As for where Bilzerian Sr's fortune had actually gone, or whether it was anywhere near the half a billion dollars that some have estimated - it's anyone guess. According to reports, the family house was eventually sold in a series of Byzantine transactions, ending up partly owned by a charity named after the family's cat. Other assets found their way to the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. There was one holding, however, that Bilzerian Sr made sure to diligently report to the authorities: the balance of his prison commissary account. As of the last filing, it was precisely 23 cents.
The younger Bilzerian has never denied that he has trust funds in his name. In fact, while he was still in Seal training, the government pressured him into putting up a third of one of them to get his dad out of jail - an act of generosity that didn't go down well at home. "He wouldn't talk to me for eight months," Bilzerian said. "He's some hard-headed bastard."
That was about when the gambling began.
Bilzerian says he learned to play poker at the University of Florida, where he enrolled after the Navy to study business and criminology - funded by a $6,000-a-month "disability allowance as a veteran" that he qualified for due to his injuries and honourable discharge.
By his second year, he'd gone broke, apparently with no access to the assets of which he was a beneficiary. Forced to sell his guns, Bilzerian returned to the poker table with a near-pathological focus. "You have to go broke to respect the money," he has said of his losses. "And I had a style where I could make a lot of money if I had self-control."
"Some weeks I was making, like, $90,000," he has explained, "so I'm looking at these professors, thinking, what am I doing here?"
DAN BILZERIAN
The way Bilzerian tells it, he turned the $750 he had left over from liquidating his possessions into $10,000. Then he bought a one-way ticket to Las Vegas and turned that $10,000 into $187,000.
With this sizeable bankroll, he then went back to university, more determined than ever, and resumed his studies while continuing to hone his skills in "cash games" after classes. (The potential winnings in cash games are essentially unlimited, whereas tournaments have fixed buy-ins and fixed prizes.)
Bilzerian never did finish his degree. "Some weeks I was making, like, $90,000," he has explained, "so I'm looking at these professors, thinking, what am I doing here?"
Bilzerian was 27 when he first came to the attention of the high-stakes poker crowd. It was 2007, and he'd booked himself into Harveys Lake Tahoe, a 740-room hotel on the border of California and Nevada, with a suitcase filled with $100,000 in used bank notes. "He was not playing wild at all," recalled Todd "DanDruff"
Witteles, a well-known player, when describing his first game with Bilzerian to Poker News, a website owned by Antanas Guogo, a Lithuanian-Australian businessman known as the "Australian Airbag" and the "Mouth From Down Under". "The game was very nitty [no one betting much] and he basically wanted everyone else to start playing loose before he did," added Witteles. "I think he was just mad that people saw him as the rich fish [bad player] from whom they could extract money. Not surprisingly, the game stayed tight, and he finally got up and left."
Bilzerian's first attempt to win a big tournament - where exaggerating your wins is impossible, due to the very public nature of the proceedings - was similarly disappointing. He entered with his brother, Adam (who by then had renounced his US citizenship and written a book on the subject) and ended up in 180th place with $36,000 in prize money. "I wanted to kill myself," he later told All In magazine. (The winner, Joe Cada, took home $8.5m.)
Nevertheless, the tournament's broadcaster, ESPN, took note of Bilzerian's charisma and gave him plenty of on-screen time, which led to a sponsorship deal with Victory Poker, a now-defunct online cardroom. That, in turn, led to some of Bilzerian's first public stunts. He bet $400,000 on a drag race with his lawyer. He swam through an alligator-filled lake at midnight. He fired a 50-caliber machine gun at an RV in the desert until it burst into a flames.
And along the way, he turned down an offer of $100,000 from one of the (unnamed) founders of Facebook to shave off his beard.
Meanwhile, in private cash games, Bilzerian became known for playing "loose aggressive" - in other words, betting big and betting often, to the delight of his ultra-wealthy fellow players.
In one moment of madness, he flipped a coin for $2.3m (£1.4m) of chips... And lost.