me, to the point where I feel physically uncomfortable,” Mireskandari said. “I get up and say, ‘Guys, I don’t know y’all. Never met y’all. … I’m out of here.’”
Mireskandari said he believes Wilson, who he said acted as a middleman between him and Prime Social, may have made unrealistic promises to the poker club owners about what could be achieved.
Wilson did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
Mireskandari said he did not know Ogg’s office was investigating the clubs, as his work for Ogg did not involve consulting on specific criminal probes. If he had known, Mireskandari said, he would not have agreed to draft the ordinance.
Ogg’s office confirmed that aspect of Mireskandari’s account in a statement Monday, saying the “strictly confidential” cases were known only to the police officers and prosecutors working on them.
“Amir Mireskandari has never had access to any of our case files and had no knowledge of any investigative information,” Ogg spokesman Dane Schiller said.
Zachary Fertitta, a Prime Social attorney, said Mireskandari’s overall narrative not only contradicts that of his clients’, but also implies that Ogg’s dismissal of the cases was unwarranted.
“If we just concocted this story and she bit on it — he’s calling his friend that naïve? Really? That doesn’t hold water with me,” Fertitta said. “I don’t think Kim Ogg is that naïve or gullible, and I think she did the right thing.”
In a news conference the day after the charges were dismissed, Fertitta and other lawyers for Prime Social said Wilson, Mireskandari and another lawyer approached the club and asked for $250,000 to help get a gamblingrelated ordinance passed. Fertitta said his client would not have agreed to pay the fee had there not been “the legitimizing presence of a DA’s office representative,” referring to Mireskandari.
He also said Mireskandari directed his clients to make thousands of dollars in contributions to his political action committee, Texans for Fairness and Justice. Mireskandari denied that.
Chip Lewis, an attorney for defendants associated with Post Oak, said Mireskandari’s version of events obscures that he made a similarly ambitious pitch to both clubs, though Post Oak did not accept it.
“He wanted the same amount of money to utilize his relationships and contacts in law enforcement to secure one of the few permits/ licenses that would be issued by the city of Houston,” Lewis said. “When my guys told me about that, I explained that there can be no permit or license granted by any municipality to violate state law, and therefore it was my opinion that it’s bullshit.”
Both clubs were busted in a May 1 raid led by the district attorney’s office. Prosecutors charged nine owners or employees with felony counts of money laundering, engaging in organized criminal activity and gambling promotion.
At the time, Mireskandari had a contract with Ogg’s office to help pursue “complex financial and economic crimes.” Mireskandari, who was one of Ogg’s largest fundraisers in her successful 2016 campaign, joined her office in January 2017. He said he is passionate about white-collar crime because he was defrauded by business partners in the early 2010s.
Ogg’s office, in the Monday statement, said Mireskandari’s tasks as a consultant included organizing seminars for business and law enforcement officials on cybersecurity, analyzing caseloads and discussing a possible financial crimes hub with other law enforcement agencies.
Mireskandari said he stopped working for the county in May 2018, a date confirmed by Ogg’s office and county payment records. Mireskandari said he signed a new one-year contract with the county in February because he had hoped to return to consulting.
The poker room prosecutions collapsed on June 16, when Ogg dismissed all of the charges against the defendants and said the county would return more than $200,000 in gambling proceeds police seized in the raids, citing multiple conflicts of interest and saying she was referring the matter to the FBI. She also canceled the county’s contract with Mireskandari.
“When defense attorneys representing the poker room owners and operators indicated they intended to utilize alleged interactions with Mireskandari to bolster their defensive theory of the case,” said Schiller, of Ogg’s office, “we turned the matter over to the FBI to avoid any possible conflict of interest, or even any appearance of a conflict of interest. This procedure of referring the case to federal authorities was the proper course of action in a situation of this nature.”