The Commerce Casino soon became the preeminent card club, surpassing the Bicycle Club, now the Bicycle Casino. The feds weren’t interested in taking chances on modernizing. But the government ran the club with the caution of a bureaucrat, he said. marshals seized the club in 1990 after a jury convicted four men of racketeering charges stemming from laundering millions of dollars from drug deals through a number of companies, including the Bicycle Club. Things got worse for Hardie when the federal government got into the gambling business. An investigation turned up no evidence that Hardie had any involvement, and he testified for the prosecution. 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. The games may have been on the up-and-up, but much of the financing for the casino, it turned out, was not. “You could almost say that Hardie was the father of the modern large California card club.” “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.
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