Gilbert Arenas has really gotta stay away from any card game that ain’t solitaire. The one-time Washington Wizards superstar, who tanked his basketball career in 2009 by bringing guns to a fistfight with a teammate over piddly gambling debts, has been arrested again, this time for his role in an allegedly off-the-books poker operation.
According to the Department of Justice, Arenas was one of several card players—including a man named Yevgeni Gershman, who the DOJ describes as a "suspected organized crime figure from Israel"—taken into custody in Los Angeles today for running a recurring high-stakes game of poker at a house he owned in Encino, Calif. Details in the DOJ's release give the impression that Arenas was essentially arrested for hosting grim men's evenings:
Gershman hired young women who, in exchange for tips, served drinks, provided massages, and offered companionship to the poker players. The women were charged a “tax” – a percentage of their earnings from working the games. Chefs, valets, and armed security guards also were hired to staff these illegal poker games.
Along with being the landlord, Arenas was portrayed by the feds as the organizer of the makeshift casino, which allegedly was in business from September 2021 to July 2022 and focused on a game of chance known as pot-limit Omaha. Arenas, who was identified as “a.k.a. ‘Agent Zero’” in a DOJ release trumpeting the busts, has been charged with conspiracy to operate an illegal gambling business, operating an illegal gambling business, and lying to investigators. At least six other people allegedly involved in the operation, none of them celebrities, were also arrested, and indicted for crimes ranging from gambling and immigration offenses to something the DOJ described as “conspiracy to commit marriage fraud.”
Again, this isn’t Arenas’s first rodeo with playing cards and trouble. He was arrested in 2010 after it got out that he’d brought a gym bag full of firearms into the Wizards' locker room while beefing over a card game called booray with teammate and future accused murderer Javaris Crittenton. Arenas refused to pay a related debt of what was reported to be “a few hundred dollars.” At the time, Arenas was in the middle of a six-year Wizards deal worth $111 million.
Arenas should be considered, of course, innocent until proven guilty in the Encino case, and lots about his arrest and the way DOJ trumpeted it is unseemly. One would think our nation’s top lawpersons have more important things to do than police poker and call a marriage fraudulent. Isn’t that Norman Chad’s job?
