Houston Curtis - The Billion Dollar Hollywood Heist: The A-List Kingpin and the Poker Ring that Brought Down Tinseltown

Copyright 2020 by Houston Curtis and Dylan Howard

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Jacket design by 5mediadesign Front jacket photos credit: BigStockPhoto Back jacket photos courtesy of the author

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-5507-9 Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-6217-6

Printed in the United States of America

To all those who stood by me in the dark as well as the light. You know who you are.

A powerful man like Bradley Ruderman rarely answered his office phone. But on this occasion, the multimillionaire hedge fund manager picked up. Just as well. When the caller identified himself, Ruderman was taken aback. It was Tobey Maguire. The Tobey Maguire.

Ruderman was used to mixing with the rich and influential; his hedge fund managed millions of dollars of other peoples money from offices in Beverly Hills. This, though, was different. Maguire was Hollywood A-list. And there was more. An intriguing invitation, extended to him: He said, Hey, we have this game... Would you like to play?

Spider-Man was asking him round to his house to play poker.

Now, for the first time, this book can reveal exclusively the exact details of how Rudermanwho served time in a Texas prison after being convicted of embezzling $25 million from his investorswas drawn into a clandestine world of high-stakes illegal poker games, a secret society that included Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Leonardo DiCaprio as some of its most noted alumni.

It was a story that was to end in multimillion-dollar fraud, jail, and violence. One that has no heroes, but plenty of victims. Today Rudermana mini-Madoffhas every reason to bitterly regret taking the call that fateful day in 2006. But Maguire will almost certainly wish he never made it.

Rudermans tale was documented in a 206-page deposition that was conducted on March 29 at Taft Community Correctional Facility in Kern County, California. As one of the foremost investigative journalists in Hollywood, I exclusively obtained the transcript of that interrogation. Using Rudermans words, I was able to tell the full story of Hollywoods high-roller card sharks for the first time.

His videotaped testimony, on oath and under the penalty of perjury, tells the explosive tale of his fall from grace, beginning in 2006 when he was still chief executive of Ruderman Capital Partners.

It was not, however, Maguires call that began the sad case of a man corrupted by the twinkling lights of fame and danger. That came a few weeks earlier, after Ruderman was walking along the pristine Pacific Ocean coastline in Malibu.

Ruderman, then in his early forties, was strolling on Carbon Beachthe star-studded enclave of the rich and famouswhen he bumped into a friend who was at a barbecue on the sand. It was no ordinary family barbecue. The host was Rick Salomon, otherwise known as Paris Hiltons infamous sex-tape partner.

At the party, Ruderman got talking to a beautiful brunette. She was thirty-three-year-old Molly Bloom, the sister of two-time Olympic skier and Philadelphia Eagles player Jeremy Bloom.

She asked me if I would be interested in playing in a game that they were coincidentally having the following night at that house, Ruderman told lawyers in the deposition, and she asked if I would be interested in participating, and I said, sure.

Ruderman needed little convincing. She just told me it was a traditional Texas Holdem game... that if I enjoyed gambling and enjoyed action that it would be worth my while to come. I figured, you know, why not? I have nothing else to do that night and I certainly love to gamble, and it was close and it made for an easy scenario.

He was in.

The call from Maguire, whom Ruderman had never previously met, confirmed the hedge fund managers place on the secret card circuit. Ruderman recalls in the deposition: He had mentioned that he knew that I had played in a prior game that Molly had organized, and asked if I liked it, and I said yes.

He says, well, thats good because we actually have a regular game that she organizes, he continued. Its not on the beach, its in town, and heres the facts about it and would I be interested, and I said yes. That game, it turned out, was at Maguires Los Angeles house that he shares with his wife, Jennifer, the daughter of Ronald Meyer, president and CEO of Universal Studios, and their two children, Ruby, 5, and three-year-old Otis.

Soon Ruderman was playing regularly, usually every other week. The routine became familiar to him. Bloom invited players by text, often mentioning when stars were expected. Ruderman said in his testimony: She [Molly] would include into your personal text message, Daves showing up, Tobeys showing.

Blooms games were strictly invitation-only, to venues such as the Four Seasons, the Peninsula, the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the world-famous Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard, a venue once owned by Johnny Depp. You had to be vetted by Bloom to get in. You had to have pedigree, said Ruderman.

By 2009, Ruderman told lawyers, he was well known on the circuit as someone who paid his debts. These were no ordinary games. Secret passwords were needed to play, and the door was sometimes manned by armed guards in bulletproof vests. Everything was laid on, even shoulder massages during games to relieve tension.

Ronald Richards, one of the lawyers questioning Ruderman in prison, noted: Molly built a service business for herself by bringing friendly, attractive girls to serve drinks, and she provided a stable location and staff to host a game.

Ruderman said the idea that attractive girls and drinks were the reason players showed up was wrong. The reason people show up at the game, in all due respect to Molly, is not Molly. Its the other players. Like Maguire and Co., the highest-wattage members of the circle.

But Bloom, it was said, could get whatever you needed. A source said illegal drugs would sometimes be part of the action. From whom, no one ever named. It was known to a handful of us that one player would keep two hookers down the hall of the hotel in another room, an insider said.

He would disappear for 30 minutes at a time, leaving the main players in the game frustrated. In reality, he was going to do blow [in a room with] two hookers. (There is no suggestion any of the people named in this story used drugs or hookers; indeed, this author has chosen not to name the individual identified by multiple sources.)

If the extras on offer were unusual, the stakes involved were mind-blowing. In fact, there was no financial limit in the secret, unlicensed Texas Holdem games. On one occasion, a player lost $300,000 in a night.