Mason and Charmaine Malmuth Foundation

[hongkonger]

The thing is this; I truly don't know a single person in poker or the gambling industry that knows Mason, that has anything positive to say about him.

I played many many many sessions of 30/60 and 40/80 lhe with him back during the boom. His regular game is 2-5 NL and he'll play limit games if there is a waiting list. He doesn't smile. He won't talk to anyone. He shows no enjoyment. It's almost like he is robotic. He announces like a machine "raise, call, fold" in the same monotone voice.

I never met his wife Salamander but I imagine she is a peach.

Funny story: For all the bashing I did back in the day about Micon, we truly did have a lot of good memories. 2008-2009ish we were leaving the Bellagio poker room to go eat and MM is playing in some game. Micon throws from about 20 feet a dollar chip right at MM and it hits him after it bounces on the felt right on his mutt head. He looks around but has no idea who threw it. Everyone at the table just goes about their business.

Micon and I ended up eating and as we were pulling out of valet, MM was standing waiting for his car. Micon starts yelling at MM "Niki Manaj morherfucker!!!!!" at the top of his lungs and throws a water bottle filled with cigarette butts at him. Lol. I know it sounds juvenile but it was pretty funny at the time.

Oh another time Sklansky offered me $25,000 to console his ex-wife who he gave my phone number to with out my consent and had claimed was depressed and lethargic.

Jesus what crazy times.

GS


ZoD

Like everything else about the poker "community!"

[Texter]

Probably uses the charity to write off his vacations.

[Belly Buster]

Probably uses the charity to write off his vacations.

As there's no breakdown of any of the expenses, it could be used (tax efficiently) for absolutely anything, and no one is going to be any the wiser.

[Reno]

Embedded Tweet

https://twitter.com/twt/status/701170267133841409

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[gauchojake]

[MumblesBadly]

501c3 are the mothers milk of embarrassment for most everyone (athletes) who set them up.

Misanthrope that I am, I look at 990 tax records for 501c's quite often. I always enjoy the thrill of catching someone's hand in the cookie jar.

The typical scam is putting your family and posse on the payroll. See the Gronkowski family. Before you know it only 10% makes it to the street. But most charities are piss poor anyway.

I see Mason & Salamander claim 3hrs of work ea. week with no personal salary and no one else on payroll.

Looking clean.

Being under $50k there is no requirement to itemize donations. 35% tax bracket - this is small tax savings.

Chaulk this up to a strange choice by a guy who is perceived as strange anyway. You got nothing here.

My thoughts, also. While MM may be a greedy controling fuck when it comes to his website, IMO Druff was being petty and specious in making the claim that the "Contributions, gifts and grants" can be "anything". MM isn't foolish enough to fabricate such figures without documentation of giving for charitable purposes to survive an audit.

[JTJTJTJT]

Most of these small charity's are pools of tax free money for the owner and anything less than a million is unlikely to be audited.

One of best tricks I have seen is in the clever way some of them raise money. Special events and corporate donations are good but take more work for the owner of the charity and the suckers may not buy your flimsy story. But the easy way is to team up with a few others also looking for some extra cash. Say for example you and two friends each had a charity for worthy causes like Tennis, Polo, and Golf lessons for strippers . Player1 donates 20K each to the other two charity's and they do the same. Now you each deduct 40K from your personal taxes, and have a pool of 40K which can be used for the charity maybe travel to Hawaii, credit card expenses, business dinners, etc.

[Dan Druff]

501c3 are the mothers milk of embarrassment for most everyone (athletes) who set them up.

Misanthrope that I am, I look at 990 tax records for 501c's quite often. I always enjoy the thrill of catching someone's hand in the cookie jar.

The typical scam is putting your family and posse on the payroll. See the Gronkowski family. Before you know it only 10% makes it to the street. But most charities are piss poor anyway.

I see Mason & Salamander claim 3hrs of work ea. week with no personal salary and no one else on payroll.

Looking clean.

Being under $50k there is no requirement to itemize donations. 35% tax bracket - this is small tax savings.

Chaulk this up to a strange choice by a guy who is perceived as strange anyway. You got nothing here.

My thoughts, also. While MM may be a greedy controling fuck when it comes to his website, IMO Druff was being petty and specious in making the claim that the "Contributions, gifts and grants" can be "anything". MM isn't foolish enough to fabricate such figures without documentation of giving for charitable purposes to survive an audit.

There are legal and quasi-legal ways around this.

My point to Mason is that you can't brag publicly about your foundation "giving away $270k to charity", and then refuse to provide details of exactly where the money went.

If that part is going to be such a secret, don't brag in the first place.

[MumblesBadly]

My thoughts, also. While MM may be a greedy controling fuck when it comes to his website, IMO Druff was being petty and specious in making the claim that the "Contributions, gifts and grants" can be "anything". MM isn't foolish enough to fabricate such figures without documentation of giving for charitable purposes to survive an audit.

There are legal and quasi-legal ways around this.

My point to Mason is that you can't brag publicly about your foundation "giving away $270k to charity", and then refuse to provide details of exactly where the money went.

If that part is going to be such a secret, don't brag in the first place.

"Mason! Show us your receipts! We don't believe you!"

Seriously, Druff, you are being petty.

[Benford]

Hypothetically speaking...(emphasis on hypothetically):


Could I possibly just give $200,000 to a shell 501 c-3 charity I set up and hold two tennis lessons charging $100,000 for each hourly lesson payable to me from the charity I set up, thereby technically claiming I donated $200,000 when I only gave out two hours of tennis lessons since I received all my money back from the charity I "donated" to?

Do note that I am not claiming Mason Malmuth did something like this; I am just wondering if something like this is truly possible. If such shenanigans are possible, I can definitely agree with Druff seeking clarity and itemization of the charity money spent.

[MumblesBadly]

Hypothetically speaking...(emphasis on hypothetically):


Could I possibly just give $200,000 to a shell 501 c-3 charity I set up and hold two tennis lessons charging $100,000 for each hourly lesson payable to me from the charity I set up, thereby technically claiming I donated $200,000 when I only gave out two hours of tennis lessons since I received all my money back from the charity I "donated" to?

Do note that I am not claiming Mason Malmuth did something like this; I am just wondering if something like this is truly possible. If such shenanigans are possible, I can definitely agree with Druff seeking clarity and itemization of the charity money spent.

So, on one hand you make a charitable contribution of $200,000, which is deductible from your taxes, but on the other hand, you earned $200,000 giving tennis lessons, which would be included in your AGI, which would likely trigger you needing to pay taxes based on the alternative minimum tax calculation, which would reduces the effective tax write-off of your $200,000 charitable contribution. Thus, you would owe more taxes than not engaging in this scheme.

[Benford]

So, on one hand you make a charitable contribution of $200,000, which is deductible from your taxes, but on the other hand, you earned $200,000 giving tennis lessons, which would be included in your AGI, which would likely trigger you needing to pay taxes based on the alternative minimum tax calculation, which would reduces the effective tax write-off of your $200,000 charitable contribution. Thus, you would owe more taxes than not engaging in this scheme.

That's a good point on the AMT, but you get your bragging rights a lot cheaper than donating the $200K straight, and my example was purposely a very simple one. There are a lot of unknowns surrounding Mason's case. His donations were much smaller amounts over several years which may have enabled him to operate under more favorable tax rules. Again, this is assuming there are any shell games going on with Mason's foundation which Druff is currently wondering about.

It's also possible to make the shell game much more complex than the hypothetical I described. What if you owned two separate businesses outside the charity, yet they did business with the charity you set up so you could claim redundant tax write offs from all three entities working together? Given the complexities of the IRS tax code, I wouldn't be surprised if the tax could be whittled down to zero (or close to it) if enough entities were involved.

I don't want to add much more here because not much is known about Mason's foundation. Investigating this makes sense given Druff's past explanations about scammers loving charities overall.

[MumblesBadly]

So, on one hand you make a charitable contribution of $200,000, which is deductible from your taxes, but on the other hand, you earned $200,000 giving tennis lessons, which would be included in your AGI, which would likely trigger you needing to pay taxes based on the alternative minimum tax calculation, which would reduces the effective tax write-off of your $200,000 charitable contribution. Thus, you would owe more taxes than not engaging in this scheme.

That's a good point on the AMT, but you get your bragging rights a lot cheaper than donating the $200K straight, and my example was purposely a very simple one. There are a lot of unknowns surrounding Mason's case. His donations were much smaller amounts over several years which may have enabled him to operate under more favorable tax rules. Again, this is assuming there are any shell games going on with Mason's foundation which Druff is currently wondering about.

It's also possible to make the shell game much more complex than the hypothetical I described. What if you owned two separate businesses outside the charity, yet they did business with the charity you set up so you could claim redundant tax write offs from all three entities working together? Given the complexities of the IRS tax code, I wouldn't be surprised if the tax could be whittled down to zero (or close to it) if enough entities were involved.

I don't want to add much more here because not much is known about Mason's foundation. Investigating this makes sense given Druff's past explanations about scammers loving charities overall.

It is well-known that MM is a control freak, putting even Druff to considerable shame in that category. So, setting up his own foundation gives him that control.

Also, personal expenditures to a business or club for things like tennis lessons on behalf of someone else normally can't be treated as charitable giving for tax purposes. In fact, they would be considered "gifts", and if more than a certain amount in one year is given on behalf of one individual would trigger a gift tax payable by the recipient of that largess.

In summary, setting up a private foundation is the easiest way to address those concerns.

[Belly Buster]

Mason is a douche. If you read down the rest of that article it says:

Unfortunately, because of my position with Two Plus Two and the success that we have had, it’s inevitable that the critics will appear and the negative attacks will happen, and this is something which I’ve had to deal with for many years. So this note should be viewed as just one answer to some of those people who try to tarnish the reputation of all of us associated with Two Plus Two.

So a random throwaway comment buried 36 posts deep in a PFA radio thread is perceived as a "negative attack" and warrants a full page editorial piece. No one here likes Mason, so who's he trying to win over? The guy's a clown by making this a story. Maybe his charity is totally on the level, maybe it isn't. All we know is some money goes in and some money comes out and the charity type is set up as a tax exempt structure, so all anyone can do is draw their own conclusions.

Then it says:

Finally, except for the person mentioned in the post linked to above, our policy of not soliciting for money on our website will remain in force (unless we deem it to be a special exception).

Can't really figure out what this means. He talks in code. Everyone else can call Mason "Mason" and 2p2 "2p2". But he can't bring himself to call Todd "Todd" or even "Druff" or mention Poker Fraud Alert or even PFA.

So with the great success of our company

[Belly Buster]

2014 figures are in ...

[Sanlmar]

2014 figures are in ...

You gotta wonder why he would poke a forum full of angry trolls.

[LarryLaffer]

i'm going to go ahead and sacrifice my 2+2 account and go post that in NVG

[LarryLaffer]

bump

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29.../#post52293489



^^^^does this violate the new deal? I don't think it does.

Enjoy the day gents. im going to go play frisbeegolf.

[LarryLaffer]

banned


reason: troll


lifted: never

[LarryLaffer]

im still sending a letter to the IRS on tuesday. fuck it, i'll go down to their building downtown and drop it off myself.


fuck that guy