Black Friday indictee Rubin refused bail
Accused payment processing intermediary Ira Rubin was yesterday ordered to be detained after Manhattan court deemed him a flight risk.
One of the men accused in the Black Friday indictments of helping PokerStars and Full Tilt allegedly dodge laws banning the processing of gambling payments in the US was yesterday denied bail.
Ira Rubin, charged upon his arrest in April on nine counts, including conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, was yesterday ordered to be detained after a magistrate judge in Manhattan deemed him a flight risk. Rubin had requested to be granted US$300,000 bond and be allowed to live with his parents in Florida while awaiting trial.
“There are unlimited reasons I cannot consent to the defendant’s release. I think I have no choice but to detain the defendant,” US Magistrate Judge James L Cott was reported to have told the court by Bloomberg. Federal prosecutors said that on 15 April, the day Rubin was named in the federal indictment, Rubin had chartered a plane from Costa Rica to Guatemala in an attempt to flee to Thailand.
Assistant US Attorney Arlo Devlin-Brown told the magistrate judge that 53-year-old US citizen Rubin also had an outstanding warrant for his arrest on contempt of court charges, after he fled to Costa Rica from Florida in 2008 after being served with civil charges relating to a telemarketing fraud. “He’s an extreme flight risk because he’s already done it once before,” Devlin-Brown said.
Devlin-Brown added that Rubin’s criminal record dated back “to the 1970s”, and included at least 24 different crimes. Rubin also had outstanding warrants and criminal cases in Massachusetts, Nevada, Missouri, Florida, New York and Virginia, said the federal prosecutor.
Rubin’s lawyer Stuart Meissner told the court he thought these were pre-1995 and therefore “very old matters”. To which Cott responded: “It’s old, but it’s long,” according to Bloomberg.
Meissner however also told the court the evidence against his client, “despite what the government says”, was questionable, and said they intended to fight the charges. Rubin’s lawyer also cited the prosecution’s reliance on “jailhouse informants”. Meissner said he would speak to his client about making a bail application before US District Judge Lewis Kaplan, presiding over the main case, US v Tzvetkoff et al.
The indictment unsealed on 15 April accuses poker companies PokerStars, Full Tilt and Absolute Poker via third-party payment processors including Rubin, of fraudulently arranging for “the money received by US gamblers to be disguised as payments to hundreds of non-existent online merchants purporting to sell merchandise such as jewelry and golf balls.” The shell companies Rubin created included a fake electronics business and golf store, Devlin-Brown said yesterday.
Another man accused in the indictments of acting as a payment processing intermediary in the US for the poker companies, Bradley Franzen, last month pled guility on criminal charges of conspiracy to commit bank fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and operating an illegal gambling business.