Tom Goldstein is slight, pale, and bald. Look in the dictionary, and next to the word “lawyer” you’ll find a picture of him. But in the legal circles of Washington, D.C., he is regarded with awe. That’s because Goldstein is one of the most successful Supreme Court advocates of the age.
Appearing just once in front of the Supreme Court of the United States—SCOTUS, for short—is, for most lawyers, the pinnacle of their career. Goldstein has done it 44 times, more than all but three lawyers in private practice in the Court’s modern history. His most recent case, Google v. Oracle, was described as the “copyright case of the century.”
So, it was a surprise when, three weeks ago, Goldstein was hit with a 50-page, 22-count federal indictment accusing him of massive tax evasion and listing a panoply of wild stories, including one-on-one poker games played with billionaires, multiple women he allegedly had “intimate personal relationships” with on his company’s payroll, and tens of millions of dollars won and, ultimately, lost.
To say it caused a stir in the Washington legal community is an understatement. But for those outside the capital, at the ultra-high-roller tables of Las Vegas, the glistening casinos of Macau, and the private poker games of Hollywood, it may not have come as a surprise at all.
The “Cooler”
Arguing in front of the Supreme Court is an intimidating experience. When a green light blinks on, you can begin your opening statement: three minutes dense with legal doctrine and precedent. The nine unsmiling justices then spend the next 27 minutes tearing that statement apart: exposing its contradictions, interpolating abstruse theoreticals, and generally doing everything in their power to push the lawyer in front of them to the breaking point. This is “oral argument.” Sometimes, when the justices are particularly aggrieved—a “hot bench,” in legal parlance—they’ll double-team an unimpressive advocate and toss their specious argument from one to another like killer whales tossing a seal around.
There are two broad types of Supreme Court advocate. The first is what is termed in legal circles a “heater,” a lawyer who ramps up the temperature of an argument, aggressively asserting that disaster will follow if the Court should be so foolish as to rule against them. Then there is what is known as a “cooler,” such as Goldstein, who often approaches the bench with no notes, keeps a level tone, and tries to make it as easy as possible for the Court to rule in his favor. Nevertheless, some Court-watchers say he can seem a little too pleased with himself, even condescending.
Unlike the vast majority of Supreme Court advocates, Goldstein didn’t attend an Ivy League university, clerk for a Supreme Court justice, or work for the solicitor general’s office. A star debater at the University of North Carolina, he failed to get into any top-notch law schools and had to call on family connections to squeeze his way into American University in Washington, D.C., according to a 2012 Atlantic profile.
While at A.U., he spent two summers interning for N.P.R.’s longtime Supreme Court correspondent, Nina Totenberg, the first of Goldstein’s many influential connections, gathering statistics about the voting patterns of the newest justices. She, in turn, gave him the perfect introduction to the institution in which he would spend most of his professional life.
Appearing just once in front of the Supreme Court of the United States is, for most lawyers, the pinnacle of their career. Goldstein has done it 44 times.
After Goldstein graduated, in 1995, he joined Jones Day, a large international law firm, as an associate. He was assigned the task of finding cases that the Supreme Court might accept (SCOTUS accepts less than 1 percent of the petitions it receives) to raise the firm’s prestige. Usually, this was done by seeking decisions in the U.S. Courts of Appeal—the courts one level below SCOTUS—when two or more courts disagreed, causing “a circuit split.” Within two years, by creating his own predictive algorithms, Goldstein found five cases that the Supreme Court took up.
But when Goldstein put himself, a lowly associate, forward to argue one of them, he was promptly slapped down. Supreme Court cases are like golden apples that go to only the most senior members of a law firm. Goldstein hadn’t argued a single case in any court, let alone the Supreme Court. It was an early sign of his supernatural chutzpah.
Goldstein quit and formed his own law firm. Identifying possible Supreme Court cases, he cold-called the plaintiffs to offer his services. At the time, it was generally believed that lawyers should be sought out by plaintiffs, not the other way around. One Supreme Court justice dismissed Goldstein as an “ambulance chaser.” Chief Justice John Roberts, then in private practice, allegedly remarked about him, “If I’m going to have heart-bypass surgery, I wouldn’t go to the surgeon who calls me up,” according to The American Lawyer in 2000.
Traditionally, law firms representing big corporations were the predominant filers of “cert petitions,” the documents in which a lawyer lobbies the Court to take a particular case. Goldstein, by contrast, sought individuals with SCOTUS-friendly cases. And he offered to represent the plaintiffs for free.
So it was that, in 1999, he found himself standing before SCOTUS arguing not just his first Supreme Court case, but his first case of any kind. He lost 9-0. But he won the next case, and he went on winning. He said that he only made $8,000 from his first eight cases, but the stature it gave him in Washington was priceless.
“He was young,” Totenberg says of Goldstein in this period. “He was brash. He talked too fast. He had a little bit of an attitude.” But he was good at making contacts and brokering deals. He assisted David Boies and Laurence Tribe, the top litigators on Al Gore’s legal team, on Bush v. Gore in 2000. Impressed, they sent clients his way.
Soon he established first-of-their-kind Supreme Court litigation clinics at Stanford and Harvard, teaching the students the tricks of the trade while using their unpaid labor to help him prepare for his upcoming cases. He was, by all reports, welcoming and open, even playing poker for quarters with the students during their downtime. Many of his students went on to become high-powered lawyers and solicitors general themselves.
But just as revolutionary as his law practice was his creation, in 2002, with his wife, Amy Howe, of SCOTUSblog. Up until that point, SCOTUS was a closed book. If you wanted to read one of the Court’s judgments you had to wait a week for the Court to send you a paper transcript. The Court had no Web site and was in no hurry to get one.
Sensing an unmet need, Goldstein and Howe started live-blogging SCOTUS proceedings, rushing from the courtroom when opinions were read out—where computers and phones are forbidden—and revealing the result in near-real time. They also digitized the Supreme Court’s previous opinions, allowing instant access. Their blog soon became an essential resource not only for lawyers but also, it was said, for the Supreme Court justices themselves, who found it much more convenient than the Court’s own library.
SCOTUSblog’s greatest success came in 2012, when SCOTUS was set to rule on whether Obamacare was constitutional. In the rush to report the judgment, both Fox and CNN misreported that the Court had shot it down. But they hadn’t understood the complex decision. Within 10 minutes Goldstein and Howe had parsed the judgment and revealed that the law had been, in fact, affirmed. Almost 1 million unique users accessed the blog that day. The Web site later won a Peabody Award for excellence in electronic media.
A Maniac Among Maniacs
In 2009, NBC bought Goldstein’s life rights in order to create a TV series called Tommy Supreme, which the network described as being the “inverse House—a likable guy in the most unlikable profession.” He was named one of the 50 Most Powerful People in Washington, D.C., by GQ. He was known, as Totenberg said, as “a quintessentially decent person.”
Suffice it to say, no one has ever described Dan “the Blitz” Bilzerian in such terms. The muscle-bound son of 1980s Wall Street fraudster Paul Bilzerian (a major figure in James B. Stewart’s Den of Thieves), he is known as the “King of Instagram.” Bilzerian, who has been through navy SEAL training, earned this title by wowing his 30 million followers with videos of himself firing bazookas, driving fast cars, smoking cigars, sitting in hot tubs surrounded by scantily clad women, and playing high-stakes poker. He had dedicated his life to one creed according to his self-published autobiography, The Setup: “I wanted to get tons of pussy, and I wanted total freedom.”
In 2008, Bilzerian wrote, he was making his living by taking advantage of clueless “whales,” the poker pro’s term for bad but very wealthy players. Bilzerian frequented the poker room of the Bellagio hotel, in Las Vegas, where he tipped generously enough to be alerted by the staff whenever a whale with money arrived at a table. That’s how he met Goldstein.
Bilzerian put it more succinctly in his memoir: “To this day, I have never met anyone with less respect for money proportionate to their net worth than Tom. And I’ve met some true degenerates.”
In poker there are two broad ways of playing: “tight” and “loose.” A tight player plays very few hands, bluffs rarely, and only bets when he is fairly certain of having the winning hand. A loose player plays many more hands, bets aggressively, and bluffs when he can.
Their blog soon became an essential resource not only for lawyers but also, it was said, for the Supreme Court justices themselves.
A less common subset of the loose player is known as “the maniac.” The maniac plays almost all of the hands dealt to them, no matter what their cards, and bluffs as much as possible. Whether they win or lose, it is sure to involve a large amount of money.
And then there was Goldstein: a maniac among maniacs.
A member of the TwoPlusTwo gambling forum described the Bellagio game that Bilzerian walked in on as the “Craziest Poker Game of my life.” Goldstein was reportedly betting tens of thousands of dollars without even looking at his cards. Soon, hardened poker professionals were surrounding the table to watch the action. Some were so desperate to take Goldstein on that they paid those already at the table to rent their seats for an hour.
Yet Goldstein “dominated the game” and did so without gloating or “being anything less than a polite gentleman.” The forum member declared, “if you had to pick the king of insane poker maniacs of all players in all games in the Bellagio poker room, by appearance only, Tom might be your last pick.”
Bilzerian noted in his autobiography that despite his crazy playing style, Goldstein was “savvy enough to read people and situations.” Starting with $12,000 on the table, and with many ups and downs in between, Goldstein ended up with around $100,000.
There was a fearlessness to Goldstein’s play that impressed Bilzerian. For Goldstein it seems the attraction of Bilzerian was that he offered the pasty-faced lawyer entry into a world of models and machine guns, far from the staid marble halls of SCOTUS.
So began an odd-couple story for the ages.
The Bet
“I was one of those people who just got caught up watching poker on ESPN,” Goldstein told The Washington Post in 2008, the same year he met Bilzerian. He said he’d been playing Texas Hold ’Em—which had rapidly become the most popular variant of the game—for five years, and had made the news for having “dominated” a charity tournament held at the Palm restaurant in Washington, D.C. The top prize was $2,240, which Goldstein donated to charity.
It was no secret that Goldstein enjoyed poker. He frequented Washington’s private games, although he said he stayed away from playing “judges and justices”; he had become the attorney for the Poker Players Alliance and had also begun representing the online-poker companies Full Tilt and PokerStars against the federal government, which was trying to ban them.
Gambling is hardly unknown in the legal world. One might even say the skills involved are complementary. David Boies, one of Goldstein’s mentors at the Supreme Court, has been known to regularly bet thousands of dollars in craps games. Nevertheless, it seemed Goldstein wanted to keep the “maniac” side of his life separate from his more sedate legal career.
The 2012 Atlantic profile of Goldstein began with a brief anecdote about Goldstein shipping his brand-new 2011 black Ferrari 458 (price tag: approximately $250,000) to Las Vegas to race against Bilzerian’s 1965 Shelby Cobra for a bet. The accompanying illustration depicted Goldstein driving a Ferrari down the steps of the Supreme Court. After his indictment earlier this year, the author of the piece posted on X that Goldstein was “very unhappy that [she] exposed his gambling issues.”
“To this day, I have never met anyone with less respect for money proportionate to their net worth than Tom. And I’ve met some true degenerates.”
According to Bilzerian’s autobiography, no sooner had Goldstein bought his Ferrari than he began texting Bilzerian, “talk[ing] shit” and challenging him to a race. Bilzerian accepted. Goldstein said he wanted it to be a bet, so Bilzerian suggested they race for $100,000. Goldstein countered with $300,000. They agreed on a quarter-mile drag race at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Bilzerian hired a drag-race instructor, while Goldstein sought advice and opinions through online racing forums. Goldstein continued to taunt Bilzerian, allegedly saying he wanted Bilzerian’s girlfriend to ride in the car with him so she could “see what a winner looks like.”
Before the night of the race, Bilzerian claimed that Goldstein “begged” him to up the stakes of the bet even further, offering to put up an additional $85,000 to Bilzerian’s $40,000, and also demanding that if Bilzerian lost, he had to agree not to masturbate or have sex for a month. Bilzerian in turn stipulated that Goldstein had to smoke marijuana if he lost; Goldstein had apparently never tried a drug before.
The race at the track on March 9, 2011, attracted poker players and car enthusiasts alike, all placing their own side bets. Goldstein, wearing a dark three-piece suit and crash helmet, lowered himself into his Ferrari. Bilzerian, in his polished aluminum Cobra, strapped his arms to the steering wheel. Amid burning rubber and smoke, Bilzerian beat Goldstein by three-quarters of a second.
But Goldstein wouldn’t accept the loss. “He was like one of those people at a funeral who, despite seeing the body, refuses to accept that the person is dead,” Bilzerian wrote. A film of the race, made by the now defunct NSEntFilms, was allegedly removed from YouTube after Goldstein “forced” them to take it down.
According to Bilzerian’s autobiography, true to his word, Goldstein allegedly “hit a few bong rips” and ate some weed brownies with Bilzerian. Goldstein apparently got so stoned he left his brand-new Ferrari on the Las Vegas Strip with the keys still inside before staggering into the Bellagio’s poker room and begging Bilzerian for money so he could continue gambling.
The following month, Goldstein would appear before the Supreme Court for the 24th time, successfully overturning a Vermont law that restricted the sale of physician prescription data for marketing purposes.
“Flight of Fancy”
In 2014, Bilzerian was approached by Hustler to take part in a photo shoot at his compound in Las Vegas. Photos were taken of Bilzerian cleaning his guns and playing poker surrounded by nude models. The climactic final shot was to have Bilzerian throw a porn star named Janice Griffith off the roof of his house and into the pool below. But the throw went wrong. Griffith landed in the water but injured her foot on the edge of the pool.
Video of the stunt went viral, garnering Bilzerian international attention and a million new followers on Instagram. However, he also received a letter from Griffith’s attorney demanding $85,000 for lost wages due to her injury. Bilzerian turned to Goldstein for advice, and the veteran SCOTUS advocate composed what might be his most famous piece of legal writing.
“I am genuinely sorry that your client was hurt,” Goldstein began. “No one wants to see anyone injured. But the suggestion that Mr. Bilzerian is responsible for the injury is embarrassing. I’m sorry she made you suggest it in writing.
“So like your client,” he continued, “the facts of the claim won’t, quite, fly. The tape shows the two carefully practicing this flight of fancy under Hustler’s direction, and your client expressly agreeing to go ahead. In legal lingo, she assumed the risk.”
Goldstein apparently got so stoned he left his brand-new Ferrari on the Las Vegas Strip with the keys still inside.
Goldstein went on to dispute that Griffith had lost any earnings at all, citing her Twitter feed: “Just trust me that her recent missives with the hashtags ‘#deepthroat,’ ‘#fatpussies’ and ‘#NSFW’ … suggest that her career is gangbusters.” He concluded that “if she sues, the complaint will be sanctionably frivolous” before going on to say that Bilzerian would sue her back for “every last bit of property” and would then “probably blow it up with a mortar in the desert.” He signed off, “I enjoyed our brief correspondence.”
The letter seemed as much a play for Bilzerian’s admiration as it was a legal notice, and it too went viral, appearing on both TMZ and in the ABA Journal, a legal trade magazine. A few months later he was back in front of the Supreme Court arguing Omnicare, Inc. v. Laborers District Council Construction Industry Pension Fund.
Ultra-High-Stakes
Paul Phua (the last name is pronounced “pwa”) started out as a bookmaker in Malaysia in the 1990s, when international sports gambling was booming throughout Asia. According to an ESPN profile in 2015, he was allegedly responsible for the Floodlights Affair of 1997, when two English Premier League matches were suspended because the stadium lights suddenly lost power in the second half.
Unlike in the West, Asian bookmakers pay off on matches that end prematurely, and bets on the suspended games allegedly made Phua an enormous amount of money. It was later discovered that a security guard had been bribed to flick the switch. ESPN called it “the first confirmed incidence of Asian-backed match-fixing on English soil.” Phua was never charged, and he later denied the allegation vehemently, telling PokerNews, “It’s absolute nonsense and without any basis in fact. It’s some rumors. Being in the gambling circles you get these kinds of allegations, but it’s nonsense.”
Nevertheless, Phua’s winnings allowed him to become the biggest bookie in the region. He moved to Macau in 2008, just as U.S. gambling companies such as Wynn Resorts and Las Vegas Sands were establishing outposts there. Phua was allegedly paid a commission to attract Chinese gamblers to these resorts on junkets, and, ESPN also reported, he helped encourage such renowned American poker players as Tom Dwan and Phil Ivey to prey on the rich Chinese bettors for whom poker was still a novelty. Phua’s rumored links to Chinese organized crime—the Triads—ensured that the high rollers could not run back to the mainland to escape their debts.
In July of 2014, Phua traveled to Las Vegas as it was hosting the World Series of Poker, the world’s most prestigious poker tournament. When the F.B.I. raided Phua’s villa at Caesars Palace they found a “wire room” that was said to have handled nearly $400 million in illegal wagers taken. Phua was arrested, and only gained bail by putting up his $48 million Gulfstream V jet as collateral.
When Phua asked Dwan for legal help, Dwan referred him to Goldstein, and after months of legal argument a judge eventually ruled that the F.B.I.’s search of Phua’s villa had violated his rights. Phua denied all allegations of criminality and Mafia-ties, telling Poker News, “The truth is that I was not guilty of the crimes they charged me with, and I’m not a 14k Triad, and that’s why I stayed on to fight the case at the risk of jail time.”
According to Bilzerian’s book, Phua offered to fly both Goldstein and Bilzerian to London for a celebratory poker game. But the plane was apparently diverted to Montenegro, due to Interpol’s concerns about Phua’s alleged involvement with the Triads. So, he claims, Bilzerian, Goldstein, and Phua ended up staying in Phua’s multi-million-dollar “castle” in the country until Bilzerian grew bored and left to go on a Mediterranean cruise with two dozen models. (Phua did not respond to AIR MAIL’s request for comment.)
The indictment, which focuses mainly on the years 2016 to 2022, paints a picture of a gambler increasingly out of control, dipping ever deeper into his legal business to pay off his gambling debts. In 2014, a year in which he had four cases in front of the Supreme Court, Goldstein is alleged to have borrowed $10 million from a California billionaire that he agreed to pay back with interest. Over the next two years, according to the indictment, he went on to lose most of that money in poker matches. (By the end of 2022 he allegedly still owed the billionaire more than $8.89 million.)
In 2016, the indictment alleges, Goldstein allegedly began a series of “heads-up” (one-on-one) poker matches with three “ultra-wealthy individuals.” Two were located in Asia and one in Beverly Hills. He prepared for these games by obtaining guidance and coaching from two professional poker players, studying his opponent’s historical playing patterns, and playing against computer simulations aping their style. It was not too dissimilar from the preparation he would have made for a Supreme Court argument. And as in his SCOTUS cases, his preparation paid off in a big way.
The indictment paints a picture of a gambler increasingly out of control, dipping ever deeper into his legal business to pay off his gambling debts.
According to prosecutors, that September, Goldstein traveled to Asia for his first match and won approximately $13.8 million. He parlayed these winnings into the next match, with a “businessman” in Beverly Hills, and this time won more than $26 million. In December 2016, Goldstein traveled back to Asia for another game. He was allegedly assisted in these “heads-ups” by “a Malaysian Citizen, a G&R Client, and an ultra-high stakes poker player,” who could possibly be Phua.
Goldstein won more than $8.8 million in total, which was wired to a Montenegrin bank at which both the “Malaysian” and Goldstein held accounts. According to the indictment, Goldstein had made more than $50,000,000—or an hourly rate, the lawyer calculated, of $660,000. He allegedly spent millions on unnamed “personal expenses including luxury purchases.”
Then the cooler’s luck began to cool. Between late 2016 and February 2017, Goldstein allegedly lost more than $9.5 million in a series of poker games with a Californian real-estate magnate in Los Angeles. By the middle of 2017, he had allegedly compounded those losses to more than $16 million.
In order to pay off his debts, prosecutors allege, he began to divert his legal fees directly to his personal account. He asked the partner of a law firm with whom he had done business whether he wanted to “invest” in his future poker matches. (The practice of “buying action”—sharing in the profits, or losses, of a match—is common among high-stakes gamblers.) He allegedly sent the lawyer links to an online gambling forum denigrating his opponent’s poker skills. Not mentioned was the fact that Goldstein had already lost nearly $10 million to him (the Californian real-estate magnate). Barely a month after he was allegedly scraping these funds together he could again be found in front of the Supreme Court, arguing two cases in eight days.
According to the indictment, a pattern began to emerge. When Goldstein won, the money would be immediately re-invested in future games. And sometimes when he lost, such as in 2016, he would call his law firm’s manager—“typically a recent college graduate with no formal accounting or bookkeeping experience and whose responsibilities also included, among other things, picking up Goldstein’s dry cleaning”—to unknowingly send a wire transfer from the company’s funds to satisfy his debt. These transfers would be labeled “Legal Fee.” As the sole proprietor of his law firm, only Goldstein knew what was allegedly going on with the company’s accounts.
Poker games with movie producers, actors, and Texas billionaires followed, and his losses mounted, according to prosecutors. Legal fees were now allegedly being funneled directly into his gambling account without being declared to the I.R.S. Neither did he declare his winnings, on the increasingly rare occasions when he won. If the allegations are true, Goldstein was in too deep.
Substantial Amounts of Money
In 2017, in an interview with the University of North Carolina’s alumni magazine, Goldstein declared that he had mellowed. He had traded in his Ferrari for a Tesla, he said, and had given up poker. He talked about the trials of being a parent to young children and how all he did these days was talk about legal briefs. “I think most people would find what I do boring,” he said.
But if prosecutors are correct, nothing could have been further from the truth.
A year after the interview, he allegedly traveled to Macau, won big, and flew back to Washington with a duffel bag containing “approximately $968,000 in United States dollars.” When asked by a customs official about the money he admitted that they were gambling winnings, but he then allegedly failed to report it on his 2018 income. (When later interviewed by the I.R.S. about this discrepancy he said the funds represented a “loan” but did not back it up with documentation.)
What’s more, according to the indictment, Goldstein was seemingly following Bilzerian’s example in pursuing personal relationships with “at least a dozen women,” to whom he transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars from his company’s accounts, even while he owed “substantial amounts of money to the Internal Revenue Service,” according to the indictment.
It also alleges that he hired some of these women as nominal employees at his law firm, which allowed them to be paid by the firm as well as to obtain health insurance, while they did “little or no work.” Goldstein’s payments to them were allegedly declared “business expenses.”
And in 2020 and 2021, when the pandemic shut down poker rooms, Goldstein is alleged to have engaged in dozens of crypto-currency transactions totaling more than $10 million, none of which he is said to have declared.
Goldstein was pursuing personal relationships with “at least a dozen women,” to whom he transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars from his company’s accounts.
By 2021, according to the indictment, he was more than $14 million in debt, owed at least $5 million in unpaid income taxes, and had allegedly filed a mortgage application for a $2.6 million house in Washington, without declaring his debt—a serious financial crime. And throughout this allegedly sordid period, Goldstein was successfully arguing cases in front of SCOTUS and the appellate courts.
In 2023 he announced he was retiring from his U.S. Supreme Court practice after 25 years. In an e-mail to Reuters, he blamed part of his decision to retire on the fact that SCOTUS was too ideologically divided for him to help the “little guy” anymore. He said he was an “entrepreneur at heart” and wanted to try something new that would appease the more adventurous side of his personality. And he took one farewell shot at the legal profession, saying that most law firms were “horrifically run. Lawyers are terrible at this. Including me.”
Wild Style
In May of last year, a mysterious poker player calling himself “Thomas,” who was rumored to be a European entrepreneur, entered the Hustler Casino Live Million Dollar Game II in Las Vegas. The event was being streamed live, and for a $1 million buy-in, you could play against some of the biggest names in the game, including Dwan and Doug Polk.
Wearing a face mask, with a hoodie pulled down over a baseball cap, and with tattoos on his hands, “Thomas,” according to Poker News, played a “loose, wild style.” He took a massive defeat, losing $2,731,000, and caused a stir by accidentally throwing away a winning hand that would have won him a pot worth $540,000. It wasn’t long before the online-poker crowd worked out that Thomas was Goldstein.
Why was he playing in disguise, even going as far as putting fake tattoos on his hands? Was he trying to avoid his debtors? His wife? The feds? And if so, why appear at a streaming poker tournament? Did he think this might be his last game?
On November 15 as the election dust was still settling, in an opinion essay for The New York Times, Goldstein argued that “although this idea will pain my fellow Democrats” all of the criminal cases against Donald Trump “should be abandoned.” He enraged many of his liberal colleagues with the line “a central pillar of American democracy is that no man is above the law. But Mr. Trump isn’t an ordinary man.” Was Goldstein perhaps making his opening argument in favor of a presidential pardon?
After his federal indictment was served, Goldstein hired attorneys John Lauro and Christopher Kise to represent him. Lauro recently defended Donald Trump in his January 6 election-interference case, while Kise represented him in his New York civil business-fraud trial. He also engaged Risa Heller, the crisis-communications specialist. “The Biden Justice Department brought this indictment on the eve of its departure, while ignoring critical facts that we expect will be established at trial,” Lauro says. “Mr. Goldstein entered a not guilty plea to these charges, and he intends to challenge the government’s interpretation of tax law, as well as contesting the government’s allegations of criminal intent. Some of these charges deal with years where taxes have been paid with applicable penalties and interest.”
It’s been suggested that, given the severity of the charges against him, cooperation with the government is his best shot at avoiding decades of prison time; the charge of making false statements to mortgage lenders alone carries a maximum 30-year sentence. The prospect that Goldstein will cop a plea is potentially sending shivers through his gambling partners in Las Vegas and Macau, and perhaps his old friend Bilzerian too.
Goldstein hired attorneys John Lauro and Christopher Kise to represent him. Lauro recently defended Donald Trump in his January 6 election-interference case, while Kise represented him in his New York civil business-fraud trial.
In the past two years, Bilzerian has seen his empire of debauchery begin to crumble. A battle with a supplements company he was hired to promote led to a long, expensive legal battle. He has put his Las Vegas compound up for sale. The King of Instagram hasn’t posted anything new in six months.
When one of his holding companies filed for bankruptcy last year, court papers suggested that the Blitz too had secrets of his own. Despite his boasts that that his decadent multi-millionaire lifestyle was funded by his winnings at private high-stakes poker games, court documents allege that Bilzerian’s millions were largely given to him by his family. In November he sued his father for $50 million.
That same month, Bilzerian gave his last public appearance to date, in an interview with Piers Morgan. The two discussed the Israel-Gaza war, and Bilzerian made a number of anti-Semitic comments, shocking even Morgan, and declared that Jews “basically invented genocide.”
After the interview, pictures of him could be found on the Instagram page of Hassan Shibly, a lawyer who was once the Florida chapter head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Bilzerian is seen wearing a kaffiyeh and announcing that the call to prayer “is the most fantastic thing I have ever heard.” It’s said he now wants to move to Dubai, an emirate that, not incidentally, has no formal extradition treaties with the United States. (Bilzerian did not respond to AIR MAIL’s request for comment.)
Bilzerian is not the first person you might think to go to for psychological insight, yet despite all the bluster of his autobiography, he gave as good a take on the mind of Tom Goldstein as anyone has offered so far.
“He loved the action, but it was almost like he subconsciously wanted to lose,” Bilzerian wrote. “I think he liked that everyone at the table loved him so much, and as a ruthless lawyer, he probably didn’t get that kind of a warm welcome elsewhere. The more he lost, the happier everyone around him got, and I think he was partially addicted to that feeling, but he was fully addicted to the rush of gambling.”
George Pendle is an Editor at Large at AIR MAIL. His book Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons became a television series for CBS All Access. He is also the author of Death: A Life and Happy Failure, among other books
