It must have been quite a Tuesday morning, March 12, in Havana. The weather was sunny with a pleasant morning 70°F that was to peak to 86°F at noon, light southern breeze refreshing yet not too strong. Fifty-seven years old Canadian-Antiguan entrepreneur and Economic Envoy for Antiqua and Barbuda, once tagged as the “most eligible billionaire bachelor,” was enjoying it immensely.
Not that he was lasciviously pondering on seizing the day with his young wife sunbathing in topless at a private beach (“Baby, those Mojito drops on your body are tantalizingly tempting! — Are they, sweetie? To which part of your body exactly?”).
Or that he was in the midst of evaluating weather forecast with his friends before he was to kiteboard the seashore (“Buddy, we need a bit more wind if you’re to do this, and we can’t influence that. — I waited two whole days for this gear and I’m doing it today. What do you mean we can’t control the wind?”).
Nor was he at the working breakfast with his business associates brainstorming his new investment. (“To that end, we anticipate that use of such a prominent writer and his house to a limited extent in our campaign may result in an increased awareness and demand generation. — I don’t like how that ‘limited’ sounds. Why can’t we just buy a whole darn house? — Sir, Hemingway Museum is a U.S. National Historic Landmark. — So?”)
No. For our main protagonist, all of the above would be way too conventional.
The Settings
Even if we would throw in 300-feet superyacht and bunch of girls on deck in the picture — one that would make Jordan Belfort green with envy — he might consider it as just another day in a life.
After all, when you make $7.3 billion turnovers in online gambling business in 2005, it’s not that easy to find something impressive.
Thus, in order to get his attention, the superyacht would probably have to be equipped with…
—Wait for a second! You did mention a bunch of girls, didn’t you?
That would be him, the central character of this story as he jumps into the conversation straight from Havana morning. We thought the best way to introduce him would be informal and non-conventional like he prefers to manage his affairs.
(For the record: his imaginary answers, when available, are based on public information at hand mixed with benevolent literary freedoms; his own words are always quoted.)
—Are those girls young? Do they look like teenagers or even younger? (I’m not asking for age. I’m a responsible person.)
They are.
—Do they like older guys? Like, super-rich daddies? (Please don’t give me that look. This is a free world.)
It appears to be so.
—Interesting. One more thing. Not to sound too demanding, but it’s fundamental. Do they twerk? Are they any good at that? (Quit staring at me like that! What, you never saw it at Pub Crawl?)
They do, and they are quite good at it.
And just like that…
The tropical paradise scene on that Tuesday at Cuba became a mix of progressively boiling, perhaps even bulging hot, surely spellbinding picture, on the one hand, and outrage, public dismay, and controversy that engulfed us for some time, on the other.
Now, we do not dare to write what might have happened on that day. We don’t even wanna go there — it just might be too much to know.
After all, people have the right to choose what they do in their spare time. Based on information at hand, at this moment, no foul play can be proven beyond reasonable doubt.
Surely, one could talk about morality in conjunction with political correctness, one could point out to age and social segregation in Cuba that might have provided for an opportune prey to a very rich alpha male, one could go on and on with such notions, but — is there any area of our contemporary, #meetoo life not susceptible to be scrutinized in such manner?
The Man
We do know, however, what Calvin Ayre had to say about it. (Of course, you already recognized him.)
—First of all, can’t a man have a glass of rum with “adult Cuban dancers doing the dance of their cultural heritage”? Secondly, “youngest person in that picture is turning 19 in a few months and is collage [sic] graduate and works for my personal assistant as translator when we are in Cuba”. Thirdly, a man decides to enjoy the company of a “national twerking team” as they practice by his pool, and all that you moral pundits see is the opportunity to criticize!
Now how can you argue with that?
Indeed, when you put national twerking team — the term produces 158 SERPs at Google, all of them related exclusively to Ayre — in the picture of any conversation, or better yet, on video, there are only a few optional comments to be made.
—I mean, where is this world going? “Twerking or booty dancing is extremely normal and very popular in the Caribbean”. So what’s the fuss? “I do not believe anything I post is controversial”. Besides, “for those who don’t like the cultural experience of watching how ladies love to dance in the Caribbean… please stop watching my personal social media feeds :-)”. As a matter of fact, “Fuck all ya all if you don’t like this video 🙂”.
See, that’s what we meant by ‘progressively boiling’.
—Let me tell you what’s happening here. “The only controversy is that anyone should have to be attacked for supporting superior technology that does social good when those attacking are doing it only for some concept of personal gain”. In other words, “this is about the technology and I am right”. Finally, when it comes to me, I already told you that “the lifestyle I sell is about 80% the reality of what I live”. The only question is — do you know my reality?
Indeed, what is the reality of Calvin Edward Ayre?
Every initiated iGamer knows who he is. For uninitiated, he is the former medical executive that pioneered the online gambling at times when only a few were aware of internet potentials, also a part-time visionary and a full-time controversy creator.
Different from the onset…
Ayre was never into being much of a guy to follow the rules and yet astute enough to apply the advice of Sun Tzu on how to win a war without fighting the battles (in addition of being well educated with a BSc and an MBA).
The Endeavors
Both traits were to be seen while he was working for Bicer Medical Systems in Vancouver, back in the 1990s, and later during his career.
While he sold company shares without a prospectus and moved them between accounts without filling insider trading reports — a major no-no in the stock trading world — Ayre quickly settled for $10,000 fine and a 20-year ban on running any company on the Vancouver Exchange when he got caught.
Changing industries and connecting casino chips dots from the green baize with the internet, he created an online betting software and begun to provide it to offshore bookmakers. In 1996, he was involved in the launch of some of the first online casinos ever, in Costa Rica.
His inspiration? A newspaper story about “a U.S. bookie who had set up an offshore phone-in betting operation in the Dominican Republic to elude felony charges in the States”.
Target groups? Mainly the United States players.
In 2000, when internet gambling was almost unheard of and before the UIGEA, Ayre launched Bodog, his own website. There, players could deposit their money with credit cards or online checks and enjoy in sports betting plus online poker and casino games. Winnings were collectible by wire transfer.
An extraordinary foresight backed up by years of investments was, in terms of business growth, leapfrogged by yet another part of Ayre’s folklore — the company of beautiful and young women.
Preferably in the epicenter of some adventure.
To that end, he created an imaginary Indiana Jones-like character and turned his personal vacation in Thailand into internet adventure. There he was with a digital camera, a machete, fake blood, beautiful girls, the jungle, and an expedition into Cambodia to fight Buddhist terrorists which led to imprisonment by the Cambodian Army, double-cross by opium warlords in a lost ancient city, and a wound he sustained in a knife duel while escaping the country.
Ayre personally wrote this fiction series.
The result?
Business boomed catapulting Bodog into an organization with 150 employees. Ayre’s key vendor in Canada, a company that provided for designers and computer programmers, had 200 people on payroll; their only client was Bodog.
Ayre also filmed his own poker tournament debuting on Fox Sports Network and Bodog TV in 2006, and produced webzine, a music label, a million-dollar music competition, and to top it all off — an international mixed martial arts series that featured a final match in St. Petersburg, Russia, with Vladimir Putin, Silvio Berlusconi, and Jean-Claude Van Damme in attendance.
The Behavior
The company claims that in 2007, they processed $12 billion in wagers; forty percent was casino games, 30% poker, 20% sports betting, and the rest miscellaneous.
Around this time Ayre began to employ trained sniper of the Canadian military forces — with combat experience in Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq — as a personal driver of his black Hammer and started to hand out thong underwear instead of business cards.
A curious aura, and the unique mishmash of Hugh Hefner and Richard Branson, his two idols, with a pinch of James Bond, emerged.
When the U.S. federal authorities showed signs of indisputable determination to enforce the UIGEA, Ayre simply sold Bodog’s US-facing online gambling business. He did, however, retain brand rights and oriented it toward European and Asian markets.
At that time, though, he already had sights on other ventures.
In 2009, he launched CalvinAyre.com and created one of the leading online gambling industry news and entertainment site.
When the long-reaching hand of the U.S. legislators finally caught with him in 2012, Ayre — resembling move he mastered while at Bicer Medical Systems — pled guilty to a single misdemeanor and accessory in violation of the Wire Act, paid $500,000 fine, and served a year of unsupervised probation.
In 2017, Calvin Ayre showed one more time that his “appetite for the future” is still very present by diving into the world of virtual currencies when they became mainstream.
He acquired and reinvented CoinGeek, a cryptocurrency news website, and also allocated significant investment resources into mining operations (currently among largest in the world), declaring himself an early investor and a heavy supporter of Bitcoin SV (Satoshi Version). He plans to fund a $100 million five-star resort in Antigua with profits made in trade with crypto coins.
Last but not least, he is involved with the organization of the cryptocurrency conference to be held in Toronto, Canada, on May 29-30. The event is to host “professionals from leading blockchain start-ups, global enterprises, crypto mining, investors and other brands [that] are coming to learn about… the benefits of massive on-chain scaling for miners, application developments, and enterprises”.
One might argue that once the enterprise segment of society opens itself up to cryptocurrency benefits and start exploring them — and that’s an ultimate if — it will be the dawn of a new financial era.
The guy working on establishing the connection and a proponent of the increased processing capacity of the bitcoin network happens to believe that Bitcoin SV is “a currency, not an asset just to be held, and has real utility”.
With his proven track of records to deliver what others thought impossible at the time, no one is underestimating him anymore.
The Whole is More Than Sum of Its Parts
So, what do we have here?
An alpha male playboy and a bachelor living at large? Check. A juggernaut with Type-A personality? Check. A violator of laws when possible? Check. A super-rich disrupter of global centralized banking systems? Check. A global climate change supporter? Check. A philanthropist and charitable devotee at that? Check.
With so many attributes one is usually also a danger to the establishment.
In such cases, people tend to be split into two, opponents and followers, as we all know too well. Which is exactly what happened when Ayre also checked himself as the supporter of Cuban national twerking team.
—I can live with that.
But, is this all there is to the reality of Calvin Ayre and the lifestyle he sells? No.
When you deal with a person that’s been “shaking up conventional wisdom”, “disrupting industries” and “making waves for decades” — and those are not just propaganda stuff but, like it or not, facts — no one but Calvin Ayre knows his reality.
Since he believes that “there is no personal in my life”, all we can do is observe it. Or not.
Although, next time, we hope that girls will look like they’re at least 21 years of age. Seriously.
—I’ll give you a ‘maybe’ on that.
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