Casinos And Their Burdens

Sometimes people are dishonest:

Take, for example, the ambitious criminal who crawled into a casino with counterfeit chips, dazzling replicas except for one problem: they were minted with a misspelling. Instead of "dollar," they read "dolar." As in, one worthless "dolar." A casino employee noticed the error and assumed it was a rare misprint, a collectors item, like a coin stamped with mistakes. The counterfeiter's response to the employee's interest didn't help.

"This guy ran like Jesse Owens on fire right into a card table and almost knocked himself out," Longo says.

...Grainy security footage shows a casino guest approaching a casino dealer and slapping her on the face, hard.

...A little investigation reveals the slapper is a particularly loathed breed of casino parasite - a loan shark.

And the dealer? Well, she was in $100,000 over her head. She was also stunned when the casino fired her. Stunned the casino could no longer trust her to handle thousands of dollars a day.

"Casinos, if you think of them, we're just big banks," Longo says. "At some point, you don't know how much money there is. That's the one flaw at a casino. That one little moment in time, that one weak point."

Longo queues another surveillance tape, this one focused on a small white room, where a single staff member is watching hundreds of dollars fan across a cash counter. He folds a $100 bill into his sleeve, then reaches into his vest pocket for a pen.

That one little moment in time. That one weak point.

"The money falls into a pocket, and only the pen comes back," Longo says. "There is a connectivity of criminal activity that ends up in casinos. Internal, external, it's all connected."

Edwards has another acronym for casinos that don't follow security standards to deter criminals and hustlers: BOHICA. That's short for, "Bend Over, Here It Comes Again."

...But sophistication is a relative term when it comes to scams. Longo plays another security tape. This one lasts one and a half seconds, just long enough for the camera to catch a hand darting underneath a dealer's nose and snatching $13,000 in poker chips.