Alligator Blood, the true story of Australian entrepreneur, Daniel Tzvetkoff, should have been a compelling read. It has all the ingredients: greed, hubris, extravagant wealth, a dizzying rise followed by a precipitous fall; the noir underbelly of the online porn and gambling worlds and a cast of colourful characters. It should have been a page turner.
It isn’t.
Rather, the author, James Leighton, manages to wring the life out of the liveliest of incidents, driving the reader into a turgid miasma of strangled sentences. And not only are the essential questions of morality, character and greed are not answered: they are never even asked. It’s the sort of book that ought to make any self-respecting editor at the publisher, Simon and Schuster, give themselves an uppercut and question how it all came to this.
But first, the story: Daniel Tzvetkoff made a lot of money helping businesses with dubious sources of revenue – pornography, gambling, and short-term high-interest loans – process credit card transactions.
While there are serious questions over how profitable his business actually was, he spent like it was making hundreds of millions. He splashed out on Ferraris, on some of the most expensive properties in Australia, a Super-8 racing team, yachts, corporate boxes and sponsorships, private jets, and anything else that took his fancy. His sudden wealth propelled him onto the front pages of newspapers and onto the list of Australia’s richest.
And then it all fell apart. His activities were illegal under US law. He was arrested during a visit to Vegas and threatened with 75 years in jail. He turned snitch in the blink of an eye, and in so doing, brought down the multi-billion dollar online poker industry in the United States.
This is the broad-brush story. The book promises to delve deeper, uncovering the extent of Daniel’s guilt and casting doubt on the claim he was responsible for the shutdown of online poker.
It doesn’t.
There’s no ‘depth’ to this telling of the story. It’s like that old Keating description of Peter Costello: all tip and no iceberg.
The book has two major problems: the author, whose wide-eyed enthusiasm for Vegas and the crooks of the payment processing industry verges adoration; and the subject of the book, Daniel Tzvetkoff, who comes across as greedy and vacuous, with little business sense.
Tzvetkoff is described throughout as a ‘whiz-kid.’ The book provides little or no evidence for the claim, and indeed produces ample evidence to the contrary. He’s a mediocre student at school, has no discernable people skills, and has the vocabulary of a ball of navel lint.
According to Alligator Blood, Daniel’s idols are not Gates, or Jobs, but online pornographers. He drives a Ferrari with the numberplate ‘BALLR’. He names his payday loan company (which charges 700 per cent interest on short-term loans to the desperate) ‘Hugo,’ apparently after his first-born son.
This is the sort of person we are required to accompany for 307 pages and presumably meant to sympathise with.
Daniel’s chief piece of wizardry was this: develop a payment processing system that provided better-than-average validity checks on the payments being processed. His major strengths seem to be zero ethical qualms about nature of the business he enters into, and an insatiable lust for material wealth.
The world he sells his wares into is an ugly, masculine one. Men slapping each other on the back, men drinking expensive whisky served by scantily-clad serving waitresses, men vomiting in limousines and going to strip clubs. A world where women are seen chiefly as objects to be possessed.
The men are often described in unseemly detail: “…dressed in navy blue slacks and a tight-fitting white shirt, which showed off his chiselled physique, Ryan looked slick,” or “…he looked like an Action Man doll owing to his toned physique and close-cropped brown hair with small quiff at the front.”
The author seems to be in agreement with Tzvetkoff’s love of the movie Scarface – the cult film about Cuban-American Gangster, Tony Montana.
Apparently Tzvetkoff’s favourite quote from the movie is: “In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.” The author calls these “wise words.”
Both Leighton and Tzvetkoff are more correct than they realise in embracing this mantra.
In Scarface, the Tony Montana ultimately over-reaches in his lust for money and power, destroys his relationship with his family, starts snorting the cocaine he is meant to be selling, and dies in a shootout with a rival drug cartel. In the final scene Montana falls from a balcony into a fountain with the words ‘the world is yours’ printed across it.
Daniel Tzvetkoff is the poor man’s Scarface. He has the greed, but not the toughness, brutality, and cunning of the protagonist of the film.
Daniel loses every friend he has, treats his long-suffering father with disdain, dips into company money to fund his extravagant lifestyle, and ends up informing for the FBI after being charged with money laundering, bank fraud, and gambling conspiracy (Montana would never have turned snitch).
The sections of present-tense ‘in the scene’ enactments the book are the weakest – the tortured prose staunches any potential for the story to flow. The author sprays adjectives and exclamation marks around like a vacuous 25-year old multi-millionaire spraying Kristal over drunken patrons at a Vegas nightclub.
The book takes potentially fascinating incidents during the saga and manages to render them dull. For example, Tzvetkoff flies into Georgia, as the Russians invade in 2008, to try to convince the dodgy bank they are using to give back 10 million dollars of their money. Sounds like a hair-raising set-up, right?
It’s not.
The author manages to devote a whole page to a side trip Daniel’s group makes to McDonald’s, including a passage that describes the translator helping them with the menu. As though pointing to a picture of a Big Mac is either a) complicated, or b) interesting enough to warrant inclusion in a section where the main characters are trying to escape a war zone.
It is strange that Simon and Shuster would let a book out so clearly in need of a thorough edit. Perhaps they assumed that the demographic of likely readers won’t care about the standard of the writing. They may be right. The audience for this will primarily be poker players and fans of underbelly-type true crime, and as such are probably indifferent to clunky writing if the story is good.
The problem is that neither demographic will come away from this satisfied. Poker players will be infuriated that the book goes so soft on Tzvetkoff. The poker playing community is an intelligent one, and informed when it comes to the industry. They’ll know that the author skimmed over questions of guilt, they’ll be annoyed that he acted like a fanboy when describing Tzvetkoff’s extravagances, and pissed that there is no attempt to answer the vexed question of the missing millions of poker player’s money.
As to true crime fans – well, white collar crime can only get so interesting. Sure, the cast of characters in Alligator Blood is interesting, but there is no Scarface-like chainsaw-torture-in-the-bathroom scene to make the reading compelling. Just lots of macho posturing, complex financial arrangements (which, to his credit, the author does a good job explaining), and a cameo by Mike Tyson.
The book fails to wrap up any loose ends. Today, Daniel Tzvetkoff is apparently a free man able to afford (after claiming to be broke at one point) accommodation worth up to 7000 dollars a night at an exclusive resort in Bali. Why? We’re not told. The author simply says – wink, wink – that “truth is stranger than fiction.”
Thanks, but we knew that already. That’s why we bought the book: to find out the ‘truth’ part.
This is a morality tale about greed in which not one of the major players – or the author, for that matter – gives a thought to morality or greed.
Alligator Blood is just like the slots in Vegas: it doesn’t pay off.
This review first appeared at Online Opinion Australia