A Dog's Life: Ayre in Macau with his friends, before he "retired." | Photograph by Mark Leong
Work, Work, Work: Ayre builds his with Zara Taylor and a gaggle of Chinese models, at the Macau club Cubic. | Photograph by Mark Leong
The year before the UIGEA was passed, the online "gross gaming yield" -- what the customer loses -- was $14.6 billion, according to the U.K.-based Global Betting and Gaming Consultants (GBGC). Their 2007 estimate was $15.2 billion. In other words, major sites vanished, but the overall volume of play was barely affected. "Some of the really big independent sites such as Bodog and PokerStars boomed after UIGEA because they stepped into the shoes of those who turned their back on the U.S. market," says Warwick Bartlett, a partner at GBGC.
The UIGEA did come at a cost to Ayre's personal life, however. Once a fixture in the clubs of Los Angeles and Miami, he hasn't been back to the United States since the law turned up the heat. His lawyers advised against it, particularly after the arrests of David Carruthers and Peter Dicks, British executives for the public firms BetonSports and Sportingbet, respectively, both picked up at U.S. airports during stopovers in the summer of 2006.
"Everyone in the industry assumes that they could be on some kind of federal wanted list," says Sue Schneider, founder and publisher of Interactive Gaming News. "Calvin Ayre is on a list somewhere," says Frank Catania, the former director of the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement and now a prominent industry consultant. "If he traveled in the U.S., he'd be picked up."
Ayre the optimist, of course, insists otherwise. He told me in Macau that there's no reason he can't come back to the United States, that his company is entirely legal, that he simply refocused overseas. "We voluntarily left that market. Remember, I'm not American. I don't do any business there. There are a lot of countries I don't go back to. I haven't been to Mongolia in the last two years. I haven't been to Chile in the last two years."
But the United States is, after all, more than half of the global online-gambling market. I wanted to hear him say it bothers him, that he misses the United States -- the place that made Calvin Ayre into CALVIN AYRE!
"The U.S. is really just not something that we're focusing on right now," he said, "because we don't see that as our future. We licensed the brand rights to an indigenous group [Morris Mohawk]. To us that was, like, a masterstroke. We can walk away operationally but still have an income stream from the brand penetrations that we put in place."
While Ayre insisted Bodog hasn't broken any laws, he also has embraced his fugitive reputation. "It really amps up my bad-boy billionaire stature," he told me. "It gives me street cred."
We lasted maybe a half hour at the Macau convention, not moving more than a few feet from where our entourage first stalled, alongside a booth advertising a mah-jongg site. "I don't actually run anything anymore," he said as he drained his glass of wine. "I'm just high-level direction at this point. You have to let go of stuff, right? Otherwise, you'll die."
It was 7 p.m. at the MGM hotel's Caviar Bar, and Ayre had declared it too early for champagne. Anticipating a long night, he also thought it too early for vodka, so he insisted we should chase our caviar with chardonnay. The marble-floored, gold-walled room was ours alone, but to note that is deceiving. Present were a photographer, a cameraman, a publicist, an assistant, and a stunt girlfriend. It was like a film production of a night out.
Ayre, wearing a satiny white button-down, plopped some caviar on a blini and topped it with sour cream. "Work, work, work, work ..." he said for the first but not the last time.
Caviar was followed by Cantonese food served by beautiful Chinese women (in a private dining room, of course), after which we made a short hop to Cubic, a private club atop an already exclusive club atop an office tower across from the Grand Emperor, a Chinese casino with a giant flashing neon crown.
"The last party was so good that I woke up across the bottom of the bed with no clothes on," Ayre told me. "Alone!" For all of his flaunting of women, Ayre appeared to spend each of his nights in Macau alone. Zara Taylor played the part of the girlfriend, but was actually sharing a room with Fawn Labrie, Ayre's personal assistant and Taylor's childhood best friend. That isn't to suggest that Ayre has any problems with the ladies -- one story at Gambling911.com claims he has bedded 8,000 women -- but rather that not everything you see in James Bond movies actually happens.
Scattered around the room at Cubic was a smattering of industry friends. Hip-hop boomed from the sound system, and booty-shaking music videos filled the flat-screen TVs on the walls. Objecting to a lack of females in the room, Ayre yelled, "Where the dancing girls at?" as he poured glass after glass of Dom Pérignon for anyone whose glass was even half empty.
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