Spider-Man star Tobey Maguire is among more than a dozen high-profile Hollywood celebrities being sued in connection with a mega-millions illegal gambling ring that ran high-stakes underground poker games, Star magazine is reporting exclusively.

Maguire, 35, won more than $300,000 from a Beverly Hills hedge fund manager who embezzled investor funds and orchestrated a Ponzi scheme in a desperate bid to pay off his monster debt to the star and others, it’s alleged.

An FBI investigation into Brad Ruderman, the CEO of Ruderman Capital Partners, uncovered how he lost $25 million of investor money in clandestine poker games held on a twice weekly basis in suites at the luxury Beverly Hills hotel, Four Seasons, and the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard.

Tinsel town A-listers Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon also played in the no-limit Texas Hold ‘em games which had a buy-in of $100,000, multiple members of the ring told Star. DiCaprio, Affleck and Damon are not being sued.

Others who were part of the secret society and are facing hefty lawsuits include billionaire businessman Alex Gores, The Notebook director Nick Cassavetes, Welcome Back, Kotter star Gabe Kaplan, Paris Hilton’s infamous sex tape partner, Rick Salomon, record label owner Cody Leibel and Las Vegas nightlife entrepreneur and real-estate developer Andrew Sasson, among others.

Full story here.

A while ago, I wrote a piece titled “Blowing the Whistle on Waxman.”  In case you missed it, I explained that Henry Waxman and I had been friends beginning almost 50 years ago at UCLA.  I also said that we had seen each other infrequently over the intervening years once he went to Sacramento as a state assemblyman and later to Washington as a member of Congress. 

Over the years, I moved politically from left to right, while Henry moved from left to far left to over the edge.  Still, I had a soft spot for him and, as a result, refrained from including his name when I would list the usual suspects, those left-wingers like Pelosi, Reid, Rangel, Boxer and Murtha, who were doing their utmost to destroy America.           

However, once Obama was elected and began pushing his radical agenda, while simultaneously surrounding himself with advisors who should never have been allowed within a mile of the White House, Henry began feeling his oats.  Suddenly, with the Democrats in control of the House, he was no longer a back-bencher.  He even got to have his name on a piece of major legislation, the Waxman-Markey Cap & Trade bill, a singular disaster that would send all of our energy costs soaring while simultaneously providing China and India with a tremendous advantage over what remains of our American industry. 

That was bad enough, but even after those notorious ACORN videos aired on Glenn Beck’s TV show, Waxman and 74 of his left-wing cronies on Capitol Hill voted to continue funding ACORN, and that cut the Gordian knot for me.  At that point, even old school ties weren’t enough to dissuade me, and, in a very sad frame of mind, I wrote the article. 

An hour or so after it was posted, I received an email from Waxman’s office in Washington.  It began: “Dear Burt, I can understand that we have disagreements about politics.  I can see that you have some embarrassment about our past friendship, but you are not responsible for me and I am not (thank G-d) responsible for your views or actions.  But I do resent that whatever I may have said to you in a conversation years ago is now being dredged up (and maybe made up) to make me look bad.  I never thought I had to remember things I may have said to you to be provocative at the time, would be repeated and distorted, as if it were ‘on the record.’” 

(Note:  Just for the record, I made up nothing and I distorted nothing.  What I said he said about the steroid-using baseball players he called before his committee was exactly what he said; namely that he had no idea they were even famous until he saw his fellow congressmen lining up for their autographs; and, in response to a question I posed strictly out of curiosity, replied that he had no idea how long after an athlete stopped using steroids, they would continue to show up in drug tests.  Besides, neither of those statements is particularly provocative.  They merely indicate how unqualified and unaware a congressman can be and still feel himself entitled to sit in judgment of other people.  The other thing I addressed in the article was Henry’s boasting that he and his colleagues were going to investigate Fox for biased news reporting, and my responding that I thought it was a swell idea so long as they then did the same with the NY Times, the three major networks, CNN, MSNBC and the Washington Post.  That time, I even had a totally impartial witness, my wife Yvonne.) 

Responding to his first paragraph, I wrote:  “Dear Henry, I don’t blame you in the least for being angry.  But you can imagine how I felt when I saw your name included with the other 74 Democrats who voted to continue funding an organization as corrupt and vile as ACORN.  For the life of me, I could not think of a single reason why you would wish to align yourself, even for partisan political reasons, with a group that has not only been guilty of election fraud, but, as those now famous videos made clear, have no objection to assisting a pimp to set up a brothel.  And not just any brothel, but one employing abducted 13-year-old girls from Latin America.  Also, I did send you a note some months ago wishing you a speedy recovery when I heard that you had been rushed off to the hospital, so even though you never acknowledged it, it would suggest I’m not entirely heartless.” 

Waxman’s email went on: “As I recall our poker friendship, you used to keep a card with every cent I ever lost to you to be sure you were paid.  When you sent out a letter pleading for your friends to help you out at a difficult financial time in your life, you promised that you would repay every cent.  I sent you $100.  I never asked you for the money, nor have you offered to repay it.  I did not want to embarrass you then or now.  But since you have no hesitation to try to publicly hold me up to scorn, I see no reason not to ask you to repay your debt to me.  I would like to use that money to donate to the ACLU or some other group that will defend your rights, along with everyone else, to free speech and other Constitutional protections.  Sincerely, Henry Waxman.” 

To this, I replied, “The card you mention was not for poker losses.  Those were always minimal because none of us had any money, and were invariably paid off at the end of the game.  The card was to keep track of the money I loaned you, and which you took an extremely long time to repay.  It was to help you continue playing blackjack during one of our occasional trips to Tahoe or Vegas.  I am truly sorry, though, that I did not pay back the $100.  That was an oversight because in moving from one rental to another, as circumstances forced us to do several times once Hollywood ageism made me unemployable, I lost the IOU list.  When, some years later, I was finally able to earn some money, I did pay back those whose names I remembered and those who subsequently reminded me.  I regret that I forgot your generosity.  I will have the check in the mail to you this afternoon.  You are free, of course, to donate it to the ACLU, to ACORN or even to help pay for Nancy Pelosi’s next facelift.  It’s your money, after all, unlike the money that Waxman-Markey will cost American taxpayers and American businesses.  Regards, Burt.”) 

Do I regret that Henry Waxman is one of 250-odd Democrats who are only too happy to rubberstamp every piece of legislative lunacy concocted by Obama, Axelrod, Emanuel, Jarrett, Holdren, Jennings, Sunstein and Jeff Jones?  Of course.  Do I regret that Henry Waxman has so totally lost his moral compass that even when 172 of his fellow liberals  voted to stop funding ACORN, he stood steadfast with the sleazebags?  You bet.           

Worst of all, he probably sees it as being politically courageous.  On the other hand, normal human beings, who haven’t spent most of their adult lives feeding at the public trough, recognize it as aiding and abetting.

I knew from personal experience that Henry was a fish when it came to poker, but it was some time later that I found out how truly awful he was.  Before being elected to Congress, he had gone to Sacramento as a state assemblyman.  Wherever politicians congregate, you will find two things — poker games and lobbyists.  As you can imagine, lobbyists are not there to win money from those they spend their lives trying to influence.  But it seems that Henry was so inept that, in spite of their best efforts, they kept beating him.  This so embarrassed the lobbyists that they finally banished him from the game. 

Naturally, once Mr. Waxman went to Washington, I saw him less and less frequently.  Periodically, he would return to L.A., but that was in order to spend time  meeting with constituents and holding political fund-raisers.

Over the years, Henry continued to be a liberal.  He continued to think FDR was a combination of Moses and Santa Claus.  I, on the other hand, who had been raised in a similar middle-class Jewish home, spent the intervening years wising up.

So it was that while attending a party a while back, a celebration of Henry’s 30th year in the House, I asked him what he was up to.  When he said that one of his committees was preparing to investigate Fox News for biased reporting, I couldn’t keep my yap shut and maintain my status as a polite guest.  Instead, after telling him that I thought it was a swell idea, I went on to suggest that when he and his colleagues finished investigating Fox, I trusted they would turn their eagle eyes on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post and our own Pravda wannabe, the L.A. Times.

Henry simply gawked at me.  He looked even more than usual like a fish out of water.  It was as if he thought his old school chum had been replaced during the dead of night by a space pod.

I assume he had heard from mutual acquaintances that I was no longer a Democrat, but he was so obviously unprepared for my transformation into a conservative that I almost felt sorry for him.  There was a moment of shocked silence, almost as if he was hoping I was going to laugh and admit I was just pulling his leg.  Then the moment passed, and he moved off to be among those who thought three decades of Waxman in the U.S. Congress was something worth celebrating.

For old times sake, I have generally left Waxman out of my attacks on liberals in the House.  After all, with the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Charles Rangel, John Murtha, Barbara Lee, Linda Sanchez, Bernard Sanders and Barney Frank, taking up space, I didn’t think it was necessary to focus on my old college buddy.

But things have changed.  First there was the totally irresponsible Waxman-Markey cap & trade bill, which would destroy America’s industrial capacity and send energy costs soaring for every American household, while simultaneously providing our competitors in China and India with every possible advantage.

But, for me, the final straw was Waxman’s voting along with 74 other House Democrats to continue funding ACORN with our tax dollars.  Just as there’s no need to catalogue all of ACORN’s crimes and sins at this time, there’s no reason to bother trying to find a good excuse for Waxman’s defending this gang of creeps and thugs.

At this late date, I am not easily shocked, but I was so shocked and disgusted to find Waxman siding with ACORN that I decided I was going to share a piece of information that should add a measure of embarrassment to his well-deserved shame.

A few years ago, Henry garnered a great deal of publicity when he chaired a committee investigating the use of illegal substances in major league baseball.  I suspect there were a lot of people who had never even heard of Waxman prior to the hearings.  For my part, being a lifelong baseball fan, I was glad to see Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Jose Canseco and Rafael Palmeiro, sweating on the hot seat.

Those punks had done everything in their power to destroy the national pastime by cheating, thereby erasing such honorable names as Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Roger Maris, from the record book.

Shortly after the hearings, I had lunch with Henry.  He confessed that he knew so little about baseball, he had no real idea who the players were, and that he was amazed to discover they were so famous that members of Congress and their staffs actually crowded into the hallways to collect autographs.

That was bad enough.  But I then asked him, “If a minor leaguer uses steroids or human growth hormones in order to reach the majors, but stops once he gets there, how long will he continue to test positive?”

Henry admitted he had no idea.

So here was a congressman investigating baseball who not only had no idea who its most famous players were, but no pertinent information about the substances they were being condemned for using.

Now, seriously, do you really think that he knows any more about energy than he does about baseball or poker?