LOS ANGELES -- Threats. A torched Bentley. Gunshots in the Hollywood Hills.

A network of private, high-dollar poker games in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills has been roiled by shakedowns and violence perpetrated by alleged Israeli organized crime figures, according to a federal agent’s affidavit filed last week in federal court.

The document describes how a reputed crime figure, Assaf “Ace” Waknine, allegedly tried taking a cut of the profits from a weekly card game in which players at times won and lost millions in a night.

When the host of the game balked, the affidavit said, Waknine alluded to the 2023 death of Emil Lahaziel, who was shot in the face as he walked out of a poker game in the Hollywood Hills.

“I guess you really want to end up like your other b— a— poker buddy,” Waknine wrote in a text message, according to the affidavit.

The document was filed in support of charges against Waknine, 52, for transmitting threatening communications in interstate and foreign commerce. An Israeli national who was deported from the United States in 2011, Waknine is not in custody and believed to be living in Mexico, the affidavit said.

His lawyer, Brett Greenfield, said Waknine denied having threatened or extorted people for money. “That’s just not what he does,” he said.

Greenfield said he was trying to learn more about the charges from the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles and declined to comment further.

In the affidavit, Homeland Security Investigations special agent Matthew Hernandez claimed Waknine and his brother Hai leveraged their “longstanding reputations for violence to promote a climate of fear” within Los Angeles’ Israeli community.

Hai Waknine, who was not charged in the case, previously served about six years in federal prison for racketeering. In his guilty plea, he admitted threatening to hurt businessmen if they didn’t repay loans that originated from a pool of money embezzled from an Israeli bank.

Assaf Waknine has been convicted of assault, burglary and forgery, Hernandez wrote. Waknine was also found guilty of illegal eavesdropping for cloning the pager and tapping the phone of a Los Angeles Police Department detective who was investigating him, according to the affidavit.

In the document, Hernandez alleged that Waknine collects debts, muscles “protection” payments and resolves financial disputes in Los Angeles from afar.

“You owe my partner some money,” Waknine wrote in a message cited by authorities. “And I want to talk about it nicely. Please don’t upset me with phones games.”

In another message quoted in the document, he warned: “Play with us and our money [and] the SEC and feds will be your last f— issue. We explained to you in a very direct manner don’t f— us. And you did.”

“My partners now want nothing but you,” he allegedly added, “and they will get it.”

The charges against Waknine center on his alleged ties to what Hernandez called a “cottage industry” of private poker games that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic in Los Angeles, catering to high rollers that ranged from “A-list celebrities to wealthy entrepreneurs to professional and amateur poker players.”

According to prosecutors, Waknine tried to extort money from the host of a game where the buy-in started at $20,000. Cocktail waitresses — often models or social media influencers — attended to the players, along with a full staff of card dealers, bartenders, chefs, DJs, security guards and valets. By taking half of the staff’s tips, the host — unnamed in the document — could make more than $100,000 in one night, the affidavit said.

Beginning in May 2023, a series of arsons disrupted the games, Hernandez wrote. Just after midnight on May 21, 2023, three suspects set fire to a Beverly Hills residence where a game had been held.

Three days later, four suspects set fire to a Bentley SUV that was parked outside a Benedict Canyon home where a poker party was being held, according to the affidavit. One of the suspects then fired shots into the house.

On May 26, 2023, a suspect lobbed a Molotov cocktail at a car outside an Encino house associated with one of the game hosts, setting the car and house on fire, the document said.

Two weeks later, Lahaziel was gunned down.

Thirty-nine at the time of his death, Lahaziel had left behind a “lengthy” criminal record in his native Israel, Hernandez’s affidavit said, as well as owing $1.5 million in a bankruptcy case. In a Florida divorce petition, his wife claimed Lahaziel once told her that people wanted to kill him “as a result of some of the activities he did out of the country.”

According to Hernandez’s affidavit, phone records showed that Lahaziel was in communication with Hai Waknine, often trading texts about expensive watches and fancy cars. Then, shortly before his death, Lahaziel began sending “inflammatory and threatening messages” to the Waknine brothers, the agent wrote.

The last night of his life, Lahaziel was playing poker at a rented home on Fareholm Drive when two men pulled up in a stolen Dodge truck, according to video played at a recent hearing in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

An LAPD detective testified that Ricardo Corral stepped out. Corral, then 29, was a thrice-convicted felon who’d served prison terms for assaulting police, carrying a gun as a felon and shooting into a house, according to court records.

The video showed Corral and Lahaziel speaking as Corral’s companion, Jose Martinez Sanchez, turned the truck around and parked facing back down the narrow, winding street. Lahaziel went back inside and spoke to someone on the phone. Then Corral asked a valet to tell Lahaziel to come outside. As he walked out the front door, Corral shot him in the face and neck, prosecutors charge.

Corral and Martinez Sanchez, who have pleaded not guilty, were held on murder charges after a preliminary hearing in July. No trial date has been set.

Lahaziel’s death “received widespread attention and notoriety in the insular community of high-stakes private poker in Los Angeles,” Hernandez wrote in the affidavit. Waknine, the agent claimed, alluded to the killing as he tried to get the host of the poker game targeted by arson to cough up $5,000 per game in “protection” fees.

After hanging up on Waknine, the man wrote: “I don’t know who you are and I’m in a meeting.”

“F— your meeting,” Waknine allegedly replied.

The man ultimately paid Waknine nothing, Hernandez wrote. He canceled his game after receiving the messages from Waknine, according to the agent, who cited a text exchange between the host and his security guard.

The guard sent the host a link to a 1997 Times article about Waknine tapping the LAPD detective’s phone.

“You ok?” the guard asked.

“I am ok,” the host wrote. “I just don’t want to deal with that s—.”

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.