Joran van der Sloot was a Poker Playing Punk

As Gambling911.com has extensively covered, accused murderer Joran van der Sloot has long been tied to poker, both brick and mortar and online.  The Dutchman was attending the Latin American Poker Tour in Lima, Peru when he met Stephany Flores.  She would be killed in his hotel room.  Van der Sloot would later confess to the murder, though he has since recanted that confession.

While living in Aruba five years earlier, van der Sloot had met a recent High School grad Natalee Holloway.  She later vanished and Joran was the prime suspect in her disappearance, though never convicted of any crime.

It was the night of Holloway went missing that Matthew Biebel was caught on a surveillance camera nearly slugging van der Sloot.

"You could tell he was a punk," Biebel relayed to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Kevin Riordan, recalling a poker game with van der Sloot at the Radisson Aruba Resort, Casino & Spa. 

The FBI would later visit Biebel at his home in the U.S. to discuss the incident.  They wanted to know Biebel’s relationship to van der Sloot and what the argument was about while investigating the Holloway disappearance. 

From the Inquirer:

A 55-year-old Inquirer driver and father of two grown sons, Biebel was in Aruba with a friend.  Van der Sloot shared a poker table with Biebel and his friend May 29 and 30. Although house rules require that English be spoken during games, Van der Sloot frequently chatted with other players in a local language called Papiamento, Biebel says.

"I let it go, but finally there was a pot that was just me and him, and he did it again. I called over the guy who manages the poker room, and I told him that he was breaking the rules. He was told to stop, and he did.

"The next night, the stakes were higher, and I was in a hand with him, and he started doing it again, when he was deciding whether to call my bet. And my bet was a substantial bet.

"For all I knew, he was asking the other players what they folded. He said something smart back to me. . . . I honestly don't remember what it was, but it was not good.

"That's when it almost got physical. I stood up and basically put my finger in his face."

"If the [casino official] hadn't been at the next table, I would have hit him. Because now not only was he cheating, he was being a smart-ass.

"I told him they'd better do something about this - I wasn't going to lose this hand, and I didn't - and that's kind of where it stopped.

"You could sense he was a coddled punk, and to tell you the truth, the casino coddled him as well. I had played with him for four or five hours the night before, and he was constantly getting away with stuff."

Biebel's friend, who asks not to be identified to protect her privacy, says there was nothing remarkable about Van der Sloot.

"He was a nice-looking guy who seemed normal enough," she recalls. "He seemed to know everybody there."

While Van der Sloot "was very friendly to everybody," Biebel says, "he was definitely a punk."

Beibel though expressed to the FBI agents that he found it difficult to believe how van der Sloot could have been involved in a murder of a young woman than act as if nothing had transpired. 

"The timeline didn't work for me," Biebel says. "How cold-blooded could somebody be to do something like that and come in and play poker that night and the next day?"

"I just didn't think that was possible. How do you kill somebody and then come in and play poker?

At the time, Beibel didn’t believe van der Sloot was a murderer.  Since the slaying of Flores, he now believes otherwise.

Ace King, Gambling911.com