Las Vegas: Police Release Photos of Two Suspects in $57K World Series of Poker Robbery

Two men were inside a Las Vegas rental house on the evening of July 12, waiting for the poker player staying there to come home from the World Series of Poker with his winnings.

Las Vegas police now have their pictures. What they don’t have, two months later, is their names.

LVMPD released surveillance photos on September 15 of the pair suspected of binding Jared Griener with duct tape and walking out with a bag of his cash.

Two men, a gray SUV, 20 minutes

The photos came from neighborhood surveillance. They show the two arriving and returning to their vehicle roughly 20 minutes later.

Police describe the first suspect as a heavyset Black man with braids and distinctive tattoos on his left forearm. The second is a Black man in a gray hoodie, red shorts and black shoes.

Police also identified a dark gray SUV, parked around the corner rather than out front.

LVMPD said in late July that the investigation was ongoing and the suspects were at large. Two months later, the department is asking the public to put names to two faces.

“All my $ is gone”

Griener got back to the house around 8 p.m. on a Sunday, after cashing out his summer winnings at the World Series.

Neighborhood surveillance puts the two men there about ten minutes ahead of him.

He entered the door code and walked through the front door. Two men were already inside. They tackled him, pulled the phone from his pocket and demanded to know where his backpack was, threatening to kill him.

The money was not in the house. He told them it was in his car, and they took his keys to go get it.

Then they moved him to the living room and hog-tied him with duct tape they found in the house, taping his wrists behind his back and binding his ankles to them. According to the incident report obtained by News 3, they stacked dishes on his back and warned him not to move, saying they were going to keep ransacking the place.

Getting free took him about 15 minutes.

A neighbor’s Ring camera caught what came next: Griener barefoot on the doorstep, duct tape still around his right arm, knocking and pleading for someone to call 911.

“Luckily I am physically unharmed,” he wrote on X afterward. “This was the most terrifying and traumatic experience of my life. All my $ is gone.”

Officers reached the neighborhood around 8:40 p.m. Paramedics helped him get the last of the tape off. Detectives processed the house for evidence and collected fingerprints before letting him back inside hours later. No arrests have been made.

How much was taken is not settled

Three different figures are in circulation, and they are not measuring the same thing.

The LVMPD incident report obtained by News 3 says Griener reported losing a black Coach bag holding roughly $45,000 in cash, a pair of Dior sunglasses and personal items of minimal value.

$57,500 is what he won for finishing 218th out of 9,208 in the $10,000 Main Event. Casino.org and PokerNews have used that number as the robbery figure.

$60,000 is Griener’s own account. He told the Review-Journal he withdrew about that much from his WSOP account before heading back, and that the backpack held roughly $60,000 in cash along with sunglasses, headphones and a phone charger.

That last detail is the one that untangles the rest. The cash came out of a tournament account holding a summer’s worth of cashes, not out of a single Main Event payout. The $57,500 is a prize, not an inventory of what was in the bag.

How did they get in?

That is the part nobody has explained.

Griener reached his own conclusion within hours. “These people knew the door code to my Airbnb, they were waiting for me inside and video surveillance from neighbors showed they arrived at the Airbnb 10 minutes before me,” he wrote. He suspects the tournament floor: “It’s likely someone was watching me at @wsop and knew that I was on my way home with cash.”

Malee Simpson, who owns the house, has been looking closer to home. Her cameras caught the men leaving but never caught them going in.

“It’s a mystery how they got into the house because there was no forced entry,” she told News 3. “So they would have had to have someone either let them in, or they would have used the door code themselves.”

She also reviewed footage from across the whole stay. Griener rented the house for about six weeks and shared it with two roommates, three registered guests in total. Roughly ten people came and went, Simpson said, and some who were not among the three were using the door code.

There was one code for the entire stay, Simpson said, with no separate codes issued for cleaners or maintenance.

She has not landed somewhere opposite to Griener, exactly. She thinks he was targeted too. “It seems like it’s either a very targeted event towards him of someone that would have known that he had that much money in his backpack,” she said.

The difference is where each of them is looking. Griener is looking at the tournament floor. Simpson is looking at everyone who had the code.

Police have not endorsed either version, and nobody has been named.

Griener has retained Las Vegas attorney Russell “Dutch” Boyd. “The fact that these criminals seem to have had the lock code raises many questions,” Boyd’s office said in a statement. “He’s exploring all his legal options.”

What Airbnb and the WSOP have said

Airbnb spokesperson Aaron Swor said the company was aware of the incident. “Safety is a top priority for us, and while incidents are rare, we take them seriously,” he said. “We stand ready to support the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in their ongoing investigation.” Swor said Airbnb gave Griener a full refund for his stay, which Griener confirmed, and that Griener has not filed a claim through the company’s host liability insurance program. Airbnb did not answer the Review-Journal’s question about whether the listing is still active.

The WSOP and Caesars have not commented publicly in the two months since, on a robbery one of their own players has suggested was set up by someone watching him on their floor.

It has happened before

Doyle Brunson, April 1998. Two masked men with a handgun forced him into his Las Vegas Country Club home, beat him above the eye and handcuffed him to his wife. They left with about $4,000 in cash and $80,000 in chips, part of a $93,000 prize he had won at the World Series days earlier.

Greg Raymer, December 2004. Two men came at him at the door of his Bellagio hotel room as he carried a duffel bag holding $150,000 in chips. He fought them off. Both were arrested in California six months later and convicted.

Jonathan Duhamel, December 2011. Robbers tied up and badly beat the reigning Main Event champion at his home outside Montreal, taking his bracelet, a Rolex and more than $115,000 in cash.

In the Duhamel case, four people were arrested, and one was an ex-girlfriend. She pleaded guilty to kidnapping, breaking and entering, and conspiracy to commit armed robbery, and was sentenced to 42 months.

The mechanism Griener suspects is documented too. In June, two Southern California men pleaded guilty in federal court to a run of casino ambush robberies: they entered card rooms under false names, watched for players cashing out, followed them, and took the money at gunpoint. Dereck Nathan Lopez and Juan Gabriel Gonzalez admitted to at least 15 robberies and attempts totaling more than $274,000, and agreed to 14 years each.

The same logic turns up further down the chain, where the target is the machine rather than the player. Game Empress has covered an eight-person crew working gaming machines at an Illinois travel center, a masked crew smashing video gambling terminals at a Lake County gas station, burglars damaging three machines at a New Lenox liquor store, and a guilty plea in a southwest Missouri arcade gambling case. What separates the Griener robbery is that the crew skipped the machine and went to the man carrying the bankroll.

Raymer’s robbers were convicted. So was one of Duhamel’s. Two months on, nobody has been arrested in this case.

Who he is

Griener plays out of Huntington Beach. The Hendon Mob database credits him with more than $3.3 million in tournament earnings, and WSOP lists more than 109 cashes at the series and one Circuit ring. His deepest run this summer was the Main Event, 218th out of 9,208, for $57,500.

The case is open. Police want to hear from anyone who recognizes either man, or who saw a dark gray SUV near Vegas Drive and Buffalo Drive on the evening of July 12. Crime Stoppers of Nevada takes anonymous tips at 702-385-5555 and at crimestoppersofnv, with a cash reward available if a tip leads to an arrest.