Casino Risque

 By TIMOTHY TAYLOR

27 April 2007 for The Globe and Mail Report on Business Magazine

Online gambling, extreme fighting, heat from U.S. authorities-the fabulous (and somewhat murky) world of Calvin Ayre, farm boy-turned-tycoon

There is a moment in pretty much every bout of mixed martial arts-or MMA, as it is now popularly known-where the spectator will see roughly the following: a lean, mid-20s male, muscular and tattooed, astride the chest of a similar mid-20s male, pounding his fists downward into his opponent’s face. This moment doesn’t always signal the end of the fight. MMA is known for slippery manoeuvres that turn the fight improbably upside down: knee bars and chokeholds that are applied in a sudden unfurling of limbs, a slithering of bodies that invert the expectations, like some huge, sweating piece of origami unfolding to reveal an object you could not possibly have predicted.<?xml:namespace prefix = o />

Still, unless you’re a very devout MMA fan, you’ll be hard-pressed not to feel, in that first moment-as the fists descend, the nasal blood mists, spackling the canvas, and the supine opponent’s hands flutter to defend his eyes-that Western civilization itself teeters on the brink of oblivion, perhaps never to awaken again.

Welcome to the Barceló Playa Tambor in Costa Rica. I’m ringside with Calvin Ayre, the Saskatchewan-born online gambling tycoon perhaps best known for being the cover boy of Forbes’s Billionaire issue in March, 2006. Ayre, whose net worth at that time was estimated at slightly over $1 billion (U.S.), is the founder and CEO of Bodog Entertainment, one of the highest-profile and most controversial players in the online gambling industry. We’re here watching the filming of the third and fourth seasons of BodogFight’s “MMA lifestyle show,” as Ayre calls it, now carried to 93 million households twice-weekly by Ion Television, the U.S. broadcast group. BodogFight, one of the entertainment divisions of Bodog.com and a key component of the company’s branding strategy, is also one of the CEO’s favourite projects-he happens to be a hard-core MMA fan. “It’s simply the best fight product out there,” he says. “And we felt Bodog’s flamboyant marketing muscle could really broaden the sport’s fan base.”

Flamboyant is the key word here. Vegas at the dangerous tail end of a steroid binge comes to mind. In the baking sun at Tambor Beach, there are a couple hundred participants-fighters, trainers, hangers-on-sitting on the crates that make up the bleachers of this Survivor-styled set, flexing in their Bloodline- and Pimp Hammer-brand MMA leisure wear. There are Bodog-hired girls salted throughout the crowd in their Brazilian-cut bikinis, their push-ups and their teddies. There are reportedly nine cameras at work on the set from BodogFight alone. And the outside press-from Canada and elsewhere-has been shuttling in and out all week, making this perhaps the only entertainment production in the world that starts the hard junketing on the first day of principal photography.

And then there is Ayre himself, posed at the epicentre of this action. Single, in his mid-40s, getting a gut. He’s wearing a short-sleeved tropical shirt. He has a drink on the go, working against what would appear to be a pretty decent hangover. (“Some of his party buddies were in yesterday,” his PR handler confides.) He sits on a raised bleacher between a pretty young woman described to me as his “date” and a hard-eyed model in a red bustier.

I’ve just had one of those MMA moments that for all but the aficionado will induce a kind of existential despair: the experience of watching someone be punched unconscious as they lie on their back. Ayre has made his way ringside to congratulate the winning fighter, one of only a few sponsored by Bodog, while in the background, play-by-play commentator Bob Sheridan lays it on perhaps a bit thick as he intones: Calvin doesn’t miss a fight. He loves them. What he might not know is that the fighters love him as much as he loves them.

What does Bodog like about this particular fighter, I ask Ayre as he returns to his crate, reseating himself between the girls in the shade of crossed palm fronds. I am expecting some enlightenment on the topic of strikers versus grapplers, or the fine art of the takedown. But Ayre answers by turning to his favourite topic of all-one he’ll return to often in the conversations we’ll have over the next day and a half.

“I like him because he’s a brand ambassador for us,” Ayre says, squinting up through cracking TV makeup. “He’s everything Bodog stands for as a brand. Living life to the fullest. Me against him, right? The primeval challenge. Those are our brand values.”

Aggressive. But then an aggressive brand-one linked with the most violent legal blood sport on Earth-may be just what you need in the world of online gambling these days. For all the production and PR hoopla surrounding the MMA shoot, Bodog is first and foremost an online casino, where gamblers who don’t want to leave the comfort of the La-Z-Boy can play all the regular casino games (craps, baccarat, roulette, blackjack, slots), visit an online poker room with hundreds of tables, or go to the online sports book where lines are posted and bets can be made on everything from horse racing to college football to MMA itself.

Bodog is only one of dozens of such sites competing for a piece of a global industry with estimated revenue-total wagers less winnings paid back to players-of $12 billion in 2005, the most recent year for which reliable figures are available. Ayre’s company doesn’t command much market share: Its wager volume ($7.3 billion) generated $210 million in revenue in 2005, for a share of under 2%. That’s about the same percentage it now holds in the hugely popular poker market, where an industry leader such as PokerStars has an estimated share of about 25%.

But those numbers aren’t as important to Bodog as the $55 million Ayre publicized widely as the company’s net profit in 2005. That was the critical data in the Forbes calculation that put his personal net worth at $1 billion. (Magazine staff arrived at the figure by applying an 18 times-trailing-earnings multiplier, a figure then considered applicable to publicly traded online gaming stocks, and factoring in other Bodog assets.) Whether the estimate stands, however, is debatable. Bodog (the name is invented and has no inherent meaning) is privately held, and even its ownership can’t be verified without access to confidential information. Certainly Forbes no longer believes Ayre is worth that much-it dumped him from its 2007 list in March.

Still, Ayre has made great use of the billionaire tag, combining it with such other elements as MMA in a highly effective branding strategy that sets Bodog apart from its competitors. While rivals such as PartyPoker and 888.com direct players straight to their gaming tables, Bodog presents a lifestyle: The Bodog.com website is cross-hatched with links to BodogFight, as well as to the BodogMusic label and the online magazine BodogNation, which itself points back to other destinations such as the sports book and the Maxim-style BodogGirl spreads. Ayre himself appears throughout the site, depicted as the consummate playboy in photo galleries and an exhaustive collection of press clippings. Any page that doesn’t have the CEO smiling out from between a couple of celebrities or with his arms draped around exotic gals with umbrella drinks shows other guys in suits holding Scotch tumblers and laughing overly hard, or gesturing to one another like catalogue models as if to convince visitors that a real world, with all the mixological and sexual possibilities that Ayre appears to regularly enjoy, does in fact exist just outside the frame.

And that’s a subtle bit of brand business, offering to players some value in addition to the privilege of giving their money away online. All the blinged-out, wide-boy fantasy material may induce the sense you’re watching a culture lying supine and getting its lights punched out. But you have to give Ayre his props on the strategy, which has helped Bodog weather extremely difficult times for the online gambling sector and-who knows?-might even get him his billion back.

The hurdles the industry is now facing can be blamed squarely on the U.S. Department of Justice. Its shooting war with the online gambling sector began in July, 2006, when government officials arrested David Carruthers, CEO of BetonSports.com, and charged him with racketeering and fraud. The crackdown continued that October, after Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), banning banks and credit card companies from processing payments to online casinos. (Proponents of the act tend to cite gambling addiction rates and the risk of criminal or terrorist money laundering through unregulated online gambling sites.) By January, 2007, the sector was in full retreat, with virtually all publicly traded gambling companies withdrawn from the U.S. market. Still, the FBI swooped in and arrested Canadians John Lefebvre and Stephen Lawrence, founders of Neteller Inc., a payment processor that had continued to handle billions on behalf of the industry.

“It’s horrible. We’re in a state of disarray,” says Russ Hawkins, owner of Major Wager, a leading online gaming discussion forum. Bets placed by American gamblers had represented the majority of the industry’s business. Hawkins estimates that industry volumes are now off 30%. Meanwhile, share prices of publicly traded online gaming companies have tanked. PartyGaming PLC, once part of the FTSE 100, has suffered such massive declines in its share price that one analyst covering large- and mid-cap stocks at Charles Stanley in London comments, with evident Oxbridgian glee, that the online gaming sector has essentially “fallen out of our universe.”

The huge obstacles to payment processing are not insurmountable. “Credit cards still work,” says Chris Costigan, a long-time friend of Ayre’s and owner of another popular gaming discussion site, Gambling 911. That’s provided the online casino uses offshore processors that allow gaming payments to pass through uncoded. But finding processors willing to break U.S. laws in this way isn’t exactly difficult. Google the words “payment processing” and “uncoded” and you’ll turn up dozens.

The more fatal problem, however, has been software-related. Online casinos very commonly use gaming and support software licensed from third parties. In the wake of the UIGEA, many of these third-party suppliers adjusted their systems to block U.S.-based Internet addresses, vaporizing the American customer base for many online casinos. That’s what happened to the online poker site Doyles Room when its network, provided by Tribeca Tables, decided it could no longer risk operating in the U.S.

Almost every CEO in the business is now talking about expansion into Asia, but the lost revenues won’t be replaced quickly. The U.S. market represented more than 50% of the global industry in 2005 (prior to the legal crisis), according to Christiansen Capital Advisors founder Eugene Christiansen, who has tracked gambling industry volumes since 1982. Both Costigan and Hawkins also stress how difficult Asian expansion can be. The preferred games are different. There are language barriers and marketing problems, and the legal environment in Asia is not necessarily more lenient. China has been stepping up enforcement of its regulations against online gambling, Costigan points out, citing a recent three-month crackdown.

Yet, superficially at least, little seems to have changed for Bodog. Defying the wisdom of virtually every public company in the business, it continues to service the American market. It’s able to do so because of a policy of in-house software control that stretches back to the genesis of the company. Nobody can turn off the taps on them by blocking U.S. IP addresses, because the only significant part of Bodog’s operation that has ever been handled externally was the online casino (unlike its sports book and poker room), and that vulnerability appears to have been eliminated. “The online casino was with Realtime Gaming,” Costigan says. “But my understanding from Calvin is that they’ve now bought the source code.”

Ayre also plays a very deliberate game when it comes to corporate structure and jurisdiction. Bodog has online gaming licences in Antigua and the Kahnawake Mohawk Reserve in Quebec (the legality of the latter’s gaming commission is an open question, but seemingly not one that federal or provincial government officials have much interest in pursuing). The company has a bookmaking licence in the United Kingdom, which enables it to take sports bets from anywhere in the world, and servers in Antigua, Kahnawake and the Channel Islands. A call centre and a promotions company, Riptown Media, operate out of Vancouver. Online gambling is illegal in Canada, and Ayre avoids any potential conflict with authorities here by refusing to take bets from Canadians and blocking Canadian IP addresses. (I tried to open an account by phone from Vancouver and was told there were “legal and jurisdictional” issues, but that Bodog was “working on it.”)

Having spread his operations strategically around the world, Ayre insists that he is legal in every jurisdiction in which he operates. And a recent World Trade Organization ruling against the United States and in favour of Antigua’s right to continue offering online gambling to American residents emboldens Ayre to claim that his operations are sanctioned in the context of international law. That ruling has also motivated him to leave Costa Rica, his home of 10 years, where online gambling has merely been ignored, and to set up shop in Antigua, where it is nurtured as a matter of government policy. “I’m gone already,” Ayre tells me, dismissively. “I don’t live here any more.”

We’re sitting in the poolside office of his house outside San José. Twenty-four hours removed from the MMA set, Ayre seems fully recovered from his hangover. He’s relaxed here, lounging in shorts and flip-flops, occasionally leaning over to his computer to check incoming e-mail, although he chooses his words with great caution, smiles infrequently and limits his eye contact. Around us stretches the house that he helped design, with all the Bodog-brand-consistent lifestyle components in place. There’s a swim-up bar next to the pool. There’s a fake waterfall, and a decked-out weight room that opens onto the courtyard. There’s an outdoor kitchen with a grill big enough to roast the luau pig.

Yet even if he is able to duplicate this luxury in Antigua, his sanctuary there won’t eliminate the risk of his arrest by American authorities should he ever visit the U.S. Ayre insists that the American crackdown has nothing to do with his decision not to travel there. “I stopped going there months before all that happened,” he says, his tone defensive. “I made the conscious decision to stop going to the U.S. because it’s not an environment that’s very supportive of our industry.”

Perhaps. But Ayre also stopped going there right after David Carruthers was arrested in Texas. In fact, Bodog immediately postponed-and later cancelled-a high-profile marketing conference in Las Vegas that Ayre had been scheduled to host the same month.

As for Canada, Ayre rather tersely denies he’s avoiding the country of his birth, saying he was back as recently as November. Industry observer Costigan suggests Ayre might be more cautious in future: “Bodog has to be very high on the list of targeted companies [by the Department of Justice]. So you have to figure Calvin is not going to be stepping foot in the United States. And he’s not going to be stepping foot in Canada.”

In either case, Bodog’s corporate structure may not ultimately be as important in insulating Ayre from the troubles that have befallen other industry players as is his favourite bit of Bodoggery, the branding strategy. Because however simple the energy of his brand may ultimately be, Ayre’s overall approach to selling those brand values is sophisticated.

The strategy arises directly from two challenges. The first is the low public profile the company is being forced to adopt in the United States. Advertising Bodog.com may not be illegal, but it would appear to be ill-advised, if only in the minds of the company’s media partners. A plan to wrap Allegiant Air flights into Las Vegas with Bodog colours, for example, was cancelled by the airline in April of last year. By December, Bodog had pulled all of its U.S.-facing advertising.

The second lies with the intrinsic difficulty of selling online brands. Consumers are normally able to publicize their affiliation with a brand. You buy a pair of Nikes, you get to wear the swoosh. With an online experience such as gaming, however, nothing physical is transferred. Once the computer is powered down, there’s no way for a Bodog user to publicly identify with Bodog values. (These being the “Work hard, play harder” mantra that is reiterated ad nauseum in Bodog PR materials, appended in my mind with the aggressive sentiments expressed ringside in Tambor: “Me and him, right? The primeval challenge.”)

Bodog overcomes these challenges with its entertainment divisions, particularly BodogFight and BodogMusic; the latter recently sponsored Bodog Battle, an indie rock version of American Idol promising $1 million to the winner. Both brand channels generate physical content (live shows, pay-per-view events, swag), all of which is aimed at the same audience Ayre targets with his online casino: “18-to-40-year-old males, or people who think like them. They like sports, they like fighting, they like music and they like playing poker.”

Content quality in these channels may not yet be at industry-leading levels. (A surf through online MMA boards yields much snickering about BodogFight’s production values and entertainment quality.) And the fact that the Winnipeg-raised punk-rocker vegan tattoo-billboard Bif Naked is the most famous name Ayre has so far attached to the Bodog music label places it far outside the big leagues. But when Ayre describes how these channels work, content quality doesn’t really sound like a top priority anyway.

“We use branded content to sell brand values and steer traffic back to our online properties,” Ayre explains, sitting forward and permitting some enthusiasm on this point. “Everything I do is aimed at creating an army of secondary brand ambassadors. Like the MMA event we just did. We have 250 people there. And we treat them all on a level that they find very seductive. And then we constantly hit them with our message. And they all go back to their countries and their little mixed martial arts fight gyms, and the production people all go back to production companies all over Canada and the United States. And they’re all selling Bodog and spreading the gospel.”

The fact that the MMA television show and the band competition both lose money doesn’t deter Ayre. He believes they’ll be profitable by next year, putting him in the enviable position of having his marketing programs pay for themselves. But stand-alone profits aren’t necessary anyway, because the entertainment channels promote the Bodog name so tirelessly that spinoff traffic to Bodog.com is virtually guaranteed. Once there, the visitor is only a mouse click or two away from the casino. That’s one click away from opening your wallet and handing the money to Ayre, without his ever having uttered a word about anything the DOJ considers illegal.

“It’s the purest conversion model that’s ever existed,” Ayre boasts. “We have calls to action on all of our programs that attract people to our Web properties.” And it’s almost friction-free. No getting out of your chair required. Just put down the remote control and turn to your computer. “It’s just a matter of clicking straight through to Bodog and sending money to us. It’s easy. It’s clean.”

And sensible from a legal perspective. Bodog.com tucks its head well down in the trench, while BodogFight and BodogMusic stand up and shout, directing profits toward their hidden master without raising a shot from the enemy.

Of course, the Bodog branding strategy is incomplete without Ayre himself. Secondary ambassadors are important, but there can be only one primary ambassador. Other casinos have tried manufacturing such figureheads or hiring them (Doyles Room had Pamela Anderson for a while). Ayre believes nothing beats having the head of the company actually embody the brand message. (Think Dave Thomas and Wendy’s, although with a decidedly different brand tone.) “It’s a higher degree of legitimacy,” Ayre says. “And it’s safer, assuming I can pull it off. Safer because I work harder than anyone else. I’ll never ask for a raise. And I don’t complain about doing what I’m doing now.”

He’s talking about me, of course. But I don’t take offence. His comment gets at the very heart of Bodog’s strategy. I’ve probably read a few hundred pages of media coverage on Ayre by this point, on Bodog.com and across the Web. All of it rings familiar bells. Ayre as ladies’ man. Ayre as party animal. Ayre as fight enthusiast. Ayre in a plane, in a penthouse, on a yacht, in Cambodia with two arms full of massage parlour girls. But always, overlying it all, a droning message in never-ending ostinato: Ayre as Billionaire.

How does Ayre confirm any of this is working? Easily, it would seem. “My own basket of interests falls into the mainstream of your typical person who thinks like an 18-to-40-year-old male,” he says. “And that person is basically a person who thinks like me. So from my perspective, it’s very simple. If I like it, then I assume a lot of other guys are going to like it.”

Which is tempting to accept without further analysis, in part because nothing in Ayre’s present image is incongruous. The man, in promotions, in person and by reputation, is in fact eerily consistent: Ayre does this set of things; they involve women and booze, gambling and a strong hint of nearby, associated danger (and, in fairness, a compensatory charitable foundation). But there’s nothing to suggest this isn’t appealing to the demographic he’s targeting or that it isn’t genuinely him. “Oh, it’s the real thing,” chuckles Chris Costigan, whose website last year published a story indicating that Ayre had slept with 8,000 women. “It’s definitely the real thing.”

What’s inconsistent is the story that explains how he got this way. That story is also told in boilerplates, although these have a curiously different tone. In virtually every version, the story breaks Ayre’s life into three pieces. In the first, he’s a boy in Saskatchewan, growing up on his father’s pig farm. In the second, he’s a restless university student who sells fruit out of a truck and parlays this into his first small business. In the third, Ayre sells all of his possessions for $10,000 and founds Bodog (via a predecessor company in 1994), which, in six or seven years, becomes one of the only online casinos with its own proprietary gaming software, shortly after which Ayre hits the cover of Forbes. A pastoral, a recitative and a glorious climax.

And yet this doesn’t seem to fit the man. Where’s the MMA-style aggression, the living large? There’s hardly a whiff of danger or women or debauchery of any kind in this backstory (as distinct from the lubricated renditions on offer of his present life), making you wonder how the existing Calvin Ayre, in the form publicized so widely, could possibly emerge from the Horatio Alger plot line of his official bio.

The answer is that he didn’t. Or, at least, the man can’t be understood emerging from that plot line without some key additions to the narrative. The first would have to be the 1987 drug bust in which he was implicated. This is a matter of public record for anyone who bothers to dig up the Court of Queen’s Bench of New Brunswick record F/CR/4/88, a sentencing document prepared by the Honorable Justice David M. Dickson. (David Baines, a long-time investigative journalist at The Vancouver Sun, broke the story last year.)

In September, 1987, police busted a smuggling operation involving the import of 750 pounds of marijuana to Canada from Jamaica. Four men were charged: Calvin Ayre’s father, Ken; William (Bill) Roberts (living common law with Calvin’s sister at the time); Bill’s elder brother Patrick Roberts, and a man named Frank Maddock.

The plan was a daring one, although doomed. Patrick bought a plane and flew to New Jersey to have long-range fuel tanks installed. Unwittingly, he also took on-board a tracking device, as the fuel tank installers were actually American customs officials. Roberts then flew to the Bahamas, of which Justice Dickson wrote: “Patrick Roberts, I may say, was, it seems, through this period in Nassau, to have been in company if not all the time certainly a lot of the time with another gentleman who is the son of one of the present accused and undoubtedly played a part in this whole scheme or was part of the whole arrangement, because that third party there had contact with the three accused here and was making phone calls back and forth.” And later: “Certainly the operation of the other chap with Roberts in the Bahamas appears to have been an important one.” Police testimony during the trial identified the third party as Calvin Ayre.

Still, Ayre wasn’t charged. But the incident did point him onward to another important narrative turn missing from the official bio. In prison for his role in the smuggling operation, Patrick Roberts met Erich Brunnhuber, a legendary Vancouver Stock Exchange scamster, infamous on Howe Street for his role in promoting stock that crashed on the VSE’s 1984 Black Friday. Some time in 1990, after they were both released, Roberts introduced Brunnhuber to Ayre. Roberts, by this point, had been given power of attorney over the financial affairs of the elderly majority owner of Bicer Medical Systems, a company that made heart valves. Ayre, being a friend of Roberts’s and a recent MBA graduate (City University, Seattle), was installed as president of the company.

Within months, Ayre and Roberts had a disagreement that led to them parting ways. Roberts says the falling-out related to Brunnhuber, whom Ayre had involved in Bicer affairs despite his stock fraud conviction. And according to B.C. Securities Commission documents, Ayre assumed full control of the company in September, 1990.

The company crashed and burned in less than a year. Trading in Bicer shares was halted and subsequently suspended in July, 1991. Bicer was delisted in March, 1992. The commission later found that Ayre had made distributions of shares without a prospectus, that he’d acquired large blocks of Bicer shares personally without disclosing these acquisitions, and that he’d failed to file insider reports disclosing his trading of more than three million Bicer shares, over which he had “beneficial ownership of, or control or direction over.” Ayre was fined $10,000 and banned from the exchange for 20 years, specifically from “becoming or acting as a director or officer of any reporting issuer” or “engaging in any investor relations activities.”

Ayre kept a low profile after the Bicer fiasco. His bio in a 2000 SEC filing identifies him as owner and president of HQ Vancouver, “a privately held Canadian business incubation company.” Still, he did have one more run at the public markets via his involvement with a company called Cyberoad.com (OTC: FUNN). Cyberoad was in the business of developing gaming technologies for licence to online gaming sites. Ayre was the company’s “founder and visionary,” according to the prospectus. FUNN topped $6 (U.S.) in May, 1999, then skidded steadily downward into financial oblivion. The incident only added to the stock market losses for which he shares responsibility. But, as Costigan says, “You get as big as Calvin and skeletons just don’t stay in the closet.”

Ayre doesn’t acknowledge any skeletons. He only points out, with respect to the Roberts brothers, that Bill Roberts had a nasty split from Ayre’s sister, followed by a 10-year custody dispute over their two children. But then, explaining his unwillingness to engage the press on the issue, Ayre says: “I’ve watched people sue reporters, and they never look better. Here’s something my father taught me: You fight a pig, you still get covered in pig shit.”

It’s an aggressive comment. But it is at least much more in keeping with the branded Calvin Ayre on display in Bodog PR materials than with the preppy version of his former self presented in his official bio. Perhaps the Bodog brand actually benefits from an ill-defined, edgy Calvin Ayre and the legally ambiguous nature of online gambling in general.

“No question,” Ayre says, when asked directly. “It makes us more seductive. And in particular, it increases the value of Bodog, because Bodog is in the television and music business. We really capitalize on it. It makes the story good.”

It’s a comment that spirals back toTambor, back to that site of brand message masquerading as an MMA production. After the fights were over, Ayre climbed up on the ring apron and asked all of the assembled fighters to come up and sign the ring canvas. A horde of gym guys, slinging themselves through the rope and into the ring, squatted down and scribbled their names. And then, in a group act that appeared entirely spontaneous, they queued up. They stood in a long, humble line, these hyperbolically machismo fighting machines, with their tats and their inspirational T-shirts informing the world that “Pain is merely weakness leaving the body.” They shuffled past Ayre on his crate, between his pouting gals. They shook his hand and ducked their heads in respect-the devoted with their Colonel Kurtz, while the palm trees swayed and the Bodog girls smoothed lotion over each other’s shoulders and primped for the after-party and the light started to fail over the Bahía Bellina.

What has made the Bodog story good? Money and danger. Same as it always has been in gambling and the fight game. Same as it would have been in Vegas in the early days. Bad guys everywhere. The air stirred up by the vengeful gods of chance. By the nearness of violent minds, violent pasts. Which points onward to perhaps the only two things that could cripple Bodog, hurt that story to the point of making it irrelevant. And those would be, of course, the removal of the money or the danger.

Legalization in the U.S., for example. An MSN-Wynn alliance. A wager option on the Google home page. Nothing would take danger out of the business faster than that.

And then, the money. That scary billion. On a sideboard in the living room, I spy a deck of cards with the Forbes cover embossed on the back. There are dozens of copies of the famous issue throughout the house, on an end table here, thrown carelessly onto the arm of a chair over there. It’s framed poster-sized in Ayre’s office not behind his desk, but across the room, where his gaze will have fallen on it a thousand, a hundred thousand times. He’s working with an author, he tells me, writing his biography. In two volumes: one book up to the Forbes cover; the second one for after.

“It’s what being Superbowl MVP represents to a football player,” he says, earnestly. “I mean…” And here he trails off in a nervous laugh, lost for words in the galactic shadow of his accomplishment, lost to even the thought, the possibility, that the billion might no longer be there. That Forbes might have it right leaving him off the list this year. That the off-the-record London investment banker who rubbished the 18 times-trailing-earnings multiple might have a point. “A billion?” he snorted. “You can’t value a company that’s totally illegal in the context of U.S. law. It’s meaningless.”

Ayre won’t think these thoughts and won’t be worried as a result. He ends our interview in a relatively buoyant mood, bouncing out of his chair to kiss one of the models goodbye. And then it’s logistics time, as he stands in the middle of the living room and fields walkie-talkie calls on the topic of my taxi, which is missing. Voices garbling into the room.

Leader? A woman’s voice this time. Ayre picks up the walkie-talkie again. “Yeah, leader here.” Leader? When are we going to dinner? He looks at his watch. “Um, right away, I think.”

He turns to me. The moment of final words having arrived.

“I have the only bulletproof Hummer in Costa Rica,” Calvin Ayre tells me.

And he’s off.