He remained employed there until the head of the firm, becoming infirm in his old age, took on a partner who subsequently had Hearne released. Finding himself penniless once again, he was soon approached by a young gambler whom he had met on the riverboat to New Orleans. The young man, whose father was a silent partner at a major gambling house, offered Hearne an accounting position at what was then the largest gambling operation in the city. While working for the casino, he became a favorite to many of its wealthy patrons who "having received a good education, and being a man of polished manners, with a social and genial disposition, and having, withal, a large stock of rollickling Irish humor, he commended himself to all with whom he came in contact, and those fond of play and fast living found in Pat Herne a congenial companion". He was able to get several to invest in a bank on his own account in Louisville, Kentucky. Return to New York Hearne remained with the gambling-house until public gaming was outlawed. The crackdown on illegal gambling by city officials in New Orleans beginning in 1835 resulted in a mass exodus to other cities around the country. New York City was among the places where gambling emerged and, within a few years, succeeded New Orleans as the country's gaming capitol. It was Pat Hearne, along with Henry Colton, who opened the city's earliest "first-class" casinos during this period. Their success encouraged more gamblers to flock to New York over the next decade allowing the development of future gambling and vice districts. In 1840, Hearne "fitted up" and opened a suite of apartments on Barclay Street which became the city's first skinning house". He used the apartments to entertain patrons with "bird" style dinners who were then "braced" to pay the expense. The most successful of Hearne's ventures, however, was his self-named gambling resort, opposite the Metropolitan Hotel, in lower Broadway; according to rumor he made as much as $15,000 or $20,000 a night. His gambling operations were compared to those of John Morrissey in Saratoga in later years. He became "a very celebrated character in New York" during the 1840s and 50s, being among the sportsmen and gambling empresarios who "rubbed elbows" with many celebrities, literary figures and politicians of the day, and was one of the first prominent sportsmen to emerge