How Bankroll Went Bust

Bankroll quickly fell apart. What happened? / Photo-illustration by C.J Burton

The problem with Paul Martino may be just how good he is.

Martino lives in Doylestown, after growing up in Lansdale, where he started his first company, in 1988, by creating pre-internet bulletin-board games that linked players via software and phone lines. The $15 checks arriving in the mail made his mother curious — Martino, a math whiz, was 13 years old.

He would hit Silicon Valley’s tech explosion at the turn of the century, creating companies: A curious Harvard kid named Mark Zuckerberg spent a week at one of them. A friend named Reid Hoffman knocked on Martino’s door one day to ask what he thought of an idea for a company — he was going to call it LinkedIn.

That’s how Martino rolled.

His thing became investing in fledgling companies, with the highlight his early support of FanDuel, the online sportsbook. Martino is now very rich, and he’s branched out, producing a documentary about an NBA game-fixing­ scandal, the one with Delaware County-bred referee Tim Donaghy as its face. (Martino’s cousin Tommy got caught up in that mess as well.) And he made a leap into politics by shoveling money to conservative school-board candidates across Pennsylvania, with a larger goal, he told me two years ago: “The future of the Republican Party. That is something I’m very focused on.” He wants to get rid of the party’s deadwood, go from what he sees as a country-club mentality to actually getting things done. You get the feeling Martino believes he can do pretty much anything, including, more recently, this initiative:

He decided to build a huge sports-­betting bar, Bankroll, at Chestnut Street’s old Boyd Theater, which had been empty for two decades. It wouldn’t just be a watering hole with a lot of TVs — no, Martino was going to change the nature of how we bet on sports via a sophisticated tech play, a proprietary app he’d create that would give patrons the latest game odds and player stats and other inside info from analysts, all the up-to-the-moment data right there in one place on their phones as if it were created just for them. And Bankroll would change how we watch sports together by linking its patrons to each other through that app, creating a community, the gambling equivalent of Cheers. While he was at it, Martino brought in Stephen Starr to run the kitchen. When it opened in March, Bankroll was the largest restaurant downtown, having cost $25 million to build. The next step would be taking the idea to other cities.

But within three months of opening, Bankroll was dead, the doors bolted, 50 employees jobless. The speed with which it went belly-up was stunning. And Stephen Starr didn’t even stick around that long — he’d quit the enterprise before opening night.

Starr, who knows a thing or two about running restaurants, insists that abandoning Bankroll wasn’t entirely his decision — that it was “a coup d’état.” Why Martino shunned the hyper-experienced Starr and picked Padma Rao as CEO to oversee him remains a mystery to Starr; she had worked with food-delivery apps but not brick-and-mortar restaurants. “I still don’t understand it,” he says.

There were other problems. That app to give diners inside sports dope to help them place bets — it never got up and running. Which created a strange vibe out of the chute: What, in fact, was Bankroll actually offering besides a lot of TV screens, $20 drinks, and $200 steaks? Apparently not a leg up on gambling, or on watching sports.

I know Martino a bit from writing about his earlier foray into politics, and when I called him in August without leaving a message, he immediately texted back:

Saw your call. On a board call. I am guessing you didn’t call to wish me a happy birthday — which is today. I am off the grid until Monday.

He’s a wry, pleasant guy by nature, now 49 years old. But his mood quickly shifted. He called me a week after that text to lean heavily into how hard it is to build something big and beautiful and new in this city, a place where anything cutting-edge has too many hurdles to overcome, from zoning problems to unfriendly neighbors to the exorbitant cost of construction. He’s not wrong about that. But then Martino took it one step further, venting angrily that this story on Bankroll’s quick demise just signifies how we locals — and this ­magazine — are all too willing to jump up and down in glee over his failure. He seemed to see that as a Philly thing, too — “where we’re so much more interested in failure than in getting behind success.”

Perhaps he wasn’t entirely wrong there, either: The schadenfreude in, say, Martino going at it in a round of mud-wrestling with Stephen Starr might be sweet. Yet there’s something we really do want to know, the answer to a simple question: What happened? How could someone so brilliant, so experienced with start-up enterprises, so willing to go to the heart of what works and doesn’t with big projects in the business world — how could that guy screw up so royally, so fast, with his Bankroll idea? And maybe we deserve an answer, given just how much energy Martino put into ballyhooing it, into telling us how important his brainstorm would be for this town.

It’s a story that, for me, only comes into focus upon parsing Bankroll’s collapse. (Martino declined to talk further to me about Bankroll’s end, but a half-dozen former insiders, and another 25 people who claimed to have inside knowledge, spoke to me at length — albeit without allowing me to identify them by name.) Failure, it turns out, really does reveal much more than ­success — both about someone like Martino, and about just how hard it can be to launch a cutting-edge endeavor intended to change how we eat and play.

In early 2022, I walked through Bankroll with Martino for that profile I was writing of him then. The place wasn’t yet anything, just an immense gutted theater with pigeons flying around inside it — the last movie shown there was Philadelphia, with Tom Hanks, in 1993.

Martino, ever the enthusiast, told me as we walked in: “This is going to be restored to its 1920s Art Deco look!”

He had conceived the project off the success of FanDuel, in which he’d invested in 2011, when it was just the curious idea of a husband and wife in Scotland. FanDuel has become a leading sportsbook — ­essentially, an online ­casino — capturing half the market and worth $22 billion as of late last year.

“One day, I wanted to be the person to get that money,” Martino said. “And so that was in the back of my mind for years and years and years. Maybe it’ll be a media company. And then, once sports betting got legalized, I said, it’s crazy that Philly doesn’t have a good sports bar. I finally figured out it would be a venue. And then there was almost a year or two of brainstorming.”

Now he was moving on it. Bankroll would seat 350, a rollicking place for fans to enjoy games together.

The redone Bankroll / Photograph by Jeff Fusco

Chris Tolles, himself a serial company creator who met Martino in Silicon Valley two decades ago, who had come East to work on this project, joined us on our tour: “I don’t think it’s like Facebook-and ­Twitter-style social networking, but rather an online community. Let’s call it online community-building around a subject.”

Actually, two subjects: sports and betting. That was the shared passion that would connect patrons with each other within Bankroll. One guy would challenge somebody one “bungalow” over — ­Bankroll’s cordoned-off areas with couches for watching games would be called bungalows — to try to work his way up Bankroll’s leaderboards and start betting-fueled conversation. While you were at it, you could use the app to buy drinks and order dinner.

And there would be a broadcast studio, where a guest commentator such as Charles Barkley could be brought in for a big game and do commentary for the bettors as they ate dinner. Plus, current Philly players would come in to hang out and kibitz.

“What struck me was, Martino’s like the smartest guy I’ve ever met in my life,” Marc Rayfield told me two years ago. Rayfield had been the longtime general manager of WIP radio in Philly before moving on to CBS in New York; he’d come back home to be Martino’s first Bankroll CEO. “This project is what I’ve been looking for my entire life. It’s helped me understand that young men — what they do with their free time is very different than what you and I did with our free time when we were kids. And that’s what fascinates me, and that’s what fascinates him. And I don’t want to just be a guy carrying a football. I want to be the guy who’s thinking about writing the playbook. We are trying to create the next-­generation viewing experience.”

With the goal of building a lot of Bankrolls in a lot of cities. Taking it nationwide.

Martino himself was giddy over thoughts of guys hanging out talking smack, making bets against each other, reveling in the games together — “a cool environment for you to do what you’re already doing with your buddies on sofas, but in our place, right?” (That’s how it looks in all those online-betting ads.) And one other thing, a piece of advice he said he took to heart: “Martino, you need a world-class restaurant partner, because all the cool tech you want to build doesn’t matter if nobody comes into this. I never, quite frankly, thought I’d get Stephen Starr. I never thought I’d get him. I mean, the fact that we got him is beyond my wildest dreams.”

The pressure was building on Padma Rao, promoted in 2022 to CEO of Bankroll by Paul Martino just as the build-out of the Boyd was beginning. Despite his early enthusiasm, Marc Rayfield had left for other pursuits. Rao was a tech savant and had a long working association with Martino; she’d been an adviser on his venture fund for a decade. But what qualified her, given that she didn’t live in Philly, that she wasn’t a sports fan, that she had no apparent knowledge of sports betting or, for that matter, of the restaurant business, still mystifies Bankroll insiders.

There were delays in construction, because, as Stephen Starr points out now, there are always delays in construction of big projects, especially in Philadelphia, though some say they were made worse by Rao and Chris Tolles constantly upgrading the design. Supply-chain issues caused by COVID were a problem as well. Staff turnover further delayed the build-out. The cost of materials skyrocketed, and Martino would admit to overextending: “We spent far too much on the kitchen and lighting systems for a venue of this kind,” he wrote on Facebook in September. Rao reportedly told her team to buy the finest equipment and the highest-end china, as if the money spigot would never turn off. The thinking became, more and more, even with the problems in getting it done, “What’s the most beautiful build-out we can do?”

Meantime, while the neighborhood was generally behind the abandoned Boyd Theater getting a tenant — it would do away with the homeless folks camping out front — the William Penn House, a 31-floor high-rise condo across the street, had a problem. Residents there didn’t want a gambling parlor in their neighborhood.

Which Bankroll wasn’t — it wouldn’t have a gambling license. But Martino and initial CEO Marc Rayfield got a little loose in their public enthusiasm for the project, with Rayfield writing on LinkedIn, “Bankroll is a first of its kind tech-based sports betting venture that we hope to scale across the US. … A unique and amazing customer experience for sports betters and non gamblers alike. We think of it more or less as ‘Apple meets the Sports Book!’ Game on!” This meant, to a couple of loud William Penn residents, that a casino was going in across the street, and a protracted fight ensued, costing both sides hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and traffic and security experts. One William Penn resident told me he went outside to check out the traffic at 19th and Chestnut at 2 a.m. one night, just when the planned parlor across the street would empty out, cause congestion, and pose a danger.

I asked him what sort of danger he was worried about. Well, he said, what if traffic blocked Chestnut and an emergency vehicle had to get through? Yes, William Penn has a rear entrance on Ludlow, but ambulances come to the front door. Or attempt to. What if … ?

It was that kind of fight. A zoning battle went to court. Getting a liquor license meant overcoming more William Penn objections. Martino would claim that the zoning fight was the single biggest roadblock causing delays; others who were involved think that’s overblown, including Starr, who cites the slow Boyd renovation as a bigger problem. Center City Residents Association head Rick Gross, who supported the project, says the problem ultimately wasn’t a few neighbors playing the Not in My Neighborhood card hard — he says Bankroll’s demise wasn’t caused by zoning woes or liquor-license delays or other timing hiccups, but ultimately by something else: “They didn’t get enough fannies in the seats.”

The delays did mess with the timing of the opening, though. Bankroll wasn’t ready in the fall of ’22, meaning it missed out on football, by far the biggest betting season of the year.

Padma Rao and Paul Martino inside Bankroll in happier times. / Photograph by Michael Klein/Philadelphia Inquirer

Meanwhile, Rao had quickly taken control. The stories abound. She seemed uninterested in collaboration, some observers say. The buck stopped with her, a source says she told staffers — which they took to mean that Martino didn’t want to hear anybody’s grievances or problems. She pushed contractors hard early this year; Martino had to put in $3 million more of his own money — he was, by far, the largest single investor — as the total hit $25 million.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, the idea of what Bankroll would be changed.

Let’s go back to that initial idea — what got Martino and his partners so excited over a groundbreaking tech play that could make them much richer. It was, like all great ideas, obvious once somebody has it:

In the restaurant business, margins are thin. If Bankroll grossed $10 million in food and beverage annually — a solid goal for a place that size, in that neighborhood — the net would have been $2 million, maybe a little less. Enter the tech idea. The pitch to a sportsbook would be straightforward: You have all these high-roller VIPs in the Philly area, but you know virtually nothing about them. You need to develop a personal relationship, because with so many other sportsbooks vying for their business, that’s the only way to retain your customers. Traditional casinos do that with VIP rooms, catering to big gamblers’ every need, which builds loyalty. Sportsbooks can’t readily create that connection, though, since everything is conducted online. But Bankroll could serve, in a sense, as a VIP room for online operators, letting them develop relationships with and knowledge of its gamblers, acting as the conduit to build that loyalty. Which could bring in, say, another $5 million a year to Bankroll from sportsbooks, who would pony up to get these bettors via Bankroll and to advertise on the restaurant’s exclusive app — serving only Bankroll ­customers — and across all their TV screens. That was the model that Paul Martino wanted to take to multiple cities across the country.

But maybe the gambling piece wasn’t, after all, so important.

Martino would later claim that the myriad problems in getting Bankroll up and running “made us take our eye off of perhaps the most important thing: deployment of the live technology.” That app. He made it sound as if the whole thrust behind that initial concept — what made Bankroll groundbreaking to begin with — was simply … what? Put aside? Forgotten?

That’s absurd on its face — that they would willy-nilly abandon the idea that had the company’s brain trust crowing about changing the very nature of how guys hang out and watch sports and talk to each other.

I suspect there’s a pretty direct explanation for it, though. A Bankroll insider suggests to me what happened:

“We had a fair amount of conversations with a bunch of different sportsbooks early on who said, ‘Show it to me.’” They wanted to come in to Bankroll and see a high-end clientele having a good time. “And then,” the notion went, “we would all sit. Then we would close the deal on a bunch of advertising.” Which would scroll across all those TV screens and pop up on the Bankroll app. That would be the beginning of monetizing the tech play.

There was a small problem, however: Bankroll had nothing, yet, to show — no ­clientele. Bankroll wasn’t open. So they had to get people in — get the restaurant and bar up and running first — before the relationships with sportsbooks could get life. The insider says that Bankroll did indeed have an app ready to roll before opening, but it got pushed aside because of the prove-it-first mind-set of the sportsbooks: Show us that you’ve got the business with high rollers that makes you somebody to partner with.

There was also a downturn in sportsbook stocks in 2022, which certainly made Martino and company nervous. The stocks rebounded last year, yet that created a new pressure to make the restaurant still ritzier. According to Martino’s own analysis, sportsbooks were now even more dialed-in to the high rollers, not the $5 bets.

So much for the sportsbooks being an easy gravy train.

Not being in a position to woo sportsbooks is the problem that makes sense of the mania to finally get Bankroll open and an eventual push to higher-end food and drink — both to establish it as the go-to place that sportsbooks wanted and to get the cash flowing in an attempt to survive until the tech piece was up and running. It also explains something Padma Rao reportedly told a board member about the app and the connection to sportsbooks in the lead-up to opening: “We’re going in a different direction.” So no, they didn’t, as Martino claimed, get distracted from the tech idea. At least in the short term, they had to drop it. They zeroed in on the restaurant instead.

Which made that app into a sort of MacGuffin, mysterious as to how it would be used even to high-level Bankroll insiders but just the thing that might save the day.

Meanwhile, there was more seat-of-the-pants thinking among Martino’s brain trust. One idea was to sell season-ticket packages to watch Eagles or Sixers games; these would be marketed to law firms and other businesses and give them private viewing areas. But according to another insider, “No one could figure out what to charge for it. They just couldn’t decide.” Anyway, as construction dragged on, it was tough to bring in potential ticket ­buyers — there was that problem again, that Bankroll had to be up and running in order to entice others to join the party — and the idea went nowhere.

Martino’s new betting palace seemed to be falling apart before it even opened.

Stephen Starr is calm. He even seems slightly amused. He says he had no particular interest in getting involved in a sports bar/restaurant. Starr does like sports; he’s a Phillies fan. But he prefers to watch the games at home, alone.

Marc Rayfield called him in 2021 and brought him in to meet Martino. Starr was intrigued; this would be something different for him, a twist, this elevated idea of a sports bar merged with technology. Though, Starr admits, “I didn’t really understand that part of it” — the technology piece. But he got good vibes from Martino and Manu Gambier, the gaming expert who’d helped Martino think the idea through, who was evenhanded and smart. And Starr didn’t have to put any money in.

He didn’t worry about the tech part. Starr would run the restaurant. Except no, he wouldn’t.

“I put together a concept from a food standpoint that was high-level sports-bar food, and they wanted to increase it to a very high check average, which I objected to. Even when they said our audience is going to be wealthy or whatever, I said, well, even rich people don’t want to eat fancy food when they’re watching a football game. But they killed that. They wanted foie gras and fancy food.”

“They” appeared to be Padma Rao — at least, that’s who Starr had to deal with most of the time. He assumes she was executing Paul Martino’s vision.

“At a certain point, he wasn’t listening to me. I mean, I called them and told them: I don’t think you should make this food fancy and expensive. I think you should be more concerned with volume, not check average. But they had spent so much money.”

It’s hard in Philly or anywhere, Starr says, to spend $25 million on a restaurant and make enough money back: “That’s a pretty crazy amount.”

He had warned them there was no way they could be successful just from food and beverage. The place was too big for that. But it was looking more and more like that was the deal — that the tech piece wasn’t going to bring in any money, at least not at first — as they got closer to opening.

I ask Starr if he had it out with Martino.

“I’m not going to delve into that specifically,” he says. “But yes. Okay. Yes, I had those conversations with him. And her.” Starr wants collaboration in his restaurants; he wants his staff to tell him when they think he’s wrong. But if he’s unconvinced? “Then I’ll impose my will.” Starr laughs, briefly — he’s used to getting his way. With Rao, he says, there was no collaboration.

One staffer remembers overhearing one of those conversations, over the phone. Padma Rao was yelling — and so was Starr. You could hear him coming through the receiver from across the room.

Starr says he told Martino that Rao was bad news. But Martino always supported her. One source says the last straw dropped a month before opening, when, the source says, Rao told two of Starr’s trainers as they were gearing up the service in Bankroll to get out of the house, she didn’t want to see them there, didn’t want to see their faces.

That did if for Starr. He says he challenged Martino: It’s her or me.

Martino tried to make nice. “He said, ‘We love you, Stephen, but this is the way it is.’ And that’s when we said, ‘Fuck it, we’re done. We’re out.’” It was, Starr says, “a coup d’état.” Something he thinks was brewing for some time.

He just might be right. According to an insider who worked with Rao, she had been telling staffers for a while that when Starr or his people requested something, they should say yes and then ignore the request. When asked about this claim, Rao says Starr was a “consultant” and that when push came to shove, the restaurant was ultimately not his responsibility.

This was beginning to sound like a fight on a middle-school playground. Though Martino had no ostensible problems with Starr, other than Starr trying to tone down the menu. That disagreement hadn’t gotten anywhere near the level of forcing Starr out — at least, it didn’t seem that way to him at the time.

Starr laughs about it all now — at the absurdity of hiring him and not letting him run the restaurant. “I wanted to just dispose of it as quickly as possible,” he says, “because it was so badly run, and I didn’t want any part of it. You know, my brand is strong. We have a good reputation. I didn’t really want to be a part of something like that. When I say ‘badly run,’ it was because I wasn’t really running it.”

Starr says he wouldn’t have opened the restaurant when Bankroll did, in March. It was still being worked on. The dining room wasn’t ready, so it opened with no dining room at first.

I wonder if Starr thinks Paul Martino got out over his skis and thought he could oversee something that he ultimately didn’t know how to run. “That’s the mystery,” Starr says. “I don’t know. Martino had no infrastructure, no way to make it work. Look, I never really got to know him well. He was always very nice to me.

“He carried himself in a kind way. And I didn’t really think that there was anything bad about him. But he didn’t stand up for what I believe is the right thing with us.”

And what was that?

“We should have stayed there. That’s what we were contracted to do.” To run the place.

But it was too late for that.

•

The opening-night party in March was spectacular, an almost all-Philly crowd of 550 — ex-Eagle Rodney McLeod and media marketer Johnny Colabelli and Action News reporter Jessica Boyington and actor Christian Crosby. Not A-listers, exactly, but a crowd with some pop. The space was certainly made for large gatherings: Guests entered the Big Game Room, with dining tables and walls dominated by TVs plus a bar that seated 16. (Martino would later rue having such a tiny bar.) A mezzanine in front of the Boyd’s gigantic mirror hovered above, with variously sized spaces for dining and sports-watching beyond it. Bankroll was vast and shiny and lovely, all those TVs giving off a chaotic energy but with enough original touches to back up the claim by Martino, who beamed as the maître d’ of a happening: Art Deco meets the NBA.

With that, Bankroll was open for ­business — as a high-priced bar with high-priced food, where sports fans of means could sit at the bar or on, say, those couches in their own bungalows and make bets through FanDuel or DraftKings on their phones.

There was still no proprietary app to connect diners with inside sports info, or with each other, or with any in-house contests Bankroll would drum up. Rao continued to promise that it was coming, that they were in negotiations with sportsbooks for partnerships, making it sound like at any moment …

Which raises a question: What was Bankroll really offering?

A friend of mine who stopped in at cocktail hour one weekday early on was met just inside the door by a young woman who said, “May I help you?”

This struck him as oddly unwelcoming. They were standing in the foyer of the old Boyd, with inspirational sports messages scrolling electronically above them (“If you can’t outplay them, outwork them.”  — Ben Hogan), and it was as though because this was a truly special place, he was being required to state his business.

“I’d like to get a drink,” he told the hostess.

She turned and pulled back a curtain, and he descended into the Big Game Room, joining a few patrons at the bar, sports chat keeping them company on the TVs. He took a walk around, went upstairs, peeked into the bungalows and two dining rooms and spaces that looked like private dens, which were all empty, and that presented him with a question: What is this? And then a couple more: Will anyone come? Wouldn’t most of Philly really prefer to sit on their couches at home, tap into DraftKings, and order a pizza?

An answer came fast, after things were looking good for a moment. There was a burst of business during the March Madness of college basketball and the NBA playoffs. Plus, a partnership was finally struck with a sportsbook, Parx Casino in Bensalem, to be the go-to betting site that Bankroll patrons would access through that app, which would launch during the summer. But then the bottom fell out. Starr’s warning about the restaurant not being able to cover costs alone became moot, since now there were days when virtually no one came in, especially with the dawn of summer, when sports meet the dog days of baseball and the city decamps to the Shore.

The empty Bankroll today / Photograph by Laura Swartz

At this point, Padma Rao was in overdrive, or so my insiders tell me. They say she instructed one staffer to fire a hostess on the spot simply for seating six people at a four-top; she demanded that managers come in on off days to fire staffers she was fed up with; one evening, a hostess went out to the curb to a guy on a motorcycle to try to drum up business, showing him a menu and then bringing him inside. She was fired, too, the staffers says, because Rao said the biker wasn’t the type of patron they desired. Rao won’t discuss individual personnel moves but is adamant that “no employee was ever the subject of employment action based on a single issue.” As to how terminations were handled and by whom, she says, “The manager was given the option to terminate the employee, or I could handle it on their behalf.”

Bankroll desperately needed working capital to get to football season, but the project had required so much money that to go back to the well for another round of financing seemed impossible. Paul Martino’s main lender, based in Silicon Valley, was reportedly putting the heat on.

Bankroll slid even further from the original concept. “It really was becoming sort of a nightclub,” an insider says. “That was obvious, because they were bringing in a club promoter from Atlantic City to create parties on Friday nights, with a deejay on Saturday nights.” Which is kind of ironic, given that convincing William Penn House they were planning a tame high-end restaurant had seemed so important in overcoming the neighbors’ complaints. But it was too late in the game to worry about starting a new fight with the residents now.

Employees started asking Rao if they were in danger of closing; executive chef Scott Swiderski says he sat down with her in early June to get the lowdown. She acknowledged that business was slow and that some prep cooks would have to be laid off, but no managers, she said, were at risk. She told Swiderski there was enough money to get them through the summer. What she apparently didn’t share was that she and Martino had been trying to sell the business — showing the restaurant to a prospective buyer had been on her calendar for weeks at that point.

“Then I got a call from the Inquirer, the Monday after Father’s Day,” Swiderski says. It was only a couple weeks after he’d met with Rao. “The reporter said, ‘I’m sorry to hear about what happened.’”

That’s how Swiderski found out that Bankroll was done.

The stripping of Bankroll for auction after it closed seemed tragicomic, as everything — toilet paper, an eight-foot-by-nine-foot TV screen (listed at $5,000), a three-horsepower ice-cream maker, a baby-changing table — went on the block. The space, as of early November, still hadn’t been rented, though there is a winner in the whole debacle: Pearl Properties, the owner of the building, now has control of that exorbitant build-out, ready for a new tenant. Word on the street is that we’re getting another sports bar.

In September, Paul Martino wrote online that mistakes were made on Bankroll because “we defaulted to thinking we were building a restaurant vs. a live entertainment venue.” As if he’d come to a point of not knowing, himself, just what his venue offered. And neither did anyone else.

So no wonder I got that angry phone call from Martino in August when I wanted to talk to him about what went wrong, given his own apparent uncertainty and, more to the point, what he believes about himself. This is the era of big-deal guys who think they can do anything. That they can control, say, how we talk to each other online (and, while they’re at it, colonize Mars). How dare I dive into his big public misfire — as if he should get a pass based on the very attempt.

But Martino himself created the intrigue. His idea that he shared two years ago, that he was going to change how young men with sports and betting obsessions hang out together, presented as if it would be a new social paradigm, invites our consideration, maybe even more so in failure. Because he was right: It was a big gambit. Even after the fact — or especially after the fact — it would be nice to really understand what that gambit was.

That takes me right back, at the 11th hour here, to that high-tech play Martino was going to launch last summer, if Bankroll had made it that far, which would give his diners a leg up on placing bets — back to that app, the MacGuffin that keeps hanging around to the point of annoyance.

I take one last stab, calling a Bankroll insider to share what I’ve learned that app would have offered, a quick list: access to the best team analysts and cutting-edge metrics on teams and the latest betting odds and a direct connection to Parx or another sportsbook. And one more thing — connections to others within Bankroll.

“Am I missing something?” I wonder.

“No,” the insider says.

Which is surprising — apart from connections to other bettors, what I cite is available on Google, what anybody can dig out at home.

Well, I am underplaying something, the insider says: “That laundry list is not that interesting per se, as much as patrons integrating into the people and the venue that we put together.”

Ah! The MacGuffin, at last, revealed! It turns out that the tech play wasn’t so techy after all. No, it was all about creating that new way to hang out; the draw would be the place, the crowd. Exactly what Martino was so excited about two years ago, getting strangers on his Bankroll couches to have sport with each other as they bet the night away, eating and drinking in splendor. All it would cost was money, with boatloads of it, in turn, flowing to Martino and his fellow investors.

But Philly took a quick look at Bankroll last spring and decided to head to the Shore for the summer instead of hanging around, given that an iPhone and a bar in Wildwood that had TVs was all any gambler really needed.

Which leaves us, finally, with one pretty simple question.

When Martino was brainstorming the idea, why didn’t anyone around him, the tech guys and business developers I talked to two years ago and then again recently — why didn’t any of them see what a flimsy notion it really was? That trying to lure guys into a high-end restaurant to lounge on couches while placing bets on games and overspending on food and drink was a fraught idea from the jump?

Here’s what they say: They thought it would work. Why? Well, gambling — ­gambling on games is a big deal now. And Paul Martino is a brilliant guy. Really? That’s all you got? I wondered if his early partners were holding something back, not divulging any doubts they’d had. But that’s not it.

As initial CEO Marc Rayfield said two years ago, “I don’t want to just be a guy carrying a football. I want to be the guy who’s thinking about writing the playbook. We are trying to create the next-generation viewing experience.” And, of course, he said this: “Martino’s like the smartest guy I’ve ever met in my life.” They all bought in.

Brilliance emanates from one’s method as much as from, say, crunching numbers or crafting code. Two years ago, many people told me that Martino’s true gift is telling it like it is and then acting. That he has a sort of ruthlessness in judging ideas — that is, other people’s ideas — when he’s deciding where to put his money.

That ruthlessness apparently didn’t touch his own brainstorm, though, which is a point everyone seemed to miss. Nor was he zeroed in on Bankroll as it was rolled out. He once said that his primary job was teaching CEOs of the companies he invests in how to do their jobs. But it often seemed that Padma Rao was left to wing it alone.

Everyone can now see that the tech piece of Bankroll went nowhere, that losing Stephen Starr was a huge hit, that Rao was out of her depth — all the problems laid out here. But no one seems to parse that fundamental question: Was it a good idea?

Paul Martino’s risk now doesn’t change. It’s the line he walks: that his brilliance and confidence allow him to reach for any new endeavor he feels like putting his stamp on — and God knows this city needs big thinkers willing to chase big projects. Martino took his shot here, and bravo to him for that. But therein lies his risk, too: that all that confidence can cross the line into hubris.

As it did with his sports bar. Martino got ahead of himself, leaping too fast into territory that he had no idea how to conquer. In the end, that’s what made Bankroll such a lousy bet.

Published as “Busted” in the December 2023/January 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.

This piece has been updated to reflect the amount of time the Boyd Theater had been vacant.