Authorities say illegal card games hosted at mansions in Encino, Sherman Oaks and the Hollywood Hills bring together Israeli organized crime figures, Latino gang members and gamblers who racked up debts as high as $1.2 million.

Emil Lahaziel knew how to bluff.

On Instagram, he posed behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce convertible. “Flying high,” he wrote in the caption of a photograph taken on a private jet.

Never mind the seven-figure debt Lahaziel owed in his native Israel, according to a financial disclosure in a divorce case, or the admission to his wife that people were looking to kill him “as a result of some of the activities he did out of the country.”

So it made sense that Lahaziel spent the last night of his life playing poker.

In the early hours of June 7, 2023, he went to a

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