WHEN THE POKER WAS WILD IN NY NYC
Inside the celeb boom & cop busts of swankiest hush-hush cards clubs
IT is 10 p.m. on a Tuesday and I am about to do something illegal. Standing in a closet-sized room with locked doors on either side, I raise my arms and get a pat-down from a muscled-up guy who calls himself Big Reggie. Satisfied there are no weapons on my person, he gets me buzzed into a room with a wall of windows covered in sheets.
Flat-screens show baseball and soccer, but nobody’s here to watch TV. Two poker tables are surrounded by male gamblers. Small talk and the clattering of chips resonate around the room.
I buy in for $200 and receive two stacks of $5 chips, and a Britishaccented dealer welcomes me to the game. Affable as he is, poker in these places is never really all that friendly. I size up the other players and am grateful the guy to my right bets like a maniac. I hope to get a decent hand before he goes bust. Cards are in the air, and I feel right at home.
For some, underground poker clubs are as much a part of the city’s fabric as Greek diners and corner bars. They carry a mix of louche glamour and potential profit. Long before movies like “Rounders,” celeb-studded World Series of Poker telecasts and memoirs such as “Molly’s Game” (which gains speed with Tobey Maguire in action — and ends with “Poker Princess” Molly Bloom, who ran the high-stakes games in LA and NYC, in handcuffs), there was discreet gambling in unassuming places.
According to veteran player Mickey Appleman, high-stakes games of gin and poker ran on parallel tracks in the 1970s. That was when a Lower East Side kid named Stu Ungar — who’d become a poker superstar, die in a flea-bag Vegas motel, and be played by Michael Imperioli in a trashy biopic called “High Roller” — tore up the gin action.
UNGAR decamped for Las Vegas in the late 1970s while underground poker clubs continued to thrive. Bookies, businessmen, numbers runners, drug dealers and professional gamblers all rubbed shoulders in the socalled goulash joints — or “ghoulies” to old-timers. “Called that,” says Johnny M., a Brooklyn native and lifelong hustler who declined to give his last name, “because they originally served goulash and were run by Eastern Europeans. Games were so good and so much cash got splashed that dealers made $100,000 a year.”
The games were pretty good for knock-around regulars as well. As related by Johnny, he and his crew preyed on tourists and squares. “We played because we liked playing, always being in action, always having cash — and we cheated when we could,” he remembers. “There was collusion. To pull it off, we spoke in a code — ‘funny’ meant four, ‘nice’ was nine, ‘very’ was three of a kind: ‘ This is a very nice guy here’ meant that you held three nines — and the suckers had no idea what we were saying to each other.”
At one Manhattan joint called Louie Greco — a back-room spot with a few tables and dealers who fixed the decks — “there was a poker game that ran for a month and a half, nonstop, with different guys, all seeming like Damon Runyon characters, popping in and out of it.”
The party began winding down in the years after legal gambling came to New Jersey in 1974. “Atlantic City put a kibosh on our games,” says Johnny. “AC took everybody’s money.”
Plus, a fresh breed of New York poker room would soon evolve out of the backgammon scene at The Mayfair Club, which long stood as a semiprivate gaming spot on a low floor of the Gramercy Park Hotel. “We considered the guys who played there to be scumbag people. They were all percentage guys.”
By that, he means they were into figuring out the mathematics behind the games they gambled at rather than cheating and playing by the seats of their pants.
The Mayfair was a tatty club where some of the brainiest players in New York gathered to play bridge and backgammon for serious money. In the early ’80s they began playing poker, using the backgammon checkers as chips. Some of the most talented players of the last few decades got their starts there.
“The guy who made the game was somebody we called Phil the Rabbi,” says Erik Seidel, who has made $29 million in tournament poker winnings. “He worked as a financier, had a lot of money and was very emotional. When he lost, he went crazy [dropping increasingly large sums of cash]. He made the game playable.”
In 1988, the Mayfair moved to a larger, subterranean space on East 25th Street, where “Rounders” writer Brian Koppelman saw guys like Joel Bagels, who would inspire John Turturro’s character, Joey Knish, in the 1998 movie.
OVER a wild four-year period, from 2003 until 2007, the New York scene blew up. Poker clubs would occupy sprawling loft spaces with 15 or more felt-topped tables. They were supposed to be secret, yet they had evocative names: Play Station, Straddle, Diamond Club, and the Aquarium.
Clubs were getting written up in newspapers, and celebrities were spotted at tables. But nobody seemed to care.
“People looked at poker as something very innocuous,” says Appleman. Things were loose enough that The Post reported on Alex Rodriguez hanging out in a Union Square club — sitting alongside poker pro Phil Hellmuth — just hours after the Yankees beat the Orioles.
Money was being scooped at all levels. Appleman remembers nights when players experienced $60,000 swings. Because poker had gotten so big and so trendy, there were loads of inept neophytes. Some of them helped a struggling new-to-the-city publicist, who declined to be named,
make rent in Manhattan. Plus it was a hell of a lot of fun.
“The atmosphere at a place called Genoa was raucous,” remembers Jamie Weinstein, who works in finance and now lives in Connecticut. Recounting the spot that doubled as an Italian social club on Houston Street, he adds, “The owner showed hard-core porn on TV, the players were loose and there was an excellent marinara on the menu.”
At another place, the Fairview, he boasts, “It was so easy to win that if you needed money, you went there for an hour and returned home with $300.”
Back then, police found it easy to overlook poker clubs. But the operators became so bold that by 2006, busts increased. In one in-
stance, Weinstein remembers, a club owner contacted players in the wake of a raid and agreed to pay them back for the chips they had on the table. (Cash, with which players bought chips, had been confiscated).
That not only shows a degree of professionalism, but it also displays how much money was being made. (Poker-club owners profit by extracting a percentage of money out of each pot or by charging hourly rates.)
“With a couple people running a small club, you earned north of 100 grand each,” says Weinstein, acknowledging that some of those owners had to kick money back to the mob.
“It was published that Play Station” — one of the larger clubs — “made over $1 million per year.”
Most players were able to toler-
ate the occasional raid as a cost of doing business. Way scarier were the hijackings that came next.
“Genoa got robbed, and that place was clearly owned by the Mafia. It was scary that people weren’t concerned about robbing a mob-owned place,” says one regular who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
THE scene reached its nadir in November 2007, when a club on Fifth Avenue and 28th Street was held up by armed robbers in ski masks. Players watched helplessly as the thugs beat a cashier and stole all their money. Things would have gone smoothly — and remained unreported — if one of the nervous thieves had not dropped his gun. It went off, fatally wounding a 55year-old math teacher from New Jersey. Nearly three years later, two men were found guilty of murder in the botched heist.
The accidental shooting dimin-ished player turnout.
Poker-club owners also took notice. They cut down on thehe likelihood of their games being robbed by making the clubs smaller and less public. That way, they’d have less money on hand for thieves to grab. So while New York remains dotted with poker-playing spots, mostt of them are not unlike the mod-estly sized, Garment Districtt place where I wound up beingg relieved of 50 bucks over the course of a couple up-and-down hours.
But where illicit gambling iss concerned, Appleman opines, you really never know what will happen or where it will go. “New places are always opening, andd old ones are always closing,” hee says. “Guys are always seizing op-portunities.”