The Full Tilt legal battles are heating up … and this time they are on the offensive, suing Cycalona Gowen in federal court.

Full Tilt (specifically Tiltware, LLC, out of California) is not seeking money from her beyond court costs and attorney fees. But they do want a clear declaration that she does not have the 1 percent ownership interest she alleges.

Click here to read Tiltware’s compaint against Gowen, filed on Friday.

So why would they be doing this? Well according to the Nevada lawyers I’ve spoken to, that’s hard to say …

Essentially, they’re looking for the court to rule against her without having a trial. She goes to court again on February 1, for the third and last time, with the court deciding if her Third-Amended Complaint has merits to proceed. But if Full Tilt wins, and the judge says, yeah, sorry, we can’t waste a jury’s time with this … then maybe they don’t win enough?

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Here’s the actual Kennedy vs. FTP lawsuit, 19 pages, filed by Cyrus Sanai, a lawyer out of Beverly Hills.

And here’s the 2+2 thread from 2007 when the key plaintiff — Lary Kennedy (aka “pokergirl_z” on Full Tilt) — first spelled out her beefs that led to this lawsuit … mostly stemming from a series of heads-up matches against a Full Tilt player known as “TheComplainer”.

Kennedy is the real plaintiff. Greg Omoroy is just a guy who owned another account she used (which is a whole-nother issue altogether). And though they aren’t formally seeking class-action status, they do seem to be laying the groundwork for such a possibility — an aggressive legal play for sure.

Essentially, the allegations are that Full Tilt — with unfettered ability to label a player a bot, confiscate her money, and smear her name by calling her a bot — constitutes organized crime … being perpetuated by Californians against Californians, in violation of all sorts of California business and gaming laws.

They also say that “Playing Against the Pros” is tantamount to gambling against the “house” … there’s an added boogeyman with allegations that Full Tilt is running its own bots on the site … and a new-to-me company gets discussed, too: Verta Enterprises, out of St. Kitts.

On the surface, that seems less shakedown/extortion-y than other California lawsuits against Full Tilt. But the class-action possibilities suggest this suit is really looking for penalties in the hundreds of millions or more — you know, the kind of money the Feds have been collecting from longtime online gambling purveyors looking to get on the USA clean list.

If it turns out pokergirl_z was not a bot — and she claims to have video proof — it could be quite the expensive security goof.

Click below for further breakdown of the suit:

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The Full Tilt Poker legal team is busy. On the heels of the presumably still-unresolved Clonie Gowen $40 million lawsuit, another case was filed in the Nevada court system on September 11, 2009. This is the only information available thus far:

Jason Newitt
v.
Tiltware; Full Tilt Poker; Pocket Kings Ltd.; Pocket Kings Consulting Ltd.; Raymond Bitar; Howard Lederer
9/11/2009

Contract action. Plaintiff says he was unfairly fired, and that his distribution payments were unfairly ceased. Defendants then took control of his ownership.

Newitt was the former Tilt employee responsible for inadvertently forwarding Howard Lederer e-mail about Jimmy “Gobboboy” Fricke (the “freak and very weird dude”) — an “oops” that revealed a little something about Lederer and Bitar’s positions and powers within the Full Tilt money machine. Whether or not this had anything to do with Newitt’s dismissal and the subsequent lawsuit remains to be seen until we get our sneaky little hands on the court documents.

2+2 is speculating that “Clonie Gowan’s suit against Full Tilt dismissed” [sic].

PokerNewsDaily followed suit:

With the majority of the case being dismissed with prejudice and only Tiltware, Bitar and Lederer eligible for any further action, Gowen’s lawsuit appears to be dead at this time.

And then PokerNews reported “Gowen Lawsuit Against Full Tilt Dismissed”.

These hedlines are for the most part inaccurate, and at a minimum misleading. Clonie’s lawsuit is still alive … the courts have simply stripped out some irrelevant defendants while considering motions for expedited discovery, and her team has 30 days to amend their complaints around the still relevant defendants, i.e. Tiltware, Howard Lederer, and Ray Bitar. These recent rulings may be considered setbacks, but it’s not like she has to start from scratch to “refile”.

Read the court documents for yourself:

Gowen Motions Denied
Gowen Hearing Vacated

Now granted, these are a little confusing, so Pokerati has made half-hearted attempts to contact attorneys on both sides of the case, and have received no response from either. We’ve also contacted insiders on both sides of the case, whom literally say the exact same thing: “It’s definitely not over”. To be sure, on both sides, no one’s celebrating nor stomping about wildly screaming “Appeal!” bemoaning these most recent decisions.

In the meantime, to help us understand, Pokerati has brought in an independent, poker-savvy legal expert from a neighboring state to help translate:

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I’m still trying to figure out what it all means … who the plaintiffs are, and what they’re seeking. The best I can tell on first skim is that an LA attorney is representing himself, and seeking injunctive relief in an attempt to prevent Californians from gambling across state lines — i.e. James B. Hicks wants the site shut down.

This may or may not be connected to proposed legislation in California to allow players to gamble online within state lines.

Developing, obviously.

Click here to download and read the lawsuit.

UPDATE: Looks like this likely is a nuisance shakedowny kinda case … though personally I’m still suspicious that the proposed California intrastate online gambling bill might have something to do with it. From the Pokerati legal advisory team’s Cali branch:

This is really an attorney driven case under a California law called the “Unfair Competition Law” (UCL) that basically says, in part, that if any party is committing an act that is “unlawful” (i.e., violates a statute), that party can be enjoined from those unlawful acts and…..must pay the plaintiff’s attorneys fees. In other words, there probably is no harm to the plaintiff, but that may be irrelevant. This is really just a vehicle to get some attorneys fees paid.

Clonie Gowen filed an amended complaint in her lawsuit against Full Tilt Poker last month, according to Pokerlistings. The complaint added two additional defendants (Pocket Kings Consulting and Tiltproof) as well as adding seven causes of action in a response to the defendant’s motion to dismiss.

Those interested in reading the case can read the amended complaint and her motion for expedited discovery over at Scribd.com:

Amended Complaint
Motion for Expedited Discovery

Attorneys for Tiltware, the parent company of Full Tilt Poker, filed a motion yesterday to dismiss Clonie Gowen’s case against them for $40 million as an alleged 1% owner of the company. For those interested in reading the motion, it can be read here.

Chewed up, spit out? Clonie Gowen is challenging the most fearsome of Full Tilt avatars in Clark County Court.

We all knew something fishy was going on with Clonie and Full Tilt, right? And we’ve always wondered how exactly Full Tilt operates — seriously it’s kinda a mystery, even to people who work for them — and now, with Clonie Gowen suing four different companies connected to the game so many play with the pros, we should find out quite a bit of interesting info.

As far as I know, this is the first time any online poker biz that operates in the grayish world of processing money from American players (really really light gray, but still … ) will have to show its stuff publicly. Even Ultimate Bet/Absolute, with all the audits and investigations hasn’t really had to show anything it doesn’t want to to anyone outside its own semi-corporate family.

Um, hole-card cameras in the courtroom?

Official court docs here.

Gowen v. Tiltware LLC, et al.,
Plaintiff: Cycalona Gowen
Defendant: Full Tilt Poker, Tiltware LLC, Pocket Kings Ltd., Kolyma Corporation, A.V.V., Raymond J. Bitar, Howard Lederer, Andrew Bloch, Phillip Ivey, Christopher Ferguson, John Juanda, Phillip Gordon, Erick Lindgren, Erik Seidel, Jennifer Harman-Traniello, Michael Matusow, Allen Cunningham, Gus Hansen and Patrick Antonious

Case Number: 2:2008cv01581
Filed: November 14, 2008

Court: Nevada District Court
Office: Las Vegas Office [ Court Info ]
County: Clark
Presiding Judge: Judge Robert C. Jones
Referring Judge: Magistrate Judge Robert J. Johnston

Nature of Suit: Contract – Other Contract
Cause: 28:1332 Diversity-Other Contract
Jurisdiction: Diversity
Jury Demanded By: Plaintiff

They’re talking about it on 2+2, and the summary of her allegations below comes from the Hendon Mob:

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