Settlement Ends Postle Bankruptcy Petition Saga
This signals what could be the end of articles about Mike Postle. While that doesn’t seem likely for someone who clearly feels that much of the poker community wronged him, it is the end of this part of the Mike Postle story. Attorneys for Todd Witteles and Veronica Brill, via a mediator, agreed to a settlement in principle with Postle, which led to the final dismissal of the case this week.
The Previous Chapter
The Postle story officially began – at least in public – in September and October 2019 with accusations that Mike Postle cheated during cash poker games livestreamed from Stones Gambling Hall in Northern California. From there, the story descended into mess of court cases and accusations.
Many of the 2021 developments stemmed from a case that Postle filed against a chunk of the poker community that he felt smeared his name. He ultimately tried to drop that case abruptly, but since two of the defendants – Witteles and Brill – fought back against Postle’s charges under the anti-SLAPP statute of California law. When Postle tried to drop the case and slink away, it meant that Witteles and Brill won their anti-SLAPP motions…per the law. Postle didn’t believe it and refused to pay the amount of nearly $55K to Witteles and Brill.
Their attorneys – Eric Bensamochan for Witteles and Marc Randazza for Brill – took an unusual step in their attempt to get their money from Postle for their clients. They filed a petition with the court to mandate involuntary bankruptcy, which would force a revelation of Postle’s financial situation.
From there, the case spun into a tangled web that included a not-so-secret partnership between Postle and the owner of a PR firm and longtime Randazza adversary. Out of that, a website appeared with false pro-Postle information about the case, a site that soon disappeared, and the entire back-and-forth court proceedings became a list of Postle’s grievances and official legal responses.
Discovery and More Discovery
In late October, the court set discovery deadlines and a pretrial conference for December to get the case moving. Essentially, it ordered Postle to submit a proper list of his creditors, unlike the original one that listed estimated numbers and vague debtor information.
The updated creditor list from Postle named 25 specific creditors and more than $270K owed. This consisted of mostly credit card debts and debt consolidation (payday) loans, as well as more than $80K owed to Postle’s mother for “loans for multiple family court and previous attorneys needed.” Of course, he added the debts owed to Witteles and Brill to the list as well.
Settle Down
The December proceedings led to a January 7 trial date. However, as that date approached, it appeared that the parties had been talking behind the scenes. Postle retained an attorney – Yasha Rahimzadeh – and Bensamochan filed a joint motion for the approval of a stipulation to dismiss the case, along with claims and counterclaims.
That motion noted that after discovery, one of the attorneys involved in the case asked Val Loumber, another attorney, to mediate a settlement between the two sides. Loumber knew two of the attorneys involved in the case.
It worked. The motion noted that the parties reached an “agreement in principle” on December 7. All parties signed the stipulation to dismiss and a confidential settlement agreement “resolving their differences.”
Judge Christopher Klein responded to the January 7 conference with an agreement to dismiss the case “on agreement of all petitioning creditors and debtor.” That order became official on January 11, 2022.
For all intents and purposes, the case is over.
