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American Roulette
How I Turned the Odds Upside Down â" My Wild Twenty-Five-Year Ride Ripping Off the World's Casinos
By Richard Marcus St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2003 Richard Marcus
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-5240-2
CHAPTER 1
Savannah
When it first hit me that I had probably discovered the best cheating move in the history of casino gambling, one that appeared absolutely flawless, with minimal risk — even when getting caught red-handed — I experienced a feeling of euphoria that would have been complete had it not been for the sliver of doubt that naturally crept into my brain. During two decades of cheating the world's legally operating casinos at their own games, using a variety of sleight-of-hand moves, some rank, others good, still others really good, that so-called dream move had eluded me until that hot August night in 1995.
I was sitting at the bottom of a shabby roulette table inside the dingy Silver Spur at the intersection of Main and Fremont in downtown Las Vegas. Diagonally across the worn, coffee-stained layout sat my partner in crime, Pat, who'd been working the casinos with me for the past sixteen months. We were both casual in jeans and cotton shirts. Also at the table was the usual downtown assortment of multiracial degenerates, some wagering with two-dollar-gets-you-three-dollar paper coupons that dripped beer — or God knows what else — others with the remnants of their social security checks, which by the looks of what they were wearing could have certainly been put to better use. The occasional tourist dropping a bet on that table didn't even hang around for a second spin when it won. If it wasn't the bowling-alley smell or clanging slot-machine noise that chased them out, it was the horrific click-clack cocktail-waitress call emanating from the device being squeezed in one of the oily-looking pit boss's hands. I would have been chased out of there myself, had it not been true that the Silver Spur was probably the only casino left in Vegas where I wouldn't run into anyone I knew or, better yet, run into someone who knew me.
Pat and I often went downtown to test new cheating moves before going for the real money on the Las Vegas Strip. The trick here was to place a red five-dollar chip atop a green twenty-five-dollar chip on the roulette layout in such a way that the dealer would not see the bottom chip's greenness and therefore assume both chips were red. Knowing that dealers in the bust-out joints downtown were required to announce green chips on the layout, we'd know right away if the little Korean girl named Sun saw the one I was trying to hide underneath the red. We hoped she didn't, but as I delicately placed the two round chips in the first of the three 2-to-1 column boxes at the bottom of the layout, carefully measuring the angle and distance that I let the top red chip protrude off the green, I had serious doubts about the whole damned scheme. I even thought about saying good night to Pat so that I could rush home to catch a rerun of Law & Order.
But Sun never called out, "Green action on the layout," and I was absolutely sure she'd looked at my bet — at least three times. Seeing it from the back, the green chip stuck out like a sore thumb.
Pat and I shot each other surprised looks. I furrowed my brows at him as if to say, "Maybe she actually didn't see it." But I was thinking she had to see it, that perhaps she was just too lazy to call it out to the supervising floorman, or she had indeed called it out but had one of those ultra-soft Oriental voices that didn't carry well amid the din in the casino. As an ex-casino dealer myself, I knew a lot of dealers didn't give a shit and wouldn't bother straining their voices to alert superiors about the presence of a lousy green chip.
Sun spun the ball and we waited. If the bet lost, we'd place it again; if it won, we'd have our answer. Would she correctly pay me twice the $30 in chips sitting in the betting box, or mistakenly pay $20 — 2 to 1 for the two red chips we hoped she thought were there?
The ball dropped into the black number-10 slot on the spinning wheel, a first-column number that made my bet a winner. I tensed and watched the dealer. Both her hands swept piles of losing chips off the layout, then one reached for a stack of five-dollar reds in her multicolored chip well along the base of the wooden wheel. She cut swiftly into my two chips twice, paying me only $20 instead of the $60 she should have paid.
Which meant she hadn't seen the green chip underneath. She'd taken it for a red. She had made the mistake we'd wanted her to make.
I looked down on the layout at the perfect linear formation of three sets of two chips, specially admiring the set containing the green. I didn't bother to claim the $40 Sun still owed me. That would have been one of the claims from the old days. Instead, I glanced over at Pat and met his large smile with one of my own. We both knew at that instant we were on to something big: we were going to be rich.
* * *
A week earlier, we had been relaxing in Pat's apartment, our habitual Las Vegas meeting place, having just returned from a casino-cheating road trip to Reno and Lake Tahoe. Vegas had been a bit "steamy" that summer; in addition to the searing desert heat outside, the heat inside the casinos was getting to us. We'd been doing a bunch of the old blackjack moves, getting paid big chunks of money a little too often to suit the pit bosses. The town's surveillance network had put out the word on us. So we had to cool it in Vegas, hit the road for a while. We'd picked up six grand on the weekend trip, not bad for the "biggest little town in America."
Pat popped open a beer, stretched out on the sofa. I was installed in the recliner, munching from the bag of Doritos I'd just ripped open. On the TV, Harry Caray was going through his seventh-inning-stretch routine while the Cubs were getting soundly beaten at Wrigley. The Pizza Hut delivery guy showed up with our two large pizzas with extra cheese. We were all set.
"You know what, Johnny," Pat said (we called each other Johnny, I guess out of some sort of mock affection), "I've been going over something in my head. Did you ever think about putting the big-valued chip under the red before the dealer deals the cards ... and then do a switch when the bet loses?"
I knew exactly what he was thinking. At the time, all our cheating moves were based on switching chips only after winning bets. We'd bet five-dollar reds and switch in chips of much higher denominations once we knew the winning outcome. The casino term for that move was pastposting. Bookmakers in the Roaring Twenties used it to refer to sharpies who called in winning horse bets from the track just after the race was over. The principle was the same in the casino: Press up your bet the moment you knew it had won.
What Pat was visualizing was doing just the opposite: Make the big bet up front legitimately, then pull it off once you knew it had lost. The casino term for that was pinching (or dragging). Sure, I'd thought of it. It would be nice to bet a couple of grand and leave it there if it won, rake it off when it lost. But the only way such a maneuver was feasible was to somehow hide the fact you were betting big at the outset, which was very difficult to do, and then to rake off your big bet when it lost, leaving the casino in the dark. Casino personnel were thoroughly trained to combat such scams, but there had always been crafty cheaters who attacked their weaknesses. I'd once read in an old casino surveillance manual how a guy back in the fifties came up with a clever pinching move. He'd approach a roulette table just as the spinning ball was about to drop and the dealer was announcing, "No more bets," and place a thin folded-in-half packet of dollar bills on red. As it appeared to be a small bet of only a couple of bucks, the dealer usually let it play. If black came in, the guy would scoop up his packet and put down in its place another that appeared identical. If the dealer challenged him, he'd just make up a dumb excuse like he was drunk, and since all the dealer ever saw was dollar bills the guy never got much heat. The shocker was that when the ball landed on a red number and the guy won, the dealer, opening up the packet to see how many dollar bills were inside, would find that the rest of the bills folded up were not ones but hundreds. The guy ended up beating Vegas for tens of thousands (big potatoes back in the fifties) before the casinos finally got wise to what was hitting them. To put him — and any other potential copycats — out of business, the casinos implemented a simple policy that still stands today: The dealer had to announce, "Money plays!" as soon as cash appeared on the layout. Then he had to count and spread the bills for the cameras above before spinning the ball, dealing the cards, or allowing the shooter to throw the dice on a craps table. Ever since, most pinching moves were either badly conceptualized or just plain acts of desperation by people not wanting to lose their last dollar.
Getting back to Pat, I said, "You want to bet a five-thousand-dollar chip underneath a five-dollar red and yank it off when it loses?" I whistled at such audacity.
At the time, in certain casinos, we'd already been working with five-thousand-dollar chips, provided they were the same size as the smaller denomination chips, which was the case in about a third of Vegas's casinos. Since we'd been working mostly on blackjack tables, I envisioned his pinching scenario on a blackjack layout. There were seven betting spots on it, never more than seven bets. American blackjack tables were not like the ones in Europe or on some of the islands, where one gambler was permitted to place his bet behind another's inside the betting circle. But even if multiple betting were permitted in American casinos, I could never imagine a dealer, even the most inattentive one, failing to see a big-valued chip underneath, no matter how many bets were jammed up on a blackjack table. The dealer was just too close to the chips, practically right on top of them.
I told Pat my thoughts and he let the idea go, nodding his agreement that I was probably right. We settled in to watch the rest of the Cub game, then a cop flick on cable. During the movie my mind churned, and before the first dead body turned up on the screen, I grabbed the remote at the foot of my chair and zapped off the TV.
Pat glanced over, not the slightest bit aggravated that I had shut off the film. "What's rolling around in that head of yours, Johnny?" he asked, anticipating correctly that I had an afterthought about pinching the big chips.
"You know something, Johnny," I said. "Your idea has possibilities. But not blackjack ... roulette."
Pat wasn't as sharp as I when it came to creating and designing casino moves. His real talent was taking off the money, playing the part. He would've been a great actor. With his stout body and pleasant features he had the presence of a Jackie Gleason. What I had was twenty years in the ripping-off-casinos business. So I explained the thought that he'd actually put in my head.
"That trick — hiding a five-thousand-dollar chip underneath a red — just might work on a roulette table, at the bottom. With all the action on a crowded roulette layout, a dealer never has the time to really case all the bets. And if we built camouflage bets around it, it's possible the dealer won't see it, especially in casinos where the lighting creates good shadows." Dim casino lighting would naturally help us hide that chip.
Pat caught on instantly, so we got to work designing the prospective move. All our casino material was kept in Pat's spare bedroom. We had table layouts, cards, dealing shoes, chips, dice, even a regulation blackjack table that I'd inherited from my old casino mentor. A roulette wheel and table would have been welcome but were just too big to fit.
I brought out a green-felt roulette layout and spread it snugly over the dining room table. Lying on the coffee table facing the sofa were two stacks of red chips from Caesars Palace and the Mirage we hadn't bothered cashing out the last time we were inside those casinos. I grabbed both and sat them on the bottom edge of the layout, then told Pat to get into his little hiding place and extract a big chip. We never practiced with fake or minimum-value chips. When we worked with purples ($500 chips), we practiced with purples. The same went for yellows ($1,000 chips) and chocolates ($5,000 chips).
Pat sprang off the couch, scurried into the kitchen, and opened a box of Kellogg's Special K. From underneath the half-empty paper bag of cereal, he pulled out a creamy chocolate gaming chip from Caesars Palace. He smiled as he let it drop into my hand. I couldn't think of anything so small and round and so valuable other than diamonds and rare coins.
"That could turn out to be a very expensive hiding place," I said, pointing to the Special K box.
"You're right, Johnny, but I've only had to run down to the dumpster once. Got there just before the garbage truck did."
I didn't ask him why he hadn't changed his hiding spot; he might not have done so even if the garbage truck had beaten him to the dumpster. You never knew with Pat; sometimes he was a crazy Irishman.
I placed the chocolate chip in the first-column box on the layout, then capped it with three reds, cracking them slightly off the chocolate toward the imaginary dealer. I moved up to the dealer's spot to determine whether I could see the chocolate beneath the reds. I saw it easily. Discouraged, I reached back down the layout and adjusted the chips, trying to find the precise angle at which the obtruding wedge formed by the three reds hid the chocolate. I was not seeking to defy the chocolate chip's being there, only prevent its color from being seen from where I stood. Of course, the dealer would know the bottom chip was there but not its denomination. The crucial idea was to make him assume it was also a red. Roulette dealers seldom peeled chips off a bet to peek at the bottom one. I had only seen that happen when casinos were particularly steamy after having been attacked by bands of cheaters, but in normal circumstances dealers trusted their eyes.
Pat took my position at the top of the layout while I tinkered with the bet at the bottom.
"There!" he cried out suddenly. "I can't see the chocolate."
I broke out laughing. "You shittin' me?" I wasn't sure I really wanted to believe him. I didn't want to be a victim of false hope.
"Johnny," he said deliberately, tilting his big head playfully as he always did when he was making a point or mocking me or himself. "I just told you I don't see that chocolate chip." He bent down, craning his neck from side to side, examining the stack of chips from different angles. "Johnny, I still don't see that chocolate chip."
I was delirious with pleasure and excitement. I went over to him, gently shoved him out of the way, and looked down at the bet. What I didn't see amazed me. Not only was the chocolate completely out of view, I had to strain to determine that four chips, not three, were there. The chocolate chip seemed to vanish, to sink into the felt below. To see it I had to meander around the layout and put myself where the dealer would never be. I went back to the dealer's position and admired the little stack in the first-column box for several seconds. Then I peeled off one of the red chips, which didn't change anything. I peeled off another, and still the chocolate underneath remained hidden. I could barely tell there was a chip under there at all. It was impossible to hide the slight difference in elevation between one and two chips, but that was not our objective.
Now we knew that a single chip, when angled correctly atop another, would conceal the bottom chip's denomination. It was also evident that the first-column box, the farthest betting point on the layout from the dealer, was ideal for hiding chips.
"Johnny, I don't fucking believe it," I said, looking up at the bright chandelier above the dining room table. "Look at this. We're standing under this bright light. Can you imagine what this'd be like inside a casino with all those shadows?"
We stood silent for a few moments, each contemplating what this little discovery could mean for our cheating-the-casinos business. If not a hell of a lot more money, at least a hell of a lot more adventures. We broke out a bottle of champagne, toasted the new findings optimistically, polished off the bottle, then got to serious work on the layout.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from American Roulette by Richard Marcus. Copyright © 2003 Richard Marcus. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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