Former Israeli fugitive pleads guilty in Northern California video slot gambling ring

An Israeli man who’d been a fugitive for nearly two years has admitted his role in a illegal gambling ring that sprawled across Northern California and took in hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Orel Gohar, 30, pleaded guilty Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California to charges stemming from a scheme involving as many as 500 illegal video slot machines installed in bars, smoke shops and other outlets from San Jose to Sacramento.

Gohar is the brother of Yaniv Gohar, the leader of what law enforcement officials labeled the Gohar Organization — an outfit that was raking in thousands of dollars a day from video slots. The Gohars were among seven defendants charged when authorities busted up the ring in late 2017.

U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott’s office said all of the defendants have now pleaded guilty. Orel Gohar and another man, Eran Buhbut, are the only two still left to be sentenced. Gohar faces up to 30 years in prison at sentencing March 2 before Judge John Mendez.

In his plea agreement in Sacramento, Orel Gohar admitted that he and the others installed the slot machines in retail establishments across at least seven counties. Orel was among those in charge of collecting the cash proceeds; he said one store alone in San Francisco was generating up to $12,000 a week in revenue.

“Orel was recorded telling a shop owner that if he were ever confronted about the machines, he would play stupid and say that he did not know they were illegal,” the plea agreement says.

Court papers show that the Gohars laundered hundreds of thousands of dollars in proceeds through a cosmetics business and a shell company that was supposedly in the construction business.

A former San Francisco resident, Orel Gohar pleaded guilty to conducting an illegal gambling business, money laundering and failure to appear.

Shortly after their arrest in December 2017, Gohar and his brother Yaniv fled the country. They flew on a chartered flight from Oakland to Campeche, Mexico, where Yaniv Gohar bribed officials to allow the brothers to enter the country. Two weeks later, they flew from Cancun to Paris, and then took a connecting flight to Tel Aviv in their native Israel.

Yaniv Gohar was arrested in Israel in July 2019 and extradited back to the United States. He pleaded guilty in September 2019 and was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison.

Orel Gohar was arrested last December in Tel Aviv, where he’d been “moving frequently between apartments to evade authorities,” the plea agreement said.

The investigation was sparked by a tip from an informant who spotted a video slot machine inside a smoke shop on Sacramento’s Stockton Boulevard. The probe followed a similar investigation into an Israeli national named Nive Hagay, known as “Dino the Casino,” who planted illegal gambling machines in more than 70 storefronts from Sacramento to Bakersfield. He pleaded guilty in 2017 to gambling and drug charges.

This story was originally published November 25, 2020 at 2:37 PM.