Tobey Maguire (Michael Vu, PacificCoastNews.com)
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In Molly’s game, she stacked the deck with Hollywood kings.
It was the late 2000s in LA, and Molly’s was the exclusive world of high-stakes poker for A-list celebrities and men with money. Carefully selected groups of eight gathered at night at the beach homes of the filthy rich and at swank hotels suites like the Four Seasons, Beverly Hills Hotel and the Peninsula Hotel. They anted up at 10 p.m. and gambled until dawn.
Pretty Molly Dubin Bloom, 33, was there to keep them happy.
The sexy brunette brought in the foxiest bottle-service girls from Hollywood clubs to top off their drinks and rub their aching backs. Her dealers were no-nonsense aces from the local casinos who dealt fast. The doings were discreet and accounts were settled civilly.
“There would be a quarter-million dollars on the table, easily, all in cash,” said a source, who added that her games were among the priciest in the country.
It paid off — within months the 20-something ski bum from Colorado was amassing $400,000 a year. But then, the unsinkable Molly Bloom moved her enterprise to New York, and the game changed.
BLOOM grew up in the small town of Loveland, Colo., but her parents — Larry, a clinical psychologist, and Charlene “Char,” a ski instructor — let their kids spend most of their time at the picturesque Keystone ski mountain. Molly and her little brothers, Jeremy and Jordan, spent their summers hiking in the hills and their winters knee-deep in powder.
Molly was a bit of a wild child, busted in 1996, at age 18, by the Fort Collins Police Department at her Colorado State University dorm on disorderly conduct charges for unreasonable noise and for serving alcohol to minors. The next year, she pleaded guilty to speeding and was sentenced to 30 days in jail. Living in the fast lane was a theme — she pleaded guilty to speeding again in 1999 and 2001, along with driving with expired license plates, court records show.
The 5-foot-3, 115-pound beauty left for Hollywood around 2003, landing a job as an assistant to a real-estate mogul. He also happened to run underground high-stakes poker games. Bloom watched, learned and — most importantly — developed connections with the A-listers at the games.
“She was entrepreneurial and a very smart girl,” said Ronald Richards, a well-known celebrity attorney in Beverly Hills who represents Bloom, in his first in-depth interview about the poker princess.
Bloom started running games for billionaire leveraged-buyout businessman Alec E. Gores, and the plucky powerbroker lured her former boss’ players to her own games. In 2007, she registered Molly Bloom Inc., an “event and catering” business. Under California law, poker can be played at private homes, but individuals can’t explicitly organize games unless they are licensed and paying taxes. Richards says Bloom made her money from “tips.”
At her peak, Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Macaulay Culkin, Ben Affleck and Pete Sampras regularly sat at her tables. They played alongside financial kingpins, attorneys, entrepreneurs and wealthy real-estate tycoons — like professional gambler Michael Baxter and billionaire hedge-fund manager Marc Lasry — some of whom would hold the no-limits, Texas hold ’em games at their homes.
Baseball officials are also investigating whether A-Rod attended her games, although his rep, Richard Rubenstein, denies this.
“She was the créme de la créme. There weren’t other smart, put-together women who were running their own games,” said one high-stakes poker player who knew Bloom.
No hulking security guards presided over her card calls. Players paid their debts with checks drawn from company accounts or their talent manager’s funds. The guest list was hush-hush.
“It’s like AA. You didn’t talk about who played,” Richards said.
Bloom hosted three or four events a week, and the money afforded her luxury digs in West Hollywood high-rises — one with a limitless view of downtown LA and another in a penthouse. She hired her own assistant to deal with the day-to-day chores of the games and dated Drew McCourt, son of the owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, according to sources.
Underground poker games, like the rest of the economy, were hurt by the financial meltdown in 2008. Richards denies that Bloom ever skimmed from the earnings.
For whatever reason, Bloom decided to go on the road in 2009. If it worked in LA, why not take the action to Manhattan?
Bloom landed in an Upper West Side high-rise near Lin coln Center and started organizing games in a private apartment at the new Astor Place and suites at the Plaza hotel. She recruited girls from 1 Oak and Avenue and bought sophisticated dealing equipment used in casinos.
But she had fewer connections in the Big Apple and the scene was more chaotic. Raids on underground Manhattan poker games meant the action often shifted to Long Island.
Bloom’s games attracted Wall Street types, but also more degenerate gamblers. Opening bids sometimes averaged only $10,000 — which was much smaller than her LA games.
“I am hosting a game on Thursday. The stakes are 25/50 and the buy in is 5k. There will be no rake taken and lots of fun people. Let me know if you are around,” she wrote to potential players in February 2009, in an e-mail obtained by The Post.
The floor dropped out in June 2010 when Bloom was served with a $116,133 lien for declaring her “catering” income from her New York events but failing to pay taxes on it.
Then last fall, two Eastern European “thugs” barged into Bloom’s apartment to shake her down, sources say. They slapped her up but left when she gave them thousands of dollars.
Earlier this year, Bloom was deposed to give testimony in a bombshell bankruptcy case against financier Bradley Ruderman, a convicted Ponzi schemer who lost more than $4 million of his client’s dough playing poker. The suit wants celebrities Maguire, Gores and director Nick Cassavetes to pay back the money they won from Ruderman.
She hoped cooperating would get her off the hook, but bankruptcy trustees slapped her with a suit in March.
Bloom was fingered for receiving $473,000 from Ruderman’s City National Bank accounts to allegedly settle his debts. Ruderman’s bank records documented 19 transfers to Bloom in 2007 and 2008, some as high as $57,500.
The poker princess stopped hosting events and left Manhattan for California two months ago, according to her doorman.
Bloom is lying low and refuses to speak publicly until her name is cleared, Richards said. Right now, she’s just hoping for a brush with lady luck. “Hopefully it was just an embarrassing period and nothing more,” Richards said.