All Bets Are Covered

If we would require a miniature model of the full surveillance police state inwhich everyone and everything is constantly watched, we would need to look nofurther than the modern casinos in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, or one of the manyin Europe and the Far East. It has become the norm for surveillance companies totest their products in casinos, because the individual trying to cheat a casinois one of toughest adversaries they can find, and there is never any shortage ofcrooks and scam artists who believe they can devise a system to rob the house.Some of the greatest brains in the world have been applied to winning at cards,dice, and roulette, because the only way you can guarantee a win and make somemoney in a casino is to break the rules; you can never beat the odds honestly.Casinos may occasionally lose a million or so to a lucky high roller, but theyalways get it back in the long run because they benefit from an advantage calledthe "House Edge," which means all games of chance run by the house have built-inodds loaded on the side of the casino and against the player. A casino averagesa profit of seventeen to eighteen percent, and those profits are maintained andprotected by a system of constant surveillance.

The most concise description of how a high-time gambling operation works like amicrocosm of a police state is provided by Robert De Niro in the film Casino, inwhich he plays a character based heavily on the real Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal,the legendary Las Vegas casino boss who ruled through the 1960s and 1970s, whenorganized crime still ran the city. At the start of the film, De Niro is asked,"How does it work?" He explains how, on every level, everyone is watched: "Firstup, you got the dealer; then you got the inspector watching the dealer; thenthere's the pit boss watching the inspector; then there's a floor managerwatching the pit boss. I'm sitting upstairs watching the floor manager ... Thenyou've got the eye in the sky watching everyone."

During the airport chaos following the September 11, 2001 attacks on Washington,DC and New York's World Trade Center, as hastily trained airline securitypersonnel worked with new equipment and less-than-perfect systems to protecttravelers from terrorism, an oft-repeated joke was that airport security shouldbe turned over to a team of Las Vegas casino pit bosses. In many respects, thejoke made a good deal of sense. The major casino represents both business andhuman nature reduced to its simplest form. The entire focus is on raw money andnothing else. The players' basic motivation is to take money away from thecasino, while the casino is set up to take money from them. Most players hope todo it by beating the basic house-friendly odds and coming out legitimatewinners; but as long as there has been casino gambling, cardsharps, cheats,swindlers, and adventurers have been determined to take down a roulette orblackjack game, and casinos have learned from more than a century of experiencehow to spot and thwart them. Casinos have seen it all before, and have thoroughknowledge of just about every trick in the book. Everything that can be done toget around the system has been done at least once, and will be tried again.

The casino's first advantage is that, as a business, it is so profitable that ithas the cash to spend on security and maintaining the House Edge. Top houses areable to afford state-of-the-art hardware, and have the resources to pay for thebest security staff. A casino's security budget is greater than those of privatecompanies hired to protect airports, public buildings, and even the federalgovernment. The first thing you realize when you enter a casino is that you'renot only being watched, but that they really want you to know you're beingwatched. Cameras are everywhere, large, obvious, and intrusive, with sinisterDarth Vader lenses and flashing red LEDs, on which your every move is recorded,and the resulting images, so sharp on the modern equipment, are of near-broadcastquality. Las Vegas came in on the ground floor of technicalsurveillance in 1950s, when casinos were among the first American businesses toinstall closed-circuit television (CCTV) as a security and crowd-managementtool, and they have remained on the cutting edge ever since.

Pit bosses and floor managers are the human line of defense: cold-eyed men standaround in neat suits, watching the gaming and the players. The dealers work thetables, doing their best to see the bets and make sure that no one is pastposting, pinching, or dragging (altering a bet after the play has been called).Meticulous attention is also paid to the basic gaming equipment: the roulettewheels are regularly checked and properly balanced so that, when they spin,there is no possibility of any bias to upset the odds. Dice are of standardmanufacture, so they can be neither loaded nor otherwise modified, and shootersat the craps tables are under intense surveillance by the human stick-men andeven more CCTV cameras, to ensure substitutions are not made. Card decks aredesigned to a fixed standard, and the chips—the basic casino currency—areimpossible to duplicate.

Of all the weapons in a casino's security arsenal, the greatest reliance isplaced on the camera. In his book American Roulette, self-confessed mastercardsharp Richard Marcus, who toured the world and won huge amounts withelaborate sleight of hand, makes this abundantly clear: "You can't corrupt thecamera. It's the only thing you can trust because it doesn't have a heart, or abrain, and anyway, it doesn't gamble." A casino certainly does not trust itsstaff. Dealers and security men have been successfully corrupted time aftertime, but the casino owners have learned from their mistakes, and now havecomplex multi-level systems to discourage staff corruption. All dealers andcroupiers are subjected to the most stringent background checks, and manycasinos make the dealers wear aprons, not to protect their clothes, but to makeit harder for them to pocket any chips. Staff are searched after their shifts,and in some states, chips are embedded with trackers so the boss knows where themoney has gone.

On the other side of the coin, the cheats have marked cards. Computers, cameras,and cell phones have been smuggled onto the gaming floor, and magnets have beenfixed to roulette tables,...