He doesn't glance up at the hotel lobby staff - he is embarrassed both by his incongruous appearance and the electronic shackle fastened securely around his ankle, which marks him out as a criminal.

A shambling Scotsman, sallow-faced and dressed in a tracksuit and T-shirt, emerges from a lift, shuffles past the giant aquarium that dominates the lobby and makes a bee-line for the revolving exit door. Caroline Graham and Nick Gilbert report on the players who broke the bank with a busted flush.Īt precisely the same hour every day, a pathetic scene unfolds in the smart, upmarket foyer of the Clayton On The Park Hotel in St Louis, Missouri. They cash in £1.5 billion of their chips and distance themselves from their own firms - just as the US outlaws them, causing a multi-billion-pound share crash. Listen to part one of Christmas at Gunpoint, narrated by Anthony Horowitz, hereĪ tiny group of online gambling entrepreneurs float their companies, which then shoot into the top 100 British businesses.

Ruth parasol