Mr. Lucky

13

Lamar had rented the basement of a restaurant for Gerry’s meeting with the Dixie Magic’s surveillance team. The team consisted of twenty-one employees, who split three eight-hour shifts among them. The casino had shut down for an hour, to allow the TV crew filming the poker tournament to do a number of shots and interviews inside the casino. Heavily armed security guards followed the crew’s every move, giving Lamar the freedom to pull his staff for a quick off-site meeting.

“Okay, listen up,” Lamar said, standing at the front of the room. “As you all know, the casino is getting ripped off. The gentleman standing to my left is Gerry Valentine, a partner in the firm Grift Sense, whose specialty is catching casino cheaters. Gerry has come to the conclusion that the stealing is taking place at the tables in the form of chip scams. He’s going to give us a demonstration of this unusual art, and then take questions.”

Lamar relinquished the floor, and Gerry stepped up to a table in the room’s center. On it was a piece of green felt and a tray of chips similar to those used by dealers inside the casino. As he stepped up to the tray, he glanced at the faces in the crowd. Two women, the rest men, all in their thirties, all giving him hard looks, like they resented him waltzing in and telling them how dumb they were. His father had warned him about this. Casino surveillance people were territorial, just like cops. Be humble, his father had said.

He had inherited two things from his father. The first were his dark Italian looks, which he hadn’t liked as a kid but liked as he’d grown older. The second was his memory, which was close to photographic. Working off the script his father had given him, he said, “Good morning. Thanks for having me. There’s an old expression: Everything that’s old is new again. Chip scams have been around a long time. But they get the money, and that’s all cheaters care about.”

A man in the back row smothered a yawn. A joke, Gerry thought. He should have gone against his father’s advice and opened with a joke.

“There are three basic chip scams. Each involves the dealer in cahoots with a player. I’m sure you all know what that means.”

Now he was getting mean looks. Of course they knew what cahoots meant.

“I should also explain something. These scams are difficult to detect using surveillance cameras. Bosses on the floor can see them, but they’re usually looking the other way when they happen. Know why?”

His audience had turned to stone. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lamar staring at him like he’d grown two heads.

“The reason is because the dealer’s accomplice uses a prearranged set of signals to tell the dealer if the boss is watching the table or if he isn’t. Cheaters call this giving the office. The accomplice uses two signals: stop and go. Smart teams change signals every hour, making it impossible to read them.”

Gerry kept his eyes moving as he spoke. He’d read in an airline magazine that this was the best way to address a crowd. He saw Lamar look at his watch, and felt sweat start to trickle down his spine. Dump the script, he thought.

Taking four green twenty-five-dollar chips from the tray, he placed them into his left hand. He crumbled his fingers and showed the chips were gone. He’d been heavy into magic as a kid, and saw every face in the room light up. He showed them the four chips finger-palmed in his right hand. Then he placed them in a stack on the felt.

“Let’s pretend this is my accomplice’s bet. He wins his hand, and I move to pay him off. But before I pay him off, I size his bet.”

Gerry scattered the four chips on the felt. Only, now there were five. He pointed at the fifth chip. “Any of you see where that came from?”

“Your sleeve?” someone called out.

“No. I palmed it out of the rack,” Gerry said. “Then I added it to my accomplice’s bet. This is called sizing in high. I pay the player off, and we steal fifty dollars of the house’s money. This is hard to detect because every action looks normal.”

He demonstrated the scam two more times. Once slow, and once at regular speed.

“Show us another,” a black guy in the back of the room said.

“Sure,” Gerry said, giving him a smile. The black guy didn’t smile back. He had a hard face and wore a navy blazer with faded elbows. The jacket was hanging partially open, exposing the shoulder harness and gun strapped beneath his armpit. Gerry swallowed hard. Casino employees weren’t allowed to pack guns unless they were guards. Maybe this guy had some kind of special permit.

Gerry picked up four green chips and split them into two piles. He placed them on the felt. “Another common scam is to use a losing bet to cap a winning bet. The dealer picks up the losing bet and pretends to put it in the tray. In fact, he clips the chips between his fingers and immediately adds them to the winning bet.” He turned his palm over, showing the clipped chips. “If the bets are small, this is hard to detect.”

The black guy said, “Do it again.”

Gerry obliged him. This time, the man nodded approvingly. Gerry snuck a glance at his watch. Fifteen minutes had passed. It felt like an hour.

“The third common chip scam occurs when the accomplice asks for change,” he said. “It’s common for players to throw high-valued chips down and ask for them to be changed into chips of lower value. The dealer picks up the chips and adds chips palmed in his hand. He always adds enough chips to make the stack even. That way, he can break it into two even piles, which looks nice for the camera.”

Gerry placed six green chips on the felt, then demonstrated the move, adding two additional green chips in the act of cutting the stack into two piles. From the front, it looked like a magic trick, the chips instantly growing before everyone’s eyes, and he saw the unfriendly looks leave their faces.

“Those are the three basic chip scams,” he said. “There are countless variations, but all rely on these same elements. Distraction, signals between the accomplice and the dealer, and a boss on the floor looking the other way. Any questions?”

A dozen hands went up. Lamar pointed at one of the females in the group. She was pretty, had flaming red hair, and looked French. Gerry assumed she was from Louisiana, and saw her flash a sly Southern smile.

“Yes, Isabelle,” Lamar said.

“How do we catch these sons of bitches?” she asked.

Isabelle leaned forward in her chair. So did everyone else in the room. Gerry thought back to the phone conversation with his father. His old man had a theory about what was happening at the Dixie Magic, and Gerry decided it was time to return to the script.

“Lamar said you’re losing four grand, twice a month,” Gerry said. “Most chip teams steal four hundred a session. That’s about ten plays. Any more would draw heat.

“Divide four hundred into four thousand, and that gives us ten teams. That’s a lot. My guess is, they’re all working together. They may even have a member who serves as the ‘turn.’”

“What’s that?” Isabelle asked.

“The turn’s job is to turn the floor boss’s attention away from the action. It usually comes in the form of a question. Turns are usually attractive females or older people with hearing problems.”

“Why hearing problems?”

“Because it forces the floor boss to repeat everything he says.”

His father had promised Gerry that at some point in his presentation, he would win the group over. Gerry had taken his words as fatherly encouragement and was pleasantly surprised when he saw everyone start smiling and nodding.

“The next question is, how do you identify the team?” he went on. “You have sixty blackjack dealers on every shift, and you have three shifts. Which ten dealers are dirty?” He paused, and let his eyes glance across their faces. “What you look for is some other connection. Perhaps they all live in the same apartment complex. Or they worked together before, or served in the military. There has to be a link.”

“Why is that?” Lamar asked.

“Because the hardest part of working in a team is trusting your partners. That trust has to be there from the start. Nearly all cheating teams have some type of shared past.”

A dozen more hands shot up. Gerry realized he had run out of things to say and glanced at Lamar. As if reading his thoughts, the head of surveillance came up beside him and placed his hand on Gerry’s shoulder.

“I think this was very illuminating and has given us a lot to work with in catching these folks. What do you say we show Gerry our appreciation?”

And with that, his audience burst into long and loud applause.

Lamar drove Gerry back to the Holiday Inn. Lamar had held up his end of the bargain and arranged through the casino for Gerry to meet Tex “All In” Snyder, who was also staying at the hotel. Pulling up to the front entrance, Lamar said, “Well, here’s where we part ways. I appreciate you taking the time to do this. I hope your meeting is worth it.”

Gerry started to get out of the car. He had expected Lamar to mention hiring his father’s firm and was disappointed that he hadn’t. Then he remembered the guy at the meeting who was packing a gun. He got back in, looked Lamar straight in the eye.

“You’re a cop, aren’t you?”

Lamar stuck his tongue in his cheek. “Why do you say that?”

“Because I just spoke to a roomful of cops.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because there wasn’t a fat one in the bunch. And one of them was packing heat. They’re working for you, aren’t they?”

“Maybe,” Lamar said. “You see a lot.”

Gerry looked through the windshield at an orange tour bus disgorging a gang of elderly passengers. He’d seen them leaving the hotel for the casino, all hearty and full of pep. Now, they looked tired and beat up. Not a winner in the bunch, he thought.

“You have a real problem, don’t you?” he said.

“Yes,” Lamar said.

“How many games are getting ripped off?”

Lamar took a deep breath, as if considering whether or not he should talk about it.

“From what we can tell, all of them,” he said quietly.

“Blatant stealing like what I described?”

Lamar nodded. The last of the tour bus junkies walked past the car. A white-haired woman was all smiles and chattering up a storm. None of her friends were listening to her. She must have won a jackpot, Gerry guessed. He started to get out of the car again, then glanced at Lamar a final time. “Let me know if we can help.”

“I’ll do that,” Lamar said. “Good luck with Tex.”

“Am I going to need it?”

Lamar smiled. “Yeah. I hear he’s a real asshole.”