Ben Mezrich - Straight Flush: The True Story of Six College Friends Who Dealt Their Way to a Billion-Dollar Online Poker Empire--and How It All Came Crashing Down . . .

For my dad, who inspired me to follow my dreams, and for Arya and Asher, who make me smile every single day

Straight Flush is a dramatic narrative account based on multiple interviews, numerous sources, and thousands of pages of court documents. In some places, details of settings and descriptions have been changed to protect identities, and certain names, characterizations, and descriptions have been altered to protect privacy. In some instances I employ the technique of re-created dialogue, based on the recollections of interviewees, especially in scenes taking place more than a decade ago.

CONTENTS

DECEMBER 19, 2011

JUAN SANTAMARA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, SAN JOS, COSTA RICA

T en minutes before 5 A.M., a gray-on-gray sky was pregnant with the remnants of a passing storm, a thick canopy of clouds marred by occasional daggers of tropical blue and orangeand suddenly seven years disintegrated in a flash of reflected sunlight across the spinning glass of a revolving door.

Brent Beckley stepped through the threshold of the Central American countrys main airport and into the poorly air-conditioned terminal. A little over six feet tall, with boyish features, a square jaw, and blondish-brown hair cut short over a wide, boxy forehead, Brent was moving fast, his five-hundred-dollar Italian-leather shoes clicking against the shiny linoleum floor. He was wearing a conservative dark blue suit with matching tie; there was a briefcase in his right hand and a heavy winter coat thrown over his left shoulder. Anyone looking his way might have assumed he was just another young, eager expat businessman on his way to an important meeting up north; business-clad Americans strolling through Santamara International were a common sight, symbolic of the expat community that had grown exponentially in the near decade since Brent had first arrived in the tropical country.

But the truth was, Brent Beckley was not on his way to a business meeting. In fact, he was quite possibly on his way to a jail cell. And the journey from where hed started to where he was going was anything but common. He looked calm, cool, collectedshoulders back, head upbut on the inside he was terrified. He could feel the sweat running down the skin above his spine, and it required all his willpower to keep his knees from buckling, his body moving forward.

Ten feet from the blue-rope labyrinth that led through to Immigration and Security, Brent spotted a man strolling determinedly toward him and slowed his gait. At first glance, the man didnt look like a spy: thin, angular, with narrow cheeks, a sharp triangular nose, long legs lost in the folds of khaki pants, spindly arms jutting out past the cuffs of a white button-down shirt. The man was smiling, having recognized Brent immediately, though the two had never met. Brent tried to smile back, but the fear was playing havoc with the neurons that controlled the muscles of his face.

Brent was barely thirty years old, a small-town kid from backwoods Montana, a former frat boy whod spent most of his adult life working for what he considered to be an Internet company; hed certainly never expected to find himself rendezvousing in a tropical airport with a smiling spy.

Then again, the man wasnt necessarily a spy. From what Brent remembered from the letter hed received the week before, detailing how the meeting would go down, the mans official title was some sort of liaison with the U.S. State Department, based out of the embassy in San Jos. And up close, even despite the sharp contours of his face, he looked much more like a kindly accountant than a menacing secret operative.

But if Brent had learned anything over the past seven years, it was that there were very few things in life that were actually black or white; most things tended to be a mix of both.

Good morning, Mr. Beckley, the man said as he intercepted Brent a few feet from the entrance to the maze of blue rope. My name is David Foster. Its nice to meet you.

Brent shook the mans hand, trying to think of a response. When none was forthcoming, Foster extended his other hand, offering two documents. The first was instantly familiar: Brents U.S. passportthe same passport he had turned over to the State Department three days earlier. Glancing at the document, Brent felt his mouth go dry. He could see, even without looking closely, that someone had punched three holes through the center of the cover. Each dark circle tore at the pit of Brents stomach. There was something so permanent and real about the sight of that passport; its mutilation seemed like such a malevolent and unnecessary act.

A week earlier, when Brent had first made the decision to turn himself in, the U.S. Embassy had requested a copy of his passport. Brent had been happy to accommodate, offering them the original document so they could copy it themselves; they had promptly confiscated it. Now he could see the result.

It seemed to be just another step in a deceptive game. Brent had already agreed to surrender, and he was in the process of moving his family to the United Statesyet even that wasnt good enough.

Foster appeared to read Brents thoughts and quickly shifted the invalidated passport to the side, revealing the second document in his hand: a thin, similar-looking passport, this one with its cover still intact. Brent took both documents from the man, inspecting the second, smaller bookletand saw that it was dated for a single days use. Brent was still free to travel like any other American citizen for the next twenty-four hours.

There was a moment of awkward silence, and then Brent finally shrugged, shoving the two passports into his suit pocket.

What now? he asked.

Fosters expression turned soft, and he jerked his head toward the blue ropes behind him.

Weve got an hour to kill before your flight. You want to get a cup of coffee?

It wasnt quite what Brent had expectedbut again, none of this could have been anticipated. He nodded and followed the thin man toward Immigration.

It was the fastest Brent had ever moved through the Costa Rican airport; usually, security took forever, especially for young Americans like him. In Brents experience, some of the native immigration officers seemed to take a special pleasure in hassling young American men traveling to and from the States. Brent assumed it had to do with the massive inequities between the two cultures; to the average Costa Rican, Americans were rich, entitled, and usually obnoxious. From what Brent had seen of the mobs of northerners who kept the local tourist economy aliveusually large groups of men who spent mornings splayed out across the pristine beaches like bleating, bloated, bleached, and beached marine animals, and evenings carousing through the legal brothels that put red-light districts around the world to shamewell, maybe the immigration officers werent that far off. At the moment, Brent could only marvel as he was towed through Immigration and Security at a near-Olympic pace; Foster seemed to know everyone who worked at the airport, and even more helpful, the mans Spanish was impeccable. He spoke like a nativethough from what Brent could piece together, it appeared that Costa Rica was just one stop on a colorful, government-sponsored road trip that had extended from a military academy in Virginia, through a five-year stint in Iraq, to a half dozen embassies across South and Central America. Even if Foster wasnt a spy, hed certainly lived like one. Yet by the time Brent lowered himself onto a stool in a quiet corner of a dingy coffee shopjust beyond the last security checkpoint before the waiting area for Continental Airlines, the carrier that would take him out of his adopted home, possibly foreverhe felt as comfortable with the man as one could possibly be, under the circumstances. Foster wasnt a bad guy, and he wasnt the enemy. He just worked for them.