NEW YORK (AP) A former high-stakes poker game hostess pleaded guilty on Thursday to charges she helped run underground games for Wall Street financiers and celebrities in guest rooms at The Plaza hotel.
Molly Bloom was among more than 30 people charged earlier this year in a sprawling scheme by two related Russian-American organized crime enterprises, authorities said. In recent years the operations laundered at least $100 million in proceeds from an illegal sports betting operation that catered largely to superrich Russians, prosecutors said.
U.S. authorities following a trans-Atlantic money trail uncovered the poker games in New York. They said the players included professional athletes, Hollywood luminaries and business executives, some of whom ran up debts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they gave no names.
Bloom told a judge in federal court in Manhattan that she and others running the games at The Plaza, a luxurious landmark on the southern edge of Central Park, collected a cut of the pot, a fee known as a rake. Playing poker is legal, but organizing games for profit is against state law.
"The conductors of the game, including me, took a rake," Bloom said.