Cheating the Casino
Its all so cool. Put together a team of suave criminals, case the big casino, then clean it out with a risky but ingenious scheme. 🙂 Oceans Eleven and Oceans Twelve – with the help of George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon – certainly made knocking over a casino look fun and glamorous. Oceans Thirteen will undoubtedly do the same. And those three shows are merely among the latest in a long line of Hollywood caper movies that leave audiences rooting for the charmingly roguish thieves. 
The real-world versions of Clooney, Pitt and Damon arent quite so attractive, however. Last week, federal prosecutors revealed that grand juries had indicted 24 people suspected of carrying out a massive, multi-state scam that targeted 18 casinos and stole more than $3 million. As it turned out, a cheat team accused of bilking the Puyallup Tribes Emerald Queen Casino in 2003 was reportedly part of this much larger criminal operation. 
According to prosecutors, the conspiracy involved bribing blackjack and mini-baccarat dealers to do false shuffles, shuffles that left sequences of cards in their previous, predictable order. The cheat teams would place their bets accordingly and make off with huge sums of money. Hollywood notwithstanding, casinos are not fair game for clever criminals. However one feels about casinos and their operators, the victims of gambling scams include the other gamblers who lose their bets to the cheaters. Many are problem gamblers who cannot afford to lose more money than theyve already lost. Stealing from a tribal casino expands the number of victims. These casinos are not run for profit; they are run to shore up the finances of tribes, which often have few other sources of revenue. The Puyallup Tribes casino revenues, for example, are partially distributed among its members; the money also covers scholarships, housing, assistance for elders and other worthy causes. 
Of the 18 casinos these conspirators are accused of defrauding, 10 were tribal. Investigators now believe the Emerald Queen lost more than $1 million to the defendants. Thanks in part to the movies, cheating the casino has become part of the romance of gambling. But its nothing more than picking peoples pockets, sometimes on a grand scale. How did Hollywood make it look so good?