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Emil Rahaziel knew how to bluff.
On Instagram, he posed behind the wheels of a Rolls-Royce convertible. “It’s flying high,” he wrote in the caption of a photo taken with a private jet.
Don’t worry about the seven-figure debt Rahaziel owes to his hometown of Israel, according to financial disclosures of his divorce case and entry to his wife who is trying to kill him “as a result of some of his activities he has done abroad.”
So it makes sense that Rahaziel played the last night of his life in poker.
Early on June 7, 2023, he went to a hillside mansion rented by social media influencers. The car Barrett parked when his guests arrive at Fareholm Drive twists over Hollywood. Inside the three-story house, the chef prepared a meal when a man placed a “high stakes” bet on a poker table, detectives testified.
At 2am, 39-year-old Rahaziel headed out to meet someone he thought was a friend. The masked hooded man shot Rahaziel in the face, killing the Israelites on the steps of the refined White House.
“It was an execution,” Los Angeles County prosecutor said at a recent hearing.
The motives for Rahaziel’s murder remain a mystery, but his death led the Los Angeles Police Department to investigate the elevated poker game circuit.
Hosted in Hollywood Hills in Encino, Sherman Oaks and Hollywood Hills, the game has gathered a collection of strange people, according to the search warrant affidavit. Israeli organized crime figures and Latino gang members played cards alongside Square Johns in the Deep Pocket. The organizers hired chefs, bartenders and women who provided what the prosecutor described as “dating.”
Emil Rahaziel was killed in a high stakes poker game hosted at this Fairholm Drive Home in 2023.
(Luke Johnson/Los Angeles Times)
The crowd also included a former NBA All-Star, according to the unsealed indictment last week. Gilbert Arena, notorious for bringing a gun into the Washington Wizards locker room during a gambling dispute with his teammate in 2009, pleaded not guilty to accusations of hosting an illegal poker game at Encino’s home. His attorney did not reply to requests for comment.
When local police and federal agents stormed Arenas’ home in 2022, they found a poker party “on full swing,” the search warrant affidavit said. One man collapses into the pool as the DEA plane captures footage of a guest running away from the backyard. According to the affidavit, 36 men were taken into custody along with 12 “provocatively dressed” women.
In California, it is completely legal to hold a poker game unless the host cuts the prize money. However, authorities claim that sophisticated criminals have turned poker games into illegal businesses, not only collecting “rakes” from the pot, but also extending high-profit loans and forcing players who can’t cover their losses.
According to a search warrant affidavit, the investigation depicted in the arena began when a desperate man called for help from LAPD. He claimed he had lost $1.2 million in Trump.
When he stopped paying, he told police that the numbers from the Israeli mob had lured his child and threatened to throw a hand-held bullet into his house.
The man, who owes $1.2 million, explained to LAPD how the game works. The buy-in was usually $15,000. Most players did not exchange cash, but they played with what they called markers and calmed down what he had won and lost at the end of the night.
In addition to poker, the parties alleged that “women, alcohol, drugs and guns are readily available.”
He told LAPD he lost $1.2 million in one night. At a four-storey Hollywood Hills house with floor-to-ceiling windows called “The Glass House,” the man said he noticed the host was making a strange bet. He counted cards and came to believe that he was missing two aces from the deck.
The man began making a big bet. If he lost, he could have denounced the host of cheating and refused to pay for his marker, he thought. His loss reached $1.2 million.
Instead of paying, he fled to Israel, he told police. There he met with some men and said that if he paid about $600,000, he would be forgiven for his debt. When the detective asked if the man who called the meeting was from the Musli organization, he replied “no comments.”
“The Musli Crime Group is one of Israel’s largest and most violent organized crime groups,” he wrote in the affidavit. “They are known for working in murder, car bombing and scare tor rackets all over the world.”
After returning to the US, the man said he was threatened by Yevgeni Gershman. Gershman, a Woodland Hills resident, moved from Israel in 2021, where he was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and drug trafficking, detectives wrote in an affidavit.
The man claimed there was more: Gershman was hosting a poker game at Arenas’ house.
The outstanding arena at Grant High School in Vanneis continued to play at the University of Arizona before being drafted by the Golden State Warriors in 2001.
He appeared in Washington Wizard until 2010. That year he was suspended for 50 games due to a gun incident in the locker room. He pleaded guilty to a felony charge of carrying an unlicensed gun and played his last NBA game in 2012.
Gilbert Arenas, a former Washington Wizards player, will be taking part in the half-time ceremony of an NBA basketball game between the Wizards and the Miami Heat on Friday, November 18, 2022.
(Nick Wass/Applications)
The second gambler owed Gershman Money told LAPD about the arena. The man claimed that the previous All-Star didn’t play in the game at his own home because he “lost all the money.” Instead, Arenas rented the house from Gershman and his partner for $2,000 a night.
The man told LAPD he started as a “chip runner.” He paid prizes and tips distributed to cooks, card dealers, bartenders and what he called “Poker Girls.” Those women had to kick 25% of Gershmann’s hints, he claimed.
The host raised $200 per pot, he told LAPD. Players who were unaware of “home” had to buy tips and cash out at the end of the game. Regulars played on markers and were given a week to pay for what they owe.
The man said he went to play them four nights a week after he worked in the game. He estimated he lost $40,000 a week. He borrowed from his parents and friends to pay $1,500 a day in interest on his debts.
He claimed he received a $150,000 loan from Gershman, and he charged him $7,500 a month in interest, he claimed. He paid interest to Gershman, but never touched the principal, he said.
The LAPD, armed with the statements of two debt-rich gamblers, obtained a search warrant at Arenas’ home in July 2022. At about 11:30pm, the DEA SWAT team blew into their seats.
Prosecutors did not claim Arena, Gershman, or any of their conspiracies until last week. Contacted for comment, Gershman’s lawyer Scott Pactor said, “God forbids hobbies.”
“It’s an accusation that makes J. Edgar Hoover proud,” he added. “When was the last time the Fed destroyed a card game? In the 1920s?”
Released on a $50,000 bond, Arenas appeared on a livestream the following day, claiming he didn’t know much about his co-defendants.
“I’m snitching,” he said. “I don’t know your name. What’s your name? Igor? Yeah, let me write it down.”
Rahaziel moved to Los Angeles a few months before his death on Hollywood Hills.
Back in Hallandale, Florida, he left behind a failed marriage and a strange financial situation. When his wife filed for divorce, Rahaziel reported that he had paid $1.5 million from the Israeli bankruptcy case. Still, the couple owned four homes and a yacht together.
In his divorce petition, his wife allegedly confided to her that Rahaziel “is trying to kill him as a result of his activities abroad.”
A friend told LAPD that Lahaziel moved to Los Angeles to infiltrate the intake industry. He lived at the W Hollywood Hotel when he was hanging around Dett’s Ricardo Coral. LAPD’s Dave Vinton testified at a preliminary hearing last month.
The two were unlikely pairs. Rahaziel wears a Zibunch shirt and skinny jeans. On Instagram, he flaunted the lifestyle of his private jet, Rolls-Royce and Richard Millwatch.
Coral, 29, wore a baggy hoodie and a baseball cap. A member of the fabric Pacoima gang called “The Beast,” he lives with his girlfriend and had to ask him to rent a Honda Civic, Vinton testified. The rough tattoo had a horseshoe shaped stain on his neck, the word “Ravida Ruina,” or the abandoned life.
Ricardo Corral, shown in outdated photos of the California Department of Correctional Corrections and the Department of Rehabilitation, admits that he has not committed any crime for killing Emil Rahaziel.
(California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation)
Coral had already served three prison terms for attacking police officers, carrying a gun as a felon, and shooting them into the house, court records show.
LAPD detective Corral testified, but said he met Rahaziel on Hollywood Boulevard and sold a small amount of cocaine to Rahaziel and his friends. Eventually, Coral began collecting money for Rahaziel, Vinton testified. The detective did not say the purpose of the money.
On the last night of his life, Rahaziel went to a poker game hosted by Tony Tutuni, and Vinton testified. Toutouni, who crowned “The King of Instagram” in a 2018 Daily Mirror Tabloid article, cultivated images of Playboys and posted a photo of herself surrounded by a semi-naked woman and a pile of cash.
Totuuni declined to comment when it reached the times.
Vinton testified that the two men rose to their home on Fairholm Drive in a dodge truck that was stolen earlier that night in Sylmer. Both men wore masks and hooded sweatshirts, but using phone records, Vinton identified them as Corral and Jose Martinez Sanchez, then 31.
Coral got out of the car. As he chatted with Rajaziel, Martinez turned around the truck and parked it in the direction they were coming, Vinton testified.
Rahaziel returned to the house. The security cameras showed him looking down at the glittering city where he was sleeping and leaving the balcony with his ears in his phone.
According to Vinton, Coral asked Barrett to get Rahaziel. When he left the house, the prosecutors charged him, and Coral shot Rahaziel in the face and neck.
The surveillance cameras did not capture the shooting, but a hooded gunman rushed up the stairs pointing to the escape Bullet. Vinton testified that Martinez was surrounded by a getaway car parked a few blocks away.
Corral and Martinez were arrested about a month later. At a preliminary hearing in July, their lawyers asked Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Eleanor Hunter to dismiss the murder charge.
Martinez’s lawyers argued there was no evidence that his client knew that someone would be killed when he drove to the Hollywood hills. Corral’s lawyer said evidence that established his client was a hooded, masked shooter was “scattered and accompanied by circumstances,” as seen in the footage.
“Where there is smoke, there is always no fire,” said lawyer Joseph Shemaria.
The unelslinged hunter determined that both men had seen sufficient evidence to bring them to trial.
The motive for Rahaziel’s death remains unknown. There were no signs he was targeted by the robbery, Vinton testified. Totuouni told detectives that Rahaziel lost money in the game.
At one point, Shemaria asked Vinton about one of Rahaziel’s friends. The man told detectives he left the game before the shooting because he didn’t like how Rahaziel was Trump.
“Does that make sense?” Shemaria asked.
Vinton turned to his lawyer and said, “There are so many things that don’t make sense to me.”
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