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Affiliates of some people who were charged Wednesday with running underground gambling rings in the San Fernando Valley were previously suspected of being involved in an illegal poker room in downtown LA High Rising.
Sources said Planck may have met one or more people participating in the poker game that day, but visited the apartment where she was holding before she disappeared.
Planck, 38, disappeared on October 17, 2021 after attending his son’s soccer match at Downey.
She was later seen on security videos near her apartment on 12th Avenue and Hope Street, and her dog was found wandering upstairs.
The sealed Wednesday indictment was not said on suspicion of a downtown gambling room, and no arrests have been made for Planck’s disappearance.
In late November 2021, LAPD launched a massive search of a landfill at Chiquita Canyon near Castay after detectives developed other information that detectives may have been buried in garbage removed from high-rise downtown.
At the time, police said in a statement that Planck had died in an unspecified case in a building in downtown Los Angeles, with forensic evidence found in the building leading to a search of the landfill.
Her body was never found, and she was declared dead by a judge in February 2023.
LAPD detectives investigating her loss of diss were present in 2022 when federal agents searched the Chandler Boulevard home in Sherman Oaks. There, some of the men named in the unsealed indictment this week were allegedly running another illegal game room.
Chandler’s search proved useful in gambling investigations, but it wasn’t Planck’s loss of failure, sources said.
“Evidence of a gambling operation has been seized,” LAPD detectives wrote in a follow-up court filing. This formed part of the basis for a separate search of former NBA player Gilbert Arenas’ Encino’s home, which created the suspected evidence behind this week’s indictment.
The Arena is one of eight people accused of conspiring in valley gambling rings in 2021 and 2022, but law enforcement sources said there was no evidence of ties to downtown game rooms.
The arena first appeared in court on Wednesday afternoon, pleasing not guilty to the charges.
Arenas was paid $2,000 a night to authorities in 2022 to host a gambling event at home, saying they “don’t play because they lost all their money,” according to one of their 2022 search warrant affidavits.
NewsChopper4 was overhead when agents searched Chandler’s home in 2022 and burned it a few days later following a law enforcement attack.
The gambling ring investigation accelerated in early 2022 when police learned that one of the poker games’ patronages was being threatened after running a $1 million debt, according to sources and the court.
According to what he wrote in the affidavit, it was common for patrons to win or lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in card play for one night.
The 2022 search warrant said that the gambling operations under investigation are run by members or peers of organized crime families in Israel and Russia.
“They are known for working in murder, car bombing and scare tor rackets all over the world as tools for intimidation and control,” one investigator wrote in a 2022 warrant affidavit explaining what law enforcement knew about the criminal group.
Planck’s family and friends continued to seek information about her loss and death, and in 2023 posted several signs to ask for the help of the public.
Law enforcement sources said that while some people know more about what happened to her on the day Planck disappeared, they believe they refused to cooperate because they were probably involved in other illegal activities.
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