Do you know anything about the casino business?
My ex-fiance’ was a manager. It’s a money sucker. They give suckers the rooms. If he gambled, he lost. Period. Likely hundreds of thousands if he had all those comp cards. He’s a major money loser. That’s how it works. You gamble; you lose.
I know it’s a money sucker... casinos never go out of business for having a run of bad luck because they don’t leave anything up to luck. Bad luck is only for guests. Now, if he was gambling against other gamblers in poker rather than the house....it would be possible for him to be a very lucky boy ... perhaps with the aide of his girlfriend and tiny cameras, even luckier. Speculation of course.
What I was asking was if anyone had solid, specific information that he was in debt and lost all his money, because I haven’t been able to follow the story closely. It would be a reasonable assumption he had lost a lot over the years, since he was a welcome repeat guest. But did he gamble himself into a hole? I don’t think so, given the other things we know about his case.... namely that he spent a year buying guns, he had money to wire to the Philippines, and he did not go on a selling spree of his assets to raise funds.
I think it more likely that he had some other form of income so lucrative that he could afford to lose, and he gambled for entertainment. His brother hinted otherwise, that he thought he gambled for income... but that may just have been what Steve told his family about his money rather than tell them something they might not want to hear, that it was ill gotten gains. “Hi, mom, I just acquired an obscene amount of money from smuggling a load of heroin. Let’s buy a duplex!” Or “Hi, brother! Some cartel just paid me for bumping off a potential rival drug lord. Let’s go buy a bar in the Florida keys.” Or “Honey, a sheikh in the UAE just paid me for transporting another set of underage Philippine girls. Wanna party for a week in Bali?” It’d be much easier to tell the relatives you won a high stakes poker game when you give them gifts of money, and no questions will be asked.