The Worst Bad Luck of All

The phone rang. It was my friend T. “Have you heard?” he asked.

Whenever a New York poker player asks me if I’ve heard, I know that he is about to tell me some bad news, something on the order of the “Diamond Club got raided last night,” or “Ace Point was held up,” news of the sort that has become all too common the past few years. What T told me, however, was a whole other order of bad: “Mike Z’s new club was stuck up last night by four guys with shotguns. They fucking killed a guy.”

I felt instantly sick. Not vomit-sick but not far from it, either. “Any idea who the guy was?”

“No. All I know is his name was Frank and he always wore a Yankee cap.”

“Oh, God.”

“Don’t tell me you knew him.”

Yeah, I knew him. For 15 years I knew him. Since the Mayfair Club in the early ’90s. And a dozen other clubs since. His name was Frank DeSena. He lived in Jersey and taught math. He had an adopted teenage son. He was a gentleman. Quiet, polite, always friendly. More to the point, I knew that although he was capable of a check-raise and that he might push a draw, he was a numbers guy, the opposite of wild. I knew that in a robbery, he’d do what he was told, he wouldn’t try to be a hero.

“Jesus, why Frank?” I couldn’t get my head around it.

“So you don’t think he did anything stupid?” T asked.

“No way! Frank was the least confrontational guy I’ve ever met. If some clown was waving a gun around, he’d be the guy saying, ‘Just do what they say.’ Why the fuck would they shoot him?”

Over the course of the rest of the day, I made half a dozen phone calls to half a dozen different people both to help me process the news and to get a clearer picture of what had happened. I found out that four guys in ski masks had gotten through the door of the club. They were real clever, calling each other “Number One” and “Number Two” instead of using names. They were so clever that one of them dropped a shotgun and, when he bent down to pick it up, accidentally pulled the trigger.  

The sound of a shotgun going off in an enclosed space must have been loud and, under the circumstances, terrifying, but none of the hundred or so players stretched out on the floor beneath the tables seemed to realize that someone had been shot. The robbers continued collecting wallets and valuables for another five minutes. When they finally left, Frank was heard moaning. My friend Bobby went to his aid and saw the gaping wound, the blood oozing onto the carpet. He tried to stanch the bleeding with his hand. While most of the players fled, one of the proprietors hatched a plan to take Frank downstairs, so that he wouldn’t be discovered in the club. But Bobby and another customer told him to get screwed.

“You’re worrying about your business while this guy’s life is in the balance?” Bobby said.

Despite Bobby’s efforts to keep him breathing, by the time the paramedics got there, Frank had died. Bobby was a tough guy who’d done serious time upstate but he was choked up when he told me. “You know I’ve been through a lot of shit,” he said, “but nothing as bad as this. Frank died in my arms. He died in my fucking arms and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

In the days that followed, I couldn’t stop thinking about Frank, about his family, about the stupid senselessness of his death. I promised my wife that I was done with the underground clubs. I was pretty sure that the cops would shut them all down anyway, but even if they didn’t, I couldn’t justify to her or myself taking the risk. Years of calculating odds on straights and flushes had led me to assess most life situations in terms of risk and reward. No matter how I broke this one down, a session of poker wasn’t worth dying for.

That was the thing. Poker had just been a game all these years, now it was something else. The underground clubs had always had a certain outlaw mystique, but it was essentially innocent. There was nothing remotely romantic or innocent about murder.

Still, the thought of not playing in the clubs was difficult to absorb. For 20 years, the underground clubs had been a big part of my life. I had found my way to the Mayfair Club in 1988 then in the mid-1990s began frequenting the slightly funkier, rowdier Diamond Club. In those pre-poker boom days, the underground poker scene operated largely under the radar, the only blip coming in 1989 when the Mayfair was held up one night.

The bumbling crooks were variously dubbed “The Over the Hill Gang” and “The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight” by the local tabloids because they were all in their fifties and sixties, and because one of them tripped on the stairs and broke his nose and another one of them complained of chest pains when they were caught by cops while trying to make their getaway. In those days, the Mayfair was in so tight with the cops that they had an alarm wired right into the precinct. Most of us considered that robbery a fluke. We laughed it off.

The truth is, I never thought twice about security at the clubs. The poker community was small and tight-knit. Everybody knew everybody. But then came televised poker, Moneymaker and the Internet, and all these young dudes began showing up. Poker was cool the way pool had been cool. New clubs started popping up all over town to take advantage. There were even celebrities: Robert Iler from The Sopranos, the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez. There were newspaper stories. It was getting too public, too big. The cops, embarrassed perhaps, began shutting places down. It didn’t matter. The clubs were like cockroaches. New ones appeared as soon as the old ones vanished. But it was different now. Where once I knew every face in a game, now I was lucky to know a few in an entire club. Seeing so many strangers, it began to occur to me that security might be an issue. What could be an easier mark than a poker club, after all? Cash in every pocket and who was going to go to the cops afterwards?

Sure enough, the Ace Point club got hit one night. Guys in ski masks with guns. I was lucky not to be there. But just hearing the news gave me the willies. I didn’t tell my wife. But the other poker club old timers and I talked about it plenty. It seemed inevitable that it would happen again and that at some point somebody would do something stupid and either kill someone or get killed.

Secretly, we hoped we were wrong. We hoped the initial robbery was a fluke, a one-off, the way the one at the Mayfair had been twenty years earlier. But like student suicides, the idea was in the air. More robberies followed. Stupidly, I kept playing. It was Russian Roulette. I just didn’t believe the gun really had a bullet in it. And then came the phone call from T. The one about Frank. The one that made me stop.   In the weeks after the murder, the cops raided and padlocked every club in Manhattan, including a seemingly invulnerable Italian social club that had been around for 40 years. Of course, there are always eager entrepreneurs willing to try their luck, no matter how stacked the deck might seem. And so I have heard of new clubs opening up recently. I have yet to go to any of them and I seriously doubt that I will. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped playing. It’s just that now I play in private games in people’s apartments. The action isn’t nearly as good. The games sometimes break absurdly early. But at least I don’t worry about getting shot.

I hate saying I’m nostalgic for the old days because it makes me feel old. But it’s hard not to think about how, when I was 9 years old, I used to walk to school through the city streets on my own. It goes without saying that no self-respecting parent would ever let a kid do that now. These days you can’t even walk into a school anymore without passing through a metal detector. Or get on a plane without taking off your shoes.

Maybe it’s just the way of things. I remember my parents talking wistfully of the days when they could sleep out on their fire escape on a hot summer night or leave their apartment door unlocked. The world gets ever more perilous. And now a guy I knew, a good guy, is dead. God bless, Frank. I hope things run better for you in the next life.