I woke up a couple hours before the 12 noon start of the $1500 PLO8 WSOP event. My first real poker tourney.

A bite to eat, a ton of nicotine, and I was excited. Brian, a local Las Vegas thief, drove me to the Rio. I found out Michael Jackson died on the way. Sucked.

I walk in wearing a Susan Marsh Dance T-Shirt. What a circus. Half naked women, postponed starts, and cameras everywhere. I thought I was playing poker. ooops. This was far from civilized poker.

So after I am redirected from one room to another, we start.

Allen Kessler is sitting across from me. Allen Cunningham is on the table behind me, which is right on the ropes. The stage is ten meters away, i mean the platform for pretentious clowns. ooops.

We start, and I win several decent hands. Quickly the table realizes that the dealers have no clue what they are dealing. “The Chainsaw” is asked, by a dealer, to help out on split pots. Sick. I came all the way from Alabama for this joke. Yep.

Then music comes on outta every speaker. Jeff Lisandro is paraded up to the platform, and everyone stops. The place looked like a religious gathering for a couple minutes. I asked the dealer how could this be happening. He said the guy won three bracelets, so deal with it. Seems silly. He already got the bracelets. We were trying to play poker. OOOps.

I lost a big pot with 10 minutes left in the first round.

After that hand, I decided to go on and leave. I left my chips on the table, gave chainsaw my cell number, and told the man in the suit that I wouldn’t play another event, ever. I mean it. What a joke. Las Vegas must be dangerously broke to treat people so poorly.

My sense of wonder and surprise was heightened by the manner of my arrival. I had been cooling my heels at home one morning when Joey arrived out of the blue in a limo. “We’re off to Vegas,” he said. And he treated most of the old crew to a trip out west on a private jet. We were like kids in a candy store. We couldn’t believe the game we’d been playing with each other since children could be presented like this. After years of seeking out games, coaxing invitations and working hard for every seat we could hustle, we were in a place where action was handed to you on a silver platter.

Looking back, we saw the tail end of Vegas’ glorious era – the whole industry was still new enough to treat the gamblers and players with respect. In those days, within minutes of stepping onto the floor, the pit boss knew your name, the dealers knew your name and the waitresses knew your name. By the time you returned on day two, your favorite drink would be there waiting for you. The poker rooms were extremely personal in their level of service. The establishments prided themselves on the warmth of the welcome they provided.

By comparison, Vegas today is Disneyland with cards. Everything is impersonal and there’s a blatant disregard for the players. So many people go through each casino’s doors every day; they just see their customer-base as a nameless, faceless mass. They don’t have to worry whether you’re enjoying your time there, because if you’re not, there’s someone walking in right behind you just itching to drop their money. You can understand why they behave like that of course – it’s just a matter of economics for big corporations, but back in the early 80s individuals ran the casinos and knew how to treat the players.

And we got to meet the greatest individual of all – the man behind the Horseshoe, Benny Binion himself. Back then, anyone who gambled anywhere in the country knew about the Horseshoe. It was regarded as the gamblers’ establishment and he was regarded as the gamblers’ host. If he wasn’t quite
legendary, he was certainly a household name. The Horseshoe may not have had had the glitz or glamour of the plush surroundings of the Strip casinos, but it was known for offering some of the best action. The Sands and the Flamingo were the big name establishments at that point, but a stop at the
Horseshoe was essential for us. It was a casino with no limit. So long as you could carry in the amount you wanted to wager for your first bet, you set the limit at that amount.

We met Benny Binion in his own bar. In fairness, he met us. It was extremely casual. I was sitting at the bar with Joey and a man walked in. A bunch of people jumped up to greet him, so I asked the bartender who he was. “You’re kidding me, aren’t you?,” he said. “That’s Mr Binion himself.”

We’d been there pretty much all day by this point and were well up from Mr Binion’s poker tables. He came over to the bar and was an extremely sociable individual. He pretty much greeted everybody. The casino had that kind of atmosphere. He shook my hand and asked me how I was finding the place. I said it was great and that was that.

After years paying our dues in smoky card rooms, Vegas was a literal breath of fresh air. It combined the best aspects of Atlantic City and New York. AC gave you safety, but small payouts and poor games, while New York offered high stakes and good payouts, but an attendant risk factor. Suddenly in Vegas, we found high stakes and good quality play in a safe environment. And, most excitingly of all, we were introduced to a whole new crowd of players.

In terms of game variety, stud still held strong, even in Vegas. I would estimate that 70 – 80% of the action was stud, with five card just edging seven for popularity. The reasons for that in a casino is obvious – five card stud means the house can get more people to a table, which increases the amount of money in play and therefore the level of action for their rake.

We ate it all up and took full advantage of the action offered. The competition was tougher than AC, but I still managed to end the weekend more than 26Gs up after a good couple of sessions at the tables in Binions. To put it in proportion, a good car cost less than 4G’s at the time, so this was of hell of a payday.

It was probably around this time that we first became properly aware of the tournaments that took place in Vegas. Back east, you’d hear the occasional reference to big games out in the desert and then you’d hear tell that some players competed for what they called a world championship. To be entirely honest, we weren’t remotely interested in the idea. Coming from an environment in which you always downplayed your own ability in order to get paid, wanting to be able to call yourself the world champion seemed to us like an extraordinary ambition.

You have to remember that despite the high stakes we played for, and the stable nature of many of our native card rooms, at least in those days, poker was an illegal activity outside of places like Vegas and AC. So you didn’t run around with a big sign saying, “I’m the best gambler in the world”. Apart from anything else, the Internal Revenue Service are the biggest pimp in town and you didn’t want them looking for 40% of your action.

My buddies and I were quite content to get our winnings quietly at the tables, flying under the radar as it were. To be quite honest, the whole notion of tournament play struck us as laughable. We didn’t have any hierarchy among ourselves or worry about who ranked above whom in terms of ability, because we knew there was enough money out there on the tables for all of us.

So even when we were out in Vegas and heard more about tournament play, we weren’t tempted to try it then. We took our winnings from the cash games, bid the place a fond farewell and looked forward to our next visit.

Arriving back in New York after a whirlwind weekend, I was naturally excited about the new poker potential that had been opened up to me. It was a real eye-opener and showed me there was a whole world of poker there to explore. At the same time, I was incredibly grateful to my oldest friend for his spontaneous generosity in taking us all out there. I decided it was my turn to reciprocate and immediately arranged a night out for us both the following Friday.

Like Joey, I lined up a limo to transport us to the evening’s entertainment. Our destination was an exclusive club that had recently opened a fair way out of town in the suburbs. We were well used to enjoying good nights out, but to thank him for the Vegas trip I went above and beyond to push the call of duty.

Having gotten to the club about midnight, we soon found out it lived up to its reputation and were having the time of our life. Two hours or so later, I was wandering back to the bar when I saw two people standing quietly in the corner of the room, watching us. One of them was wearing a black leather coat – a fashion statement in those days, but a highly suspicious one in the heat of summer. I pointed the pair out to Joey and asked him if he knew them. His response was immediate. He grabbed my arm and started heading towards the back door.

But he never made it out clean. We had gotten as far as the kitchen door when I heard the first gun shot. It was a hit.

As I said, this club was a fair way out of town, which made it even more baffling to work out what was going on. But at that time, such curiosity was the least of my concerns. I can’t really work out even to this day how it all happened, but we both ended up back in the car somehow. At that point I realized I had been shot in the arm and Joey had taken two slugs in the back.

My immediate worry was getting Joey back to Brooklyn. He was my responsibility as I was the one that had dragged him out of his own neighborhood and I knew the first question would be to ask why the hell he was doing in such unfamiliar territory. To be honest, I was more worried for my safety with regard to the reaction back in Brooklyn than I was about the bullet wound in my arm.

Despite my own less serious injury, I managed to get Joey back to the city, but he was obviously in bad shape. I tried unsuccessfully to get hold of his uncle and eventually the confusion began to make some kind of sense. There had been a change of leadership higher up the chain of command. His uncle had been gunned down earlier, before they came to finish the job by whacking Joey. After leaving my badly wounded friend with his people, I was told to go home and stay put. So I did.

Another friend of mine came round with his girlfriend, who was a nurse. They stitched my arm up, as I could hardly go to the hospital. Not only did I not want to face possible questioning from the cops, I had been told in no uncertain terms to go home and stay there and this didn’t seem like a good time to question or disobey orders.

I was contacted later that morning. Joey’s right hand man, the same one that had rescued my car, came to see me. Joey did not make it through the night. He filled me in on the chaos in the city which had been all over the papers this morning. He also told me it wasn’t safe for me there. I had witnessed last night’s events and there was no way they would leave a loose end walking around. I had to get away…far away, especially from my family, which I was putting in danger with my mere presence. I could not go to the cops for protection. That was not even an option. First of all, you did not know which of them could be trusted. Secondly, I had the “rules” burned into my brain at a very early age. What happens in the neighborhood stays in the neighborhood. You did not rat anyone out, even if your life depended on it.

I knew that as far as the guys who had whacked Joey were concerned, finding me was currently their number one priority. As time went by, I would recede from being an immediate threat to a potential one, but in the meantime I couldn’t afford to be found. My read of the situation was correct. In the days that followed every person I knew was contacted, my mother, my friends, and every place I frequented was visited. They were looking for any trace of evidence for my reappearance.

But years at the poker table had given me the clarity of an efficient decision-making process. Even this situation, life and death though it was, were just another hand of cards. To continue the analogy, the weaker player here would stay wedded to his hand, would decide to stay and hope things
worked out ok. But that wasn’t the smart play. The only consideration I could afford to have in my mind was finding the course of action that represented the least possible risk to my family. No other factors mattered. In this case, that was laying down my hand and walk away. I would have to leave.

That afternoon, fewer than 24 hours after Joey was hit, I went to see my mother and told her I had decided to join the Marines. I told her I thought a tour in the military would do me good. I didn’t explain any more than that. Because of being sheltered by her family and my father, she would have been unable to comprehend the reality of the situation anyway. After spending so much time at home and having things done for her, she had no real frames of reference. On the way out, I left the majority of my bankroll on the kitchen table – more than enough to cover the remainder of my sister’s law school tuition and the household expenses for the next year or two.

I went straight to the Marine Corp recruiting office and sought out the staff sergeant. He was a poker buddy of mine. Even though he only had a small bankroll, he had grown into a quality player during the time he has posted in New York and we had become friends. I explained the situation to him, especially the fact that I wanted to be posted overseas as soon as possible after my training. Despite the fact that my test scores and academic ability gave me pretty much my pick of military operational specialties, I decided to enlist in the infantry as that gave me the greatest odds at drawing a wining
hand and leaving the States quickly.

My buddy sorted it all out for me and I was on the next plane to Paris Island, South Carolina for Boot Camp. Only eight days after the euphoria of our trip to Vegas and two days after ill-fated club trip, I found myself on a military base in the middle of no where. I figured it was the best possible outcome. If I didn’t know exactly where I was, how the hell could anyone else possibly find me?

I wouldn’t find this out for a couple of years, but the people responsible for the hit on Joey were disposed of barely a few months after I left New York, as the mob’s internal power struggles came to an end. That knowledge was of little use to me, however. Because by the time my best friend’s assailants were cold and in the ground, I was on board a transport ship in the mid-Atlantic, en route to Beirut.

John “The Greek” Leontakianakos is a professional poker player with 27 years of experience. He runs his own website called JohnTheGreekPoker.

Around this time, Atlantic City began to open up, which offered a whole new opportunity for profitable poker. The games in those early days were pretty limited, but compared to the grind of New York, the standard was ridiculously easy. The tables were populated to a large degree by folks happier to be dropping money at poker than in the casino games. I was only too happy to relieve these tourists of their bank roll.

Of course, the standard and style of play was a function, as ever, of the players’ motivation. A lot of people were only at the tables for the entertainment value. They wanted to stay in hands; they wanted to stay involved until the last card had been dealt. God bless them for that. I hope they found it entertaining, because they certainly didn’t find it profitable.

But just because the standard was lower didn’t mean I allowed myself to let my own approach slip. I always regarded a session in AC as a job, as work, and had the same disciplined ritual every time.

The best action at the tables came between 1am and 6am on Friday and Saturday nights, when the poker crowd would be joined by gamblers who had gone bust at craps or roulette and thought they could chase their losses better against their fellow players than against the house. A lot of them were either exhausted or dispirited before they sat down, and of course many of them were well on the way to advanced states of drunkenness.

Turning a profit at the tables wasn’t the issue – in all honesty it was the easiest money you could make without holding a gun to someone’s head. I turned in streaks of 30 winning sessions or more in AC. But the key was to keep a close eye on your hourly rate – to make sure your profit was outweighing the costs of the table charges, tips, dinners, rooms for overnight stays and travel to and from the casino. That’s a mistake a lot of people make when they consider themselves winning players – not adding up, or admitting to, all the costs they incur while sitting at the table.

For a trip to be worth it, I had to be sure my take from the table was not only a sizable profit, but that it was more than I could have earned by sitting in New York and avoiding the two-and-a- half-hour drive. To maximize my earning potential, I settled into a familiar routine. I would arrive in AC mid afternoon on Friday and get some rest in my room. Then I’d book the last available dinner reservation, so I could plan on wrapping up eating just before midnight – prime time to hit the tables. I could make good money until 6am or so, then return to the room to sleep, freshen up and repeat the whole trick on Saturday night.

You may not always have been able to take home quite as much money from the casinos, but of course you did know you were guaranteed safe passage for you and your money. The risk element was almost non-existent. And that wasn’t always the case back in the boroughs.

After a Queens’ education, I could see when people were going to get rolled on their way out of underground games. If a player from out-of-town was well up and getting cocky about taking the locals’ money, you’d be able to spot a couple of people planning to take it back away from the tables. Of course, the quickest way for them to be able to do that was to spin him up even further so he would leave sooner.

Suddenly a guy would see himself winning six or seven pots in a row when his ace-high bluffs saw everyone fold and think he was on the hottest streak of his life. If you weren’t local, you wouldn’t know you were being set up. Until you stepped outside the club and got relieved of all your winnings and the remainder of your bankroll, of course. The irony for me was how few of those people ever associated getting rolled with their surprising success at the table. Even afterwards, most of the victims walked away thinking, “I was having a great night right up until I stepped outside, then I was unlucky to be robbed.” They never realized that other people were clearing off their money to them quite deliberately.

I wouldn’t like to suggest that things like that happened all the time, but getting rolled was certainly an occupational hazard. Even the games in the suburbs got robbed from time to time. It wasn’t so much of a concern for me – I had grown up in the area and thanks to the crew of friends I had known since childhood, I was less likely to be a target. We knew how to behave ourselves and how to show respect to the right people. I rarely traveled alone and relied on my street smarts to keep me out of trouble.

The parochial nature of the games and the relative tightness of the poker community also provided a form of insurance for the regular players. Most of the guys at the table had played with each other for years and didn’t tend to migrate too far in search of a game.

I was still playing with the old crew from time to time. After moving out to the suburb, I didn’t need Joey in the way I once had. And he didn’t need me. I no longer needed his protection around town and I wasn’t any use to him as hired muscle. Now we spent time together when we chose to, whereas in the beginning, we had been thrown together by circumstance. Knowing Joey had kept me safe in my teens and opened doors for me. And I was pretty lucky, because he had way more potential Johns to choose from than I had Joeys. He was the local kid and I was the outsider.

While I was carving out a poker career to replace my father’s income, Joey progressed still further in organized crime. His uncle was nearing the top of the organization and Joey was pretty much running a neighborhood in Brooklyn.

That was good news for me, because it enabled me to get accepted as an insider in the high stakes games there. The deep involvement of many of my old crew meant I was “protected” to a certain extent and I was soon able to get on track with some big earning potential.

Despite my “connections”, I was still rolled for the first time after a big win in Brooklyn. We’d taken the game for more than $21,000, a good night’s work in those days, and headed off before deciding to stop at a diner for breakfast on the way home. But we never made it that far. At the first traffic light two very nervous (and clearly high) individuals waved a gun in our faces and demanded the car keys, our money and our jackets. I never got the jacket part, and was especially annoyed by it as four days previously I had laid out a over a grand to treat myself to a custom leather jacket with hand-stitched
embroidery – a one-of-a-kind impulse purchase.

But there was no sense in arguing with two junkies with a gun, so we handed over the keys, money and jackets as requested and watched them drive off in my car. We continued to the diner on foot and I called Joey, whose room we had been playing in. He told us to stay put and wait for him. Two hours later he pulled up in his car, which was closely followed by my Caddy. At the wheel was another guy who apparently worked for Joey as “security”. They joined us for breakfast, sliding our money back to us across the table and handing over my car keys. I asked whether or not they’d been able to get my jacket back as well. Joey told me I probably didn’t want it any more as it had holes in it, which I took as a clue not to ask further questions.

To understand the severity, and speed, of Joey’s reaction, you have to understand the way the mob really worked back then. It wasn’t like the movies. The mob controlled the streets because people knew to obey their rules – that meant respect for those rules was their primary concern. When the mob protected establishments, that wasn’t about money, which was about respect.

For example, if a kid held up the wrong store and picked a store that was mob-protected, he wasn’t in trouble for the money he had taken, he was in trouble for the disrespect he had shown. If he took the money back to the store, apologized for the damage and offered to pay for it, then he’d be ok, because those actions not only showed his respect for the mob, they also set an example for other people thinking about hitting stores like that. If he didn’t take that action, he’d be dead by sundown.

As long as you weren’t stupid, you had nothing to fear on the streets. There was very little random violence – there was always a reason why someone would be punished or hit. If you acted in ignorance, you needed to find out who you had offended and why, so you could apologize pretty quick. And if you did that, you would be fine most of the time. Most everyone is entitled to one free pass.

And the way the mob protected places has often been misunderstood as well. Every street had businesses the mob looked after – that was how they kept the neighborhood under their control. But they didn’t take that money to run places down, they didn’t go in and smash places up like you see in
films – their system was much more conservative than that, It was a two-way street from which both parties profited.

My uncle was approached by the mob because he had a restaurant in Queens. They had a mobster who had just been released from jail on probation. His terms of probation were that he wasn’t to consort with any known criminals and he had to maintain a proven legal source of income. So my uncle was told he would be hiring this guy for $400 a week. Now that guy never set foot in the kitchen – he just showed up every Friday to collect his paycheck.

That job gave the mob the legitimacy they needed for their man. In return, my uncle enjoyed their protection and patronage. A couple of times a week the boys would frequent the place, running up bills of a couple of grand a week. My uncle benefited from that, and the waitresses got the biggest
tips they ever saw.

If there was ever any trouble in the place after that, my uncle didn’t call the police. He didn’t need to. Instead of waiting hours for a patrol car to show up, he could make one phone call and three Cadillacs would pull up outside within 15 minutes. He had a problem once with a chef who was stealing food from him out the back door after closing. After my uncle made one phone call to his new associates, the chef came in the next day, apologized, reimbursed him and was never any trouble again. Not only did he recover all of his losses but he was able to rectify the situation without losing his skilled worker and without any further worry that there was a potential thief working in the place.

So while they did take some money for this “protection” from my uncle and all their other concerns, the amount people paid was very carefully chosen. They didn’t want it to be a burden on businesses. They had no interest in making profitable places run at a loss. In return, my uncle got increased revenue, a guarantee not to get rolled over and good behavior from his employees even behind his back.

But that whole system, which was the way the mob used to make its money and keep control of its territory, relies on respect. If people see supposedly protected places getting knocked over, then that respect is eroded. Joey had to react after two guys were rolled coming out of one of his clubs, because otherwise people might start going to spend their money elsewhere. He may have been a long-standing close friend, but he didn’t get my money back that night because of our friendship. He did it because it would have been bad for business not to.

While I was earning a better and better living at the Brooklyn tables, Joey was securing his hold on that part of town. Although the area was completely drug-infested, Joey insisted he would never get involved in narcotics. His primary operation was protection and security. Alongside the other premises he protected, he covered over 90 “holes in the wall”. These were apartments with eye pieces and mail slots on the door, which were run by two-man teams. One would work the scales and slide the drugs through the slot to the waiting buyer, while the other handled the money and kept the shotgun ready. Each of those 90 “holes” paid Joey $2,000 a week for his protection. A lot of that money certainly got funneled up the chain of command, but by anyone standards Joey was doing pretty well for himself in his chosen career.

And his success and high profile had a big impact on my life. First up, it was thanks to Joey that I enjoyed my first trip to the biggest poker room on the planet: Las Vegas.

John “The Greek” Leontakianakos is a professional poker player with 27 years of experience. He runs his own website called JohnTheGreekPoker.