Election Day

The most Despicable Cheaters of All Descend on Vegas!

My literary agent, who is based in Washington DC, was telling me about several of his friends who work on Capitol Hill who were being sent to Las Vegas by their party bosses. Democrat and Republican volunteers are given airfare, room and board, all paid for by the respective parties. They’re in Las Vegas to observe that the election isn’t stolen.

I wonder who is going to watch the politicians.

For those of you reading this in Las Vegas (and Ohio and Florida) hold onto your wallets closely, and keep an eye out for slick DC political types. They’re bigger thieves than I was!

Tricks to Steal the Strip Casinos’ Treats

Just last night, Halloween, the world’s casino cheaters took advantage of the only night when one can wear a disguise in casinos and blend in with everyone else.

An Italian roulette cheating team that I first met over two decades ago when my team and theirs literally bumped into one another while cheating at the same roulette table in Lake Tahoe (see page 122 in my book AMERICAN ROULETTE) was out in force all over the Vegas Strip. One of my surveillance informants who works at a Strip casino themed after one of the more popular major cities in the world, recognized one of the Italians, who was dressed up as a goblin, by a tattoo on the back of his hand. I’m told the tattooed hand was sliding a stack of roulette chips from a losing number to the winning number before the dealer got his marker straight up on the layout.

Why didn’t my informant nab the Italian team? Although I don’t know for sure, perhaps the Italians, whose professionalism and quality of work I can attest to, put the enterprising surveillance professional on their payroll just like I had.

Despite the fact that my informant contact is not above taking payments from cheaters like me, (or perhaps because of that fact) he is one of the few surveillance professionals in town who can truly spot a decent professional cheat. Most of the surveillance/security personnel in the World’s casinos are simply incapable or unwilling to understand and identify sophisticated cheaters like myself. Instead, they hold tightly onto the idea that technology will be their silver bullet. Their over-reliance on technological gadgetry is pure laziness and it is a major downfall of today's casino security. For instance, the casinos’ “state of the art” facial recognition methods rarely work as they’d have you believe. Besides, it’s been my experience that no technology can match the power, ingenuity and raw will of the human mind.

Finally, all of that expensive fancy equipment ain’t worth shit on Halloween!