Great Gambling Scams. Howard Monte/Nigel Montgomery
probably worth a couple of grand. But that’s not the issue, it’s the sentimental value that counts.’ Then Paul got into his shiny car and started the engine, before leaning out of the window, almost as an afterthought, to deliver the crucial line. ‘Look, I doubt I lost the ring here in this filling station, but should it turn up I will give you $500 reward for its return. I’ll be watching the Giants game at McCann’s over the road.’
Richard left it an hour or so, and then pulled up to the same gas station in a beat-up Chevy. ‘Five dollars’ worth, please,’ he said, handing the attendant an assortment of loose change, dropping a few coins as he did so. On bending down to retrieve the change, bingo! He stood up with Paul’s lost ring in his hand. ‘Look what I’ve found. Do you reckon it’s worth anything?’
The attendant took the ring and examined it carefully. ‘It’s probably a cubic. I can’t believe anyone losing a real diamond in a filling station.’
‘Yeah, you’re probably right, no sweat, I’ll give it to a girl if I get lucky and pull.’
Now the attendant got interested. ‘I could give you a little money for it if you like?’
‘How much?’
‘I dunno, twenty bucks?’
‘Twenty bucks! You gotta be kiddin’. Even the cheapest cubics cost more than that! And, anyway, the bloody thing could be real, and it’s massive.’
The attendant had been sucked in. ‘OK, how much do you want for it, then?’
‘A couple of hundred at least.’
‘Wait here,’ the attendant said. ‘I’ll make a quick call from inside, see if my pal is interested, see if we can do a deal.’
At McCann’s, where the Giants game was on the TV, the barman answered the phone. ‘Anyone in here lost a ring at the Texaco garage down the road?’
Paul took the call.
‘Hey, I’ve found your ring.’
‘Brilliant, I’ll be right there.’
The attendant came back outside to Richard. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said, ‘I can go a hundred on it.’
They settled on $150. Richard took the cash and met Paul on a roadside hill overlooking the Texaco garage. From the comfort of Paul’s air-conditioned GTO, they took turns in watching the attendant pacing up and down the garage forecourt, looking at his watch. After about ten minutes, he couldn’t take it any more, jumped into his own car and sped over to McCann’s. The duo followed him and, when he emerged from McCann’s, realising he had been conned, Paul and Richard roared by in the GTO, and Paul yelled ‘Asshole!’ out of the window.
They repeated the gas station scam many times, almost always collecting.
When Richard Marcus drove to Las Vegas in his new Mustang convertible in the summer of 1976, a few days before his 21st birthday, I doubt even he could have imagined how his life was about to pan out. Courtesy of a substantial touch he had landed at Saratoga racetrack a week earlier, the new wheels also had twenty grand in cash stashed in the boot. Richard couldn’t wait to step inside one of the upmarket casinos he had heard so much about over the past few years – unbelievably, despite having gambled every day for the past decade, he had never actually set foot inside a casino.
His first port of call in Vegas was the showy and glitzy Riviera Hotel, where he took a suite, and spent the next few days playing high-stakes baccarat with his twenty-grand bankroll. To start with, he did rather well, turning his twenty grand into fifty, and then into a hundred. The casino, keen to massage the ego of their new young high-roller, comped everything, from the suite to expensive dinners in their best restaurants, and endless rivers of champagne. And, as they had seen happen a million times before, the casino’s investment in pampering paid off. On the day of his 21st birthday, Richard Marcus blew the whole lot. The following day, he sold his prized Mustang convertible and promptly gambled away all that money too.
He was now absolutely broke, literally penniless, and the Riviera caught on to this fact pretty quickly too, turfing him out of his $800-a-night suite after noticing he hadn’t wagered a single bet for a couple of days. Richard ended up on the Strip, and it was scorching, over 100 degrees outside in Vegas during the day. He soon discovered how much he had taken the comfort of air conditioning for granted as he pounded the streets, looking for somewhere to shelter, forced to eat in cheap coffee shops and run out without paying the bill. The night after sleeping in the luxury of the $800-a-night hotel suite, he bedded down below the I-15 overpass, in the company of druggies and winos. That was to be his home for the next ten days. In the mornings, he slipped into hotel pool areas and used the outside bathrooms to wash and shave with toiletries he stole from the hotel’s trolleys. Then he ate in all the hotel coffee shops, each time walking out without paying.
Richard was starting to get worn out by this existence. Figuring he would have to get a job to stay sane, he started to make enquiries about how one got a position in the casinos as a croupier; he had realised that, as gambling was all he knew about, he would have to take up employment on the other side of the table, at least for the time being. He quickly learned that to find a job in the hotels and casinos on the main part of the Strip meant attending croupier school and passing tests. He couldn’t wait that long, so decided instead to settle for the trashier casinos downtown, where you could literally walk in and get started as a ‘shill’ – a casino employee who sits at the card tables and plays with the house’s money. The idea is to keep all the tables in action during slack periods, so that when real punters walk in there are always games in progress, and not empty tables with bored croupiers standing behind them.
After several dry runs and knock-backs, Richard got lucky and was offered the job of a shill in a downtown, downmarket dump of a casino called the Four Queens. Mercifully, his life as a bum and coffee-shop renegade was over. Soon he was practising dealing games, and a month later he was promoted to dealing blackjack, mini-baccarat and roulette at the Four Queens. He started in the graveyard shift from midnight to eight in the morning, before being transferred to the swing shift that ran from six o’clock at night to two in the morning.
Over the next few months as a swing dealer, Richard got to know all the gambling junkies, addicts and degenerates. A pathological gambler called Whackey was one of the regular patrons. He used to come into the Four Queens every night at nine, always overly refreshed, and had been doing so as long as anyone remembered. The only culture associated with Whackey was to be found under his nails.
One night, he told Richard his story – which, unbelievably, turned out to be true. Whackey was a bum who spent the day begging on the Strip, and the nights emptying his pockets in grotty bars on cheap spirits, and at the Four Queens where he played slots and a bit of roulette, finances permitting. One night just before Christmas ten years earlier, Whackey had arrived at the Four Queens a little earlier than usual as it was raining, promptly emptied his pockets into the slots and lost. He then marched over to his favourite roulette table, and placed a folded-up dollar bill on number 4. The dealer spun the wheel, and the ball landed on number 4. Whackey won $35. Keeping his lucky dollar bill, which he put back in his pocket, he let his bet ride. Number 4 repeated, and Whackey now had $1,225. He wanted to let it ride again, but the casino maximum was $100, and Whackey bitched at this and reduced the bet to the $100. Number 4 came in a third time in a row, and Whackey now had $4,725. The casino manager pulled the croupier off the wheel, and installed another, meaner one. That didn’t put Whackey off one iota. He not only won again, but number 4 came up an incredible fifth time as well. Whackey’s five-time win on roulette is still Las Vegas’s official record on an honest roulette wheel. The casino had no hesitation in calling in the Nevada Gaming Board the following morning to examine the wheel to ensure it had not been tampered with – which it had not.
But Whackey wasn’t finished yet. Not by a long chalk. He took his $12,000 in roulette profits to the blackjack table and placed a $1,000 chip on all seven betting stations. As only a single card deck was in use, the four blackjacks he got that first round was the