Casino cheaters bet a long-term loss against a short-term gain

By THOMAS ZAMBITO New York Daily News

Sunday, June 13, 2004

New York -- They troll casino floors in the wee hours of the morning using homemade devices to fool slot machines into dumping out more coins. They dupe card dealers with distractions honed over decades. At baccarat, they daub face cards with Vaseline and, at blackjack, peek at cards coming out of the "shoe."

They even steal coin cups from elderly women playing the slots.

The hard-core cheaters in Atlantic City, N.J., never give up.

Legendary slot cheat Tommy Carmichael said he used to make $1,000 an hour at the one-armed bandits.

"The intent was not to hurt someone," said Carmichael, who rigged cheating devices in his Oklahoma television repair shop. "I wasn't hijacking somebody at the family store. It was always directed at the casinos."

Carmichael, 53, went into forced retirement after a prison stretch a few years back ended his two-decade career as a slot cheat. Plenty of successors have filled the void.

"I think, every day, people are out there trying to cheat, either a patron or an employee," said Rich Williamson, a 24-year veteran of the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement who specializes in catching slot cheats.

More than two dozen people are arrested for cheating at slots every year, the most for any single casino game, according to New Jersey crime statistics. Atlantic City's 42,000 slot machines contributed $3.3 billion in revenue last year, about 70% of the casinos' total take.

Dozens more are nabbed for cheating at blackjack and other card games. And hundreds of so-called "railbirds" are caught stealing coin cups.

Casinos use video surveillance and teams of security agents to keep the cheats out. The Casino Control Commission keeps an "exclusion list" with the names and faces of more than 160 professional cheats, mobsters and other undesirables banned from the casinos. And some casinos use facial recognition devices, which focus on a gambler's face, matching its features against thousands of database photos in a matter of seconds. But cheating schemes change all the time.

Carmichael's favorite device, the "light wand," succeeded the "yo- yo," a coin on a string that a player could dip in and out of the coin slot.

The battery-powered wand, with parts that cost less than $2.50, works by sending light into a machine's payout well where it confuses the machine's sensor, letting more coins drop than the machine was supposed to allow.

Today, many Atlantic City casinos have switched their slot machines over to a voucher or ticket payout rather than coins, rendering the wand obsolete, Williamson said.

Keno credentials

Few cheats matched the ingenuity of Ronald Dale Harris. For 12 years, Harris was an engineer with the Nevada Gaming Control Board who specialized in the detection of software and devices used to cheat at slots.

In 1995, he traveled to Atlantic City's Bally's Park Place casino, where he had an accomplice purchase 10 $10 tickets for Keno with eight numbers picked on each side. Only months before, Harris had evaluated the software used for the Keno game and somehow figured out a method to determine the approximate sequence of the random numbers the machine would spit out, according to investigators.

Harris, 47, and his accomplice won $100,000 by matching eight numbers, overcoming odds of 1 in 230,000, a feat that hadn't been accomplished in 20 years in Las Vegas. He was arrested as he returned home to Las Vegas and has been banned from casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

The same goes for Brent Eli Morris, a veteran "past-poster" who specialized in dropping down bets at baccarat and craps after the outcome was known.

Longtime casino security expert Charles Guenther said distraction is the key to the cheat's success.

"The cheating moves they use are simple and easy to detect," said Guenther, a consultant who spent 24 years in casino security, last working as surveillance director for Trump Marina. "What's hard to see is the distraction."

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