A Florida man has been arrested and charged with assassinating three men he thought were cheating him at poker.

According to media reports, officers from the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office in Florida on Sunday arrested Duane Demaris Crittenden, 28, of Palatka, Fla., and charged him with three counts of first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of a trio of poker players.

Crittenden and three men were playing a game of high-stakes poker on Friday in an abandoned building in Palatka, media reports said.

After losing heavily, Crittenden left the game and then returned with a gun, which he used to shoot each of the other three men in the head, killing them, the reports said.

When the three dead bodies were discovered on Saturday by the owner of the building, authorities were notified and they commenced a manhunt for the killer, the reports said.

When he was captured Sunday, Crittenden confessed to the killings and said he did it because the three men had cheated him during their poker game, media reports said.

The murdered men were Richard David Smith and Robert Erwin Ford, both 50 and from Palatka, and Jerome Anthony Henry, 48, of Seville, Fla., the reports said.

“We understand that he felt that they were cheating, and he went back apparently to confront them about that,” Keith Riddick, a spokesman for the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office, said.

In addition to murdering three men, Crittenden stole a sum of money, possibly as much as $9,000, from them, media reports said.

Crittenden has a lengthy rap sheet, the reports said.

He has 18 previous felony convictions in Florida and Georgia, mostly for fraud and forgery but none for violent crimes, the reports said.

(E-mail Tom Somach at tomsomach@yahoo.com.)