FULL HOUSE: Nahmad and his father, David, pose with one of the family’s many Picassos at the Helly Nahmad Gallery. (Getty Images)
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The Knicks were on the floor, and he had $250,000 riding on the game, but Hillel “Helly” Nahmad, sitting courtside, couldn’t be bothered.
Sporting a ponytail and scruffy beard, dressed casually in jeans and high tops, Helly was more interested in checking his e-mail. He didn’t even speak to his Victoria’s Secret-model girlfriend.
Jay-Z and Beyoncé arrived and sat a few seats away. When they noticed each other, the two men high-fived.
Even if few in the stands recognized the poker-playing gallery owner and scion of one of the world’s wealthiest families, Jay-Z “showed him respect.”
“Jay doesn’t do that for anyone unless they are big time,” a spy said.
Helly played it cool throughout the game, even in the fourth quarter when the score was tied. He lost his bet. He didn’t even flinch.
A quarter of a million dollars was gone, but it wasn’t like he’d notice. Helly had it all — several lavish apartments at Trump Tower, his choice of beautiful women, a chauffeured Rolls-Royce and trips by private jet.
Losing a wager wasn’t a problem. But Helly’s obsession with gambling would be his downfall.
Last week, Nahmad, 34, was charged with being part of a vast international gambling network that laundered more than $100 million.
Few could understand why such a privileged playboy might take that risk. Those who know him say he loved the thrill and wanted to show up his dad, David, a self-made billionaire and gambler himself.
“He wanted to impress his father to prove he could make his own way,” said an art-world insider who has known the family for years.
Another observer put it: “It’s not about the money. It’s ego and rush. That’s all it can be.”
The Nahmads are descended from a prominent Jewish banking family in Aleppo, Syria.
Patriarch Hillel Nahmad moved the family to Beirut in the 1940s, where sons David and Ezra were born.
The boys were operators from childhood, buying and selling marbles and candy at their school, said Ezra’s son, also named Hillel Nahmad.
By the time they were teens, the brothers were investing in the Italian stock market. Ezra went into business with an Italian art collector and opened a gallery in Milan. He was soon joined by his brothers.
David and Ezra bought their first Picassos in Paris as teens. On one trip, they strapped a large Picasso that wouldn’t fit in the trunk of their Morris Minor to the roof of the car. When they arrived in Milan, the Picasso had flown off, but they retraced their steps — and found the painting unharmed on the side of the road.
From this emerged a $3 billion art collection comprised of thousands of modern works, most stored in a duty-free concrete bunker in Switzerland. There are an estimated 300 Picassos alone.
The Nahmad brothers left Italy in the early 1970s because of terrorism by the Red Brigades.
David moved to Manhattan and, in 1974, opened the Davlyn Gallery at The Carlyle hotel. Salvador Dalí came to the opening.
Despite its tony location, the gallery walls were lined with lesser masterpieces.
“They keep the best art in Geneva where it’s safe and not taxable,” the artworld insider said.
David is known as a high-stakes gambler and, in 1996, won the World Championship of Backgammon in Monaco, where he now lives and is listed by Forbes as the principality’s No. 1 billionaire. His business interests include currency trading.
Helly Nahmad grew up in the privileged world of the Upper East Side. He attended the Dalton School but was expelled, court papers say. The school had no record of him graduating.
“Helly was always a little brat,” the art-world insider said. “He was always thinking he was smarter than he was.”
He was brought into the family business by his father, but working alongside his dad wasn’t good enough. Helly wanted a gallery in his own name just like his cousin, Helly, had in London.
In 2000, the gallery was renamed for him, and he became president.
But David Nahmad kept the reins tight.
“Helly Nahmad had little or no experience managing an art gallery and little or no education in art management, curating, art conservation, art history or business administration,” say court papers in a $5million sexual-harassment suit filed in 2005 by gallery employee Susan Dicker.
Helly liked to throw his weight around the gallery.
In a fit of pique, he fired Dicker in May 2004, but his father arranged for her to continue working, saying he was the boss and true owner of the gallery, court papers allege.
Dicker accused both father and son of a host of offenses, including stiffing her out of commissions on artwork she sold. She said David Nahmad “demanded that she engage in demeaning sexual acts with him against her consent including dominating [him] sexually, sex with other women while he watched, and engaging in ‘pee pee’ on him,” court papers say.
Dicker’s suit described a work atmosphere in which the Nahmads routinely cursed at employees and each other. Once, Helly’s sister, Marielle Safra, and mother, Collette Nahmad, fought and Safra said, “No wonder Daddy f–ks other women’,” court papers allege.
Despite their wealth, Dicker claimed she fielded calls from creditors demanding payment, including many from the manager of David Nahmad’s Fifth Avenue co-op, court papers say.
“She also received many calls asking the Nahmads to pay their gambling debts,” court papers say.
She claims she was asked to pay the family’s bills, including its cable bill, with her credit cards and from her personal checking account.
The suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.
When he was not at the gallery, Helly Nahmad’s life was like the HBO series “Entourage.”
After buying his first apartment at Trump Tower in 2000, he amassed the entire floor over the next 12 years.
Rather than knocking down walls and combining the units, Helly kept most of them separate to house members of his crew, including models and a night-life club king, a source said.
“He has his chauffeur-driven Phantom waiting outside Trump Tower for him. He’s surrounded by his entourage and models. His driver in the Phantom takes him and all the models from Trump Tower straight to [the Meatpacking District lounge] Provocateur. The red rope opens. He’s led straight to his table. Leo DiCaprio meets him there. I’ve seen it,” the source said.
Among his associates was 27-year-old Illya Trincher, a poker player from a Russian family. Trincher’s parents, Vadim and Elena, moved into Trump Tower in 2009.
The extent of the families’ association was revealed last week, when federal prosecutors charged Helly Nahmad and Vadim Trincher, with Vadim’s sons Illya and Eugene, as being part of a web of criminal enterprises.
The 83-page indictment named a wide array of suspects, including Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, a Russian mobster who has been accused of fixing the 2002 Olympic figure-skating contest, and Molly Bloom, a “poker princess” known for hooking up celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, with high-stakes games.
The feds say Nahmad and Vadim Trincher led the Nahmad-Trincher Organization with Noah Siegel, a 30-year-old Manhattan man known as “The Oracle.”
They are accused of running a high-stakes “illegal international gambling business that catered primarily to celebrities, professional poker players, and very wealthy individuals working in the financial industry,” the federal complaint says.
Vadim Trincher belonged to a separate enterprise with Tokhtakhounov, and they allegedly oversaw an illegal sports-gambling business catering almost exclusively to oligarchs in Ukraine and Russia, the feds say.
Helly Nahmad and Ilya Trincher were described in court Friday as members of the younger generation of bookmakers taking in millions of dollars in bets through illegal Web sites. Cash was allegedly laundered through the Helly Nahmad Gallery.
Members of the ring led by the more senior crew advised the younger group, said Assistant US Attorney Harris Fischman.
“All of these characters are communicating with each other at times,” he said.
Prosecutors said they had taped as many as 25,000 phone conversations from defendants over just four months. They also raided the Nahmad Gallery and other locations, seizing computers and documents.
“We do not believe that Mr. Nahmad has knowingly violated the law,” his lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, said.
While other defendants were joined by relatives at Friday’s arraignment, Nahmad had only his lawyers to accompany him.
His father once said he did not like publicity. “My son likes publicity a lot,” he told Forbes magazine.
If convicted, Helly Nahmad faces up to 92 years in prison. All for money he didn’t need.
“He thinks he’s God, untouchable,” the art-world source said. “I think he did it for the ego and the rush of doing business with some of the biggest mobsters in the world.”