Friday, May 18, 2012

Leonardo DiCaprio and Friends Escape Court Battle

Titanic star Leonardo DiCaprio is among the big names spared a visit to court this week, which would have threatened to reveal the intimate details of massive illegal poker winnings.
Tobey MacGuire and Good Will Hunting stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have also managed to settle outside court after playing with ex-hedge fund manager Bradley Ruderman.
Ruderman is serving 20 years in jail after conning multiple people out of millions of dollars, before he surrendered to the FBI in 2009. It then emerged that Ruderman may have lost as much as $25million of his investors' money.

The businessman then tried to sue DiCaprio, MacGuire, Damon and Affleck for the money they took, which would have meant that details of the high-stakes and highly illegal poker games would come to light in the courts. However, it would seem that the celebrities have escaped with most of the cash.
Howard Ehrenberg, the bankruptcy trustee who sued DiCaprio and co., revealed to Celebuzz.com that "all of the poker defendant cases are settled.
"The settlement of every poker related case without having had to incur the cost of taking any of them to trial means that the fund available for the victims has been maximised. "
The games took place in California, where gambling of this nature is still illegal. Ruderman had been living like a Hollywood Star in Malibu, California spending the victims' cash like it was going out of fashion, before being jailed.
Some States are trying allow gambling on a much greater scale, notably Illinois. There is a lot of revenue available in online gambling, Texas Hold Em and fast poker games on sites like iGame, and President of the Illinois Senate John Cullerton, who wrote this week that "certain forms of iGaming, especially poker, rely on large pools of potential players, and states that move swiftly to design a system that captures the widest audience of participants will have an advantage in terms of long-range success."
It is unknown exactly how much the stars settled for, though Spiderman star Tobey Macguire was the among the first to settle, agreeing to hand over $80,000 of the $311,200 that he won from Ruderman.

No comments:

Post a Comment