10 of the Craziest Casino Heists and Cheating Stories
Casinos are some of the most watched buildings on Earth, which has never stopped people trying. Some robbed them at gunpoint, some outsmarted them with technology, and some, it turned out, were not cheating at all. Here are ten true stories.
1The Biker Bandit, Bellagio, 2010
Just before dawn on 14 December 2010, a man in a motorcycle helmet walked into the Bellagio in Las Vegas, pulled a gun at a craps table, grabbed chips worth about $1.5 million and rode off on a motorbike. The problem with stolen casino chips is spending them. He was arrested in 2011 after trying to sell high-value chips to other gamblers, and it emerged he was the son of a Las Vegas judge.
2The driver who vanished, Circus Circus, 1993
In October 1993, Heather Tallchief, a young armoured-car driver, drove away from Circus Circus in Las Vegas with about $3.1 million that her truck had just collected. She disappeared for twelve years, living abroad, before walking into a Las Vegas courthouse in 2005 to surrender. She served a prison sentence; most of the money was never found.
3The laser at the Ritz, London, 2004
In March 2004 three gamblers, a Hungarian woman and two Serbian men, won about £1.3 million at the Ritz casino's roulette tables in two nights. Reports said they used a laser scanner hidden in a phone to measure the speed of the ball and wheel, with a computer predicting where it would land. Police arrested them, but no crime had been committed under the law of the time, and they were allowed to keep the winnings.
4The regulator who rigged the slots
Ron Harris was a computer expert working for the Nevada Gaming Control Board, the very body that tested slot machines. He secretly altered the software in some machines so they would pay out when coins were inserted in a particular sequence, and also worked out how to predict a keno game. He was caught in 1995 after an accomplice won $100,000 at keno in Atlantic City, and the payout looked too good to be true.
5The slot machine wizard
Dennis Nikrasch, a locksmith from Chicago, is often described as the most successful slot cheat in history. In the 1970s and again in the 1990s he opened machines, swapped their chips and triggered jackpots, with a team who collected the money. Estimates of the total run into the millions of dollars. He was eventually convicted and imprisoned.
6The light wand and the monkey paw
Tommy Glenn Carmichael invented a series of devices to fool slot machines, including the "monkey paw", a bent wire pushed up the payout chute, and later a "light wand" that blinded the optical sensor that counted coins. Each invention forced the industry to redesign its machines.
7The Stardust skim
In the 1970s and early 1980s, organised crime groups secretly controlled several Las Vegas casinos, including the Stardust, and skimmed cash from the counting rooms before it was recorded, smuggling millions back to bosses in the Midwest. The story ended in federal prosecutions and inspired Martin Scorsese's 1995 film Casino.
8Edge sorting: Phil Ivey
In 2012 the professional poker player Phil Ivey won about £7.7 million playing punto banco at Crockfords in London, using "edge sorting": spotting tiny differences in the printed backs of certain cards and asking the dealer to rotate them. The casino refused to pay. In 2017 the UK Supreme Court ruled that it was cheating for the purposes of civil law. A US court also ordered him to repay about $10 million won the same way at the Borgata in Atlantic City.
9Past-posting
Past-posting means adding or swapping chips on a bet after the result is known. Professional cheat Richard Marcus became notorious in the 1980s and '90s for sleight-of-hand moves that swapped low-value chips for high-value ones on winning roulette and blackjack bets, then described his methods in a memoir after retiring.
10The MIT Blackjack Team: not cheating at all
From the late 1970s into the 1990s, teams of students linked to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won large sums at blackjack by counting cards as a team. Card counting uses only memory and arithmetic and is legal, though casinos can ask counters to leave. The story inspired the book Bringing Down the House and the film 21.
The eye in the sky today
Every story above changed the way casinos protect themselves. Modern surveillance rooms watch every table and machine with high-resolution cameras, and many casinos embed RFID tags in high-value chips so that stolen chips can be made worthless. Card shoes, shufflers and roulette wheels are checked constantly, so a biased wheel like the one Joseph Jagger found at Monte Carlo in 1873, described in The Science of Luck, would now be spotted within days. Slot software is locked down and tested by independent labs, as we explain in the technology behind modern slots. And the staff who watch the screens are on our list of strange but true jobs.
