“I’m not trying to be coy here, but I don’t know if anybody can do that today who owns real estate,” he testified in October 2009. “If you own some, you’ve got to be able to sell it.”

The implication was clear: With prices still falling, and with the foreclosure crisis sweeping Las Vegas, few people were willing to gamble on real estate. Golf had become a loser, too. In the post-Lehman years, hundreds of courses closed nationwide.

In a separate lawsuit, in 2010, Walters stated in a complaint that another of his courses, Bali Hai Golf Club, had fallen short of expectations because of the economic troubles. The club was left with $49 million in “un-recouped costs,” he said.

‘Mythical Figure’

Walters has a long history of beating the odds. By now the outlines of his early life are well known: Born in Kentucky, the son of a professional gambler and a teenage mother, Walters began shooting nine-ball pool at age 4 and, by age 10, had progressed to gambling.

After being arrested for illegal sports gambling in his 20s, he struck out for Vegas -- “someplace where it [gambling] was legal and I could be a respected member of the community,” he told the author Richard Munchkin in “Gambling Wizards: Conversations With the World’s Greatest Gamblers.” “That place was Las Vegas; Las Vegas is the Wall Street of gambling.”

Munchkin says now: “Walters is the only person I know who started out a degenerate gambler and became a successful one. He’s a mythical figure in Las Vegas.”

By his own admission, as he told Munchkin, Walters’ early forays into high-stakes gambling mostly enriched the casinos, partly because he drank heavily. His big break came at the Computer Group, founded around 1980 by a young Westinghouse computer scientist named Michael Kent. Kent had developed a program to calculate his weekend softball team’s odds of winning and later applied it to handicapping college sports.

Gamblers Inc.

Kent teamed up with Ivan Mindlin, a local doctor with a gambling habit, and brought in Walters to lay bets. In a 2015 interview, Mindlin said that the operation brought in “hundreds of millions of dollars.” It also attracted federal wire taps and police raids in 1985.

“After five years of creaming the casinos, we had our doors busted down by the FBI,” Mindlin said in the 2015 interview. He did not respond to a call last week seeking comment.