Lenny
Charlotte County, Florida - May 2012
I believe this is the appropriate time to discuss Lenny, an ambitious Jewish man from New York who took a liking to me early in my live poker adventures. He was in his late 60s, seemingly wealthy from his flaunting of money, but lived in a shady part of town. He was a hell of a needler and a slowroller, and in my first homegames he was capable of putting a the whole table on complete tilt. He was a complete ******* and would make things personal in public inappropriately with people he did not agree with. All this aside, he might have been the worst 2-5 NL player I have ever encountered in my life. Before I went to any cardroom or casino in Florida, I was a victim of the "poker clubs" that existed in the area and were popular in the late 2000s and early 2010s. It just so happened that my neighbor, a retired Vietnam Vet, was a dealer who work completely off tips at a shady bar about 10 miles south of town. I never knew if these things were legal, nor did I care, but it was really the first time I played tournament style poker live. The dealers were hired by the owner, who charged the venues, usually bars, for each table they set up. The idea was the players would "tip" the dealers for the chips, and also buy food and drinks, making the table fee worth it for the venue. It was called free poker but it had the worst rake in the world considering you couldn't win a dollar until they had their quarterly tournament. This is where players who accumulated wins at the daily tournaments got chips to win gift cards. You didn't have to play to get chips at the tournament. This club attracted the retired crowd who liked to have a few drinks and dinner and play poker every day, and in the shadier venues it attracted some of the worst donkey drunks the state of Florida has ever seen. I managed to get first or second in 4 of these tournaments and was not a well liked person because of this - I was just a younger guy who raised too much.
Lenny somehow managed to take over the league in our area, and he apparently saw a lot of potential the other owners didn't in the value of the league. He decided he should sell "shares" of the company to his "business colleagues". The people involved were players in the league, many of whom were unemployed due to the recession (the sale was around winter 2011), and who had no idea how to run a business. The shares sold for around $600 each, and Tim had picked up a few of these as he had been a dealer in the game and had interest in seeing it grow. Over the next six months, Tim grew tired of the league and its 19 owners figuring out how to get rich quick, and he staged a "coup" in the league. Lenny was very condescending to Tim and he had enough of it. He found a base of 30 players or so who he knew would join his new poker league if he left Lenny, and talked to a few of the business who hosted the league on key nights. With a few other dealers, he went into his venue that previously belonged to Lenny, started games, then made a phone call. He told Lenny that a new league had taken over the venue and he should get over there right away. Lenny rushed over thinking some league from another area of the state had taken over, and came walking fast through the doors looking like he was going to tear someone's face off. As he walked into the room, he saw that Tim had clearly taken over the venue and started screaming at him, to which Tim stood up and chased him out of the bar, genuinely ready to throw down with a 70 year old man.
This league flourished and this is how Tim made a living from 2012 until the home game started. He seemed to know what the customer wanted and was pulling in decent money considering the economy was in the dumpster. He had broken off completely from Lenny's league and had become completely free of them. Well, everything but one asset - he still owned three shares of the company and needed money, so he wanted to sell out.
"Call Lenny and ask about the shares, if there are any still available. If so, ask him what they are going for." Tim's idea was that if he could find a prospective buyer, Lenny would offer a going price and that would be a benchmark for their value. The fact that Tim thought he was getting any money back was hilarious to me. I did it more out of curiosity than anything else, and there was also someone else's shares on the line - Fat John. FJ was about 6'2, 530 pounds and made Tim look like a dwarf in size. He had once taken a ride in my car and I had to hold onto the steering wheel with both hands to keep it from tracking off into a ditch. My cupholder was also rendered useless during this drive as his fat rolls had consumed the center console and my soda had disappeared underneath him. He was their website creator and had probably done more work for them than anyone else.
They offered me 20% of what they got back from their shares, so I figured I would give Lenny a call the next day. He didn't answer the phone right away, but called right back after I left a message about my curiosity in the shares.
"Hello Liam, I haven't seen you in a while, you didn't turn on me and start working with Timmy boy did you?"
"No, I have been focusing on cash games and Omaha, free poker isn't really my thing." I realized that wasn't a way to start off a conversation to buy shares of a free poker league, but wanted to distance myself from Tim in this particular conversation.
"Well you'd have to be around for all of the major events, and come play once in a while. It is good to keep the tables running thanks to our competition. You know we want to make this a statewide thing, even a national league. I even have clearance from the DEA on this, we have their support." The last part made no sense to me other than it being a snake oil pitch. What does the DEA have to do with a free poker league? They don't even have jurisdiction over gambling. I did know, however, that Lenny did have a legitimate connection with the DEA back in New York, and no one understood why or how, it just existed. I nodded and played along and asked him how much six shares were.
"You know you should have gotten in at our inception. Back then, we all bought shares at $500 and are already seeing returns. Right now, for six shares we could sell them all for $5000. I can get the paperwork ready if you are interested." While responding to Lenny that I would have to see the paperwork and get back to him, eventually hanging up the phone, I was set back from yet another experience of "rich boy" syndrome. I am not sure this comes from the way I talk or present myself, or that no one knew what my real job was, but there has always been this implication from other people in Florida that I must be independently wealthy. This happened to me at Fort Harrison in Clearwater where I was given a full tour of the hotel and asked to donate money. Also, at my job as a nursery manager in Miami, it was rumored I did it for fun. Yeah, I potted up begonias in a shed with a bunch of retired Cubans for fun when I don't even speak Spanish......
I fed all this information to Tim, at the time we were good personal friends and I felt a part of me in him as he had left Chicago just nine months before to pursue a new life in Florida with an entrepreneurial spirit. There was something about Lenny and his investors that just didn't sit right - they were terrible players and their choice for investments wasn't much better. I have no idea where the valuation of the league came from, but the whole thing couldn't have made more than $30k a year. During this time I would head down to Port Charlotte to play a small buy-in, deep stack tournament at the Elk's lodge. It brought in over 100 players on a Sunday in season, and it was a prime place to recruit new players for a "free" poker league. As I walked in, Lenny and his groupies were surrounded, talking to the retired crowd to lube them up for his league. This was 2012 and I was still relatively new to the live scene and just sat down in my seat which thankfully had a few players I knew and were friendly. The tournament was still a few minutes from starting, and as I got up to have a cigarette, I had Lenny and four of his owners in my face.
"You betrayed me son, that info you gave to Tim now started a lawsuit with the league. I'm going to sue you for defamation of character." This actually made me smile as it sounded so ridiculous. I allowed all five of them to go off on me and let the burn set in that they were a bunch of scam artists, selling a piece of paper for something it wasn't worth. I came to their town to play in their game, what was I expecting? After Lenny and his second in charge Marie were telling me how bad of a businessman I was, I began to suggest to the whole crowd that had formed how the league was structured and that Lenny should explain his business model. I figured rationality was the answer, and people would come to the conclusion that they were getting screwed either as a shareholder or as a player. I overestimated the intelligence of my crowd. I had pissed off an entire room of baby boomers who had retired to Southwest Florida, never had to think critically for themselves, and just wanted a good time whether they were getting swindled or not. I had to sit there and play among these people who thought I was an evil person when all I was trying to do was expose Lenny as a fraud. It was clear they hated me. HATED me for who I represented to their community. I was a 30 year old kid trying to give them the truth. If there is one thing I have learned from the baby boomer generation is they have no respect for any younger generation.
I let Tim and John know what happened, and it appeared to help them in mediation, as some of the owners decided to turn their backs on Lenny and they managed to get their money back and I didn't even take a cut because they were both hurting at the time - John didn't even have his AC working and was unemployed, I couldn't imagine what that would be like for a man of his size. What I did do was find out who Lenny was - his work, DEA connection, children, et cetera. So little was known about it, I figured something had to be rotten in his past. Many people who come to Florida run from their past to start anew, Lenny was no exception. It turned out he and his wife had two kids who they hadn't seen in 15 years. It was very odd considering they gave the appearance of a well off couple from New York that just retired to the area. Another result that shocked me was his rap sheet. Dating back to his New York years, he had been accused but not convicted of counts of tax evasion, embezzlement, and in Florida various counts of sexual harassment, basically everything but rape. Most of these cases were still open in Florida. I even managed to track down one of the victims in the case, a previous dealer of his that had a civil suit against him. He apparently told her he would pay a large sum of money to have sex with her, and it would be the only way she would get the job. When she turned him down, he got violent and this is where he caught with one of the more serious harassment charges. To add to all of this, he had written a book around 2007 that was an autobiography with terrible reviews. I have no idea what it was about, but the first useful review was by one of his children, and it said to never trust Lenny, that he had swindled his own son and basically had to leave New York because of his reputation.
I came up with an idea, and ordered 10 of his book off Amazon and printed out his son's review and his harassment charges that were still pending. At the next Elk's lodge tournament, I showed up really early with Tim and John and we dropped the books on the empty tables so there was one book for each table to look at with the printouts tucked in. We had waited for him to show up but once the tournament had started and he was a no show, we decided to leave after seeing the shocked faces at the tables. Two days later I got the nastiest voicemail in my life, threatening to sue me again and that if I didn't somehow fix this that he was going to kill me. Tim and John apparently got similar phone calls, but unexpectedly two weeks later Lenny was found dead at his house from an apparent heart attack and he had complained of chest pain. That's at least what his wife told the police and first responders. I wouldn't have been shocked if she had poisoned him slowly or somehow snuffed him out in his sleep.
The memorial held for him did not have a good turnout considering all of the friends he had made in Florida. I don't usually disrespect the dead, but Lenny was of a special caliber that did not deserve any respect. His name is still spoken around poker circles in the area, but never in a positive manner. Tim's league eventually shut out Lenny's old league and their shares were worth nothing as they started to turn on one another. A year later I saw one of them working at a local Wal-Mart as a cashier - he had to come out of retirement because of the amount of money he lost to Lenny's investment opportunities. That was a bad beat.
