Tom Goldstein Gets Six Years in Prison After Poker-Linked Tax Case
The former Supreme Court litigator was ordered to pay $3.1 million in restitution and will serve five years of supervised release.
Tom Goldstein, the former Supreme Court litigator and SCOTUSblog co-founder, was sentenced on Friday to six years in federal prison after his conviction on tax crimes and mortgage fraud tied to years of high-stakes poker gambling. He was also ordered to pay $3.1 million in restitution and serve five years of supervised release.
The sentence followed a six-week trial in Greenbelt, Maryland, where jurors found the 56-year-old Chevy Chase resident guilty on 12 of 16 counts. The convictions included one count of tax evasion under 26 U.S.C. 7201, four counts of aiding and assisting the preparation of false tax returns under 26 U.S.C. 7206(2), four counts of willfully failing to pay taxes under 26 U.S.C. 7203, and three counts of mortgage fraud under 18 U.S.C. 1014.
The trial included testimony from Tobey Maguire, who had enlisted Goldstein’s help recovering a gambling debt from a billionaire. Jurors deliberated for about two days before returning the guilty verdict in February.
In a June sentencing memorandum, prosecutors said Goldstein’s conduct stretched from 2012 to the present and involved a multi-year effort to hide his real income from the IRS, delay payment, and obstruct the investigation. The filing said he concealed more than $25 million in income between 2016 and 2023, leaving more than $9.5 million in unpaid taxes and causing more than $16 million in harm to the government.
The government’s filing said Goldstein won about $50 million in 2016 in heads-up poker matches against Chairman, Alec Gores and Tango. It also said he created a new version of a poker ledger in October 2017 that added false poker payments, increasing deductions by more than $3 million and cutting his 2016 income tax by over $1 million.
The same memo traced the case back to a 2012 IRS audit of Goldstein’s 2010 return, which focused on unreported gambling winnings and told him to improve his recordkeeping. It said that by 2014 he had secured a $10 million line of credit from Stewart and Lynda Resnick to finance other players, then lied about how the money would be used and later admitted he quickly lost $9 million of it playing poker.
Prosecutors also said Goldstein hid his gambling activity from accountants until 2017, lied to mortgage lenders on three applications to buy and keep a $2.6 million home, and omitted a $15 million gambling debt from mortgage paperwork in 2021 while looking for a new house in Washington, D.C. At trial, Goldstein testified that he had repeatedly told his staff and accountants to classify personal expenses correctly, and a 2014 email he wrote said they always played completely by the rules.
The defense argued that the government had overreached and that prison would make it harder for Goldstein to repay debts and deal with what his lawyers described as a severe gambling addiction. In June, Judge Lydia Kay Griggsby denied his bid for a new trial, saying the case was not close and that the evidence was sufficient under both theories of tax evasion.
Goldstein has filed for release pending appeal, and his lawyers said he intends to seek expedited review in the Fourth Circuit.
