Former king of L.A. casino hits a string of bad luck

Now Hardie is 75, splitting his time between Las Vegas and the tiny town of Corozal, Belize, hoping to free his son and three security guards from a Mexican jail just over the border.

Every gambler has his story, and they all come back to luck. Hardie's latest turn came after he put down a big bet on casino gambling in Belize. His venture wasn't working out as well as he had dreamed even before his son, George Jr., wound up in jail. His son had followed unruly gamblers from Corozal to the Mexican border, where he was charged with possession of a gun and attempted murder.

At first, local newspapers portrayed the two Mexican nationals as innocent victims who were shot at in a quarrel over beer.

"I'm very afraid that something else will happen to me, because those people have a lot of power and money. They tried to kill me," the wounded man told a local newspaper from his hospital bed.

But after Hardie released video from the casino that night, some Mexican newspapers began to criticize the arrest of the four men, with a leading paper in the state of Quintana Roo calling it "a terrible injustice."

The case has Hardie looking back at the tough hands he's been dealt in his decades in the gambling business.

A sweet hand

None of those bad cards would have come up, Hardie insists, if he hadn't been pushed out of the best game in town nearly 15 years ago.

In the mid-1980s, Hardie was holding a sweet hand. He was the de facto king of the card clubs.

"Hardie was the driving force that created the Bike club, the largest card casino in the world," said Nelson Rose, a Whittier Law School professor and an expert on gambling. "You could almost say that Hardie was the father of the modern large California card club."

The games may have been on the up-and-up, but much of the financing for the casino, it turned out, was not.

In the late 1980s, the casino was raided by federal agents, who accused some of the card club's partners of building up the casino with laundered drug money. An investigation turned up no evidence that Hardie had any involvement, and he testified for the prosecution.