She hasn’t won a major tournament, been a high stakes player or done anything else significant in poker. Still, Molly Bloom has found a way to grace poker headlines off and on for the past few years.
Known to many as the “Poker Princess,” Bloom has been running some of poker’s most high-profile games. But she took things way too far in helping the Russian mob organize underground poker outings at New York’s Plaza hotel. Seeing as how the ring raked over $100 million, Bloom and the other 33 inductees were facing some serious charges.
You might say that Bloom got off with a pretty light sentence because she recently pleaded guilty to the charges against her. The 35-year-old will now face up to six months in jail, and must pay $125,000 in fines. Given that she was facing decades in prison, this is a much more favorable deal.
So now the question must be asked, is Molly Boom finally done with this whole Poker Princess thing? She first burst into the limelight after a major celebrity poker ring was uncovered. Bloom had been organizing games for such A-Listers as Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio. Prestige and millions were a plenty at these glamorous poker nights.
However, this got busted up when a hedge fund manager named Brad Ruderman was found to have lost $5.2 million in the poker ring. Ruderman was guilty of running a Ponzi scheme, and he used a good portion of his clients’ money to play poker with. That said, the investors leveled a lawsuit at members of the poker ring so they could recoup the losses.
The Hollywood operation earned Molly Bloom fame. But the Russian mob gambling ring put her through a lot of legal trouble. Given the myriad of legal troubles she recently dealt with, we can only hope that Bloom has put the poker world behind her.