The associates of some of the people indicted Wednesday on suspicion of running an underground gambling ring in the San Fernando Valley were previously suspected of involvement with an illegal poker room in a downtown LA high rise — the same building where Heidi Planck was last seen, several law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation told NBCLA.
The sources said there was information Planck may have met up with one or more of the people attending the poker game that day or had visited the apartment where it was being held before she vanished.
Planck, who was 38, vanished on Oct.17, 2021 after attending her son’s football game in Downey.
She was later seen on security video near the apartment building at 12th and Hope Streets, and her dog was found wandering on an upper floor.
The indictment unsealed Wednesday did not address the alleged downtown gambling room, and no arrests have been made in Planck’s disappearance.
In late November 2021 the LAPD began a massive search of the Chiquita Canyon landfill near Castaic after detectives developed other information that Planck’s remains might have been buried with trash removed from the downtown high-rise.
At the time, police said in a statement that it appeared Planck died inside the building in downtown LA in an unspecified incident, and that forensic evidence found at the building led to the landfill search.
Her body was never found, and she was declared deceased by a judge in February 2023.
LAPD detectives investigating her disappearance were present in 2022 when federal agents searched a home on Chandler Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, where some of the men named in the indictment unsealed this week were suspected of running another illegal gaming room, according to the sources, copies of search warrants and other court records.
The Chandler search proved helpful in the gambling investigation but not Planck’s disappearance, the sources said.
“Evidence of a gambling operation was seized,” wrote an LAPD detective in a follow-up court filing, which formed part of the basis for the separate July 2022 search of the Encino home of former NBA player Gilbert Arenas, which produced some of the alleged evidence behind this week’s indictment.
Arenas is one of the eight people accused in the indictment of conspiring in the Valley gambling ring in 2021 and 2022, but the law enforcement sources said there was no evidence he had a connection to the downtown gaming room.
Arenas made an initial appearance in court Wednesday afternoon and entered not guilty pleas to the charges.
Arenas, one gambling patron told authorities in 2022, “does not play because he lost all his money” and was being paid $2,000 a night to host the gambling events at his home, according to one of the 2022 search warrant affidavits.
NewsChopper4 was overhead when agents searched the Chandler home in 2022 and returned days later when it burned following the law enforcement raid.
According to the sources and court documents the investigation into the gambling ring accelerated in early 2022, when police learned one patron of the poker games was being threatened after running up a million-dollar debt.
It was common for players to win or lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single night of card play, the patron explained, according to what investigators wrote in an affidavit, and most events had a minimum $15,000 buy-in.
The 2022 search warrants said the gambling operations under investigation were allegedly run by members or associates of Israeli and Russian organized crime families, who law enforcement agents described as having control of numerous illegal gambling operations around LA.
“They are known for engaging in murder, car bombings, and extortion rackets throughout the world as a tool for intimidation and control,” one investigator wrote in a 2022 warrant affidavit describing what law enforcement knew about the crime group.
Planck’s family and friends have continued to seek information about her disappearance and death, posting several billboards in 2023 that asked for the public’s help.
The law enforcement sources said they believed several people present at the downtown apartment building on the day Planck vanished know much more about what happened to her but have refused to cooperate, possibly because of their involvement in other unlawful activity.