Secrets of a Casino Con

	Not really boasting, but I could probably make million in a weekend – it would be a rampage

Hey!’ barks Richard Marcus, tapping my hand. ‘Hey! What are you doing here? I’m betting $500 chips and you’re paying me $15. What is this crap?’ With his steely blue eyes fixed on my seemingly impaired vision and his New York drawl ringing in my ears, I can’t help but screw up my face and avert my gaze floorwards. I’m eight years-old again and I’ve just been caught stealing cookies. The ridiculous thing is that Marcus is the one stealing. Role-playing as the croupier, I saw – or at least I think I saw – him put three red $5 chips on the layout ($15 in total) and now he’s claiming that there were two $500 blacks and one $5 red on top ($1,005 in total). There’s no way in hell I could have missed that.

‘Nobody ever touches a dealer’s hand,’ explains Marcus. ‘It’s like me hitting you on the head with a hammer because nobody ever, ever touches a dealer’s hand. So whatever vision you had of seeing the $15 bet, it’s gone. Then I verbalised your mistake by saying, "Hey, you paid me wrong".’ Marcus tells me to imagine that behind his bet there is a stack of $500 chips, covered by a diamond-encrusted hand and that he’s wearing a £2,000 Armani suit. All of a sudden I’m thinking that television trickster, Derren Brown, isn’t the only one who can play mind games.

Get ’em while they’re young

Richard Marcus’ love for cheating can be traced back to an early age. Having lost his whole baseball card collection to an opportunistic schoolboy scam – an experience that ‘burned’ him – he turned to the ‘dark side’ and came up with ever more resourceful schemes to make cash.

One of his favourites was the ‘gas-station scam’. Marcus would drive into a gas station and as he paid for his top-up, he would drop to his hands and knees. ‘I’d be going, "Oh shit!",’ Marcus exclaims. ‘I’d say to the attendant, "My grandparents gave me a diamond ring; damn thing must have cost $2,000 and now I’ve lost it. I’m going to be at this bar watching a football game. So if you find it, just call me up and I’ll give you $500."’

Marcus’ partner-in-crime at the time would pull up about half-an-hour later and just so happen to find this diamond ring – or rather a $20 cubic zirconia. Feigning surprise, the attendant would start offering money, $150, $200 for the ring, thinking that he was about to miss out on a nice little $500 bonus. Of course, there never was a diamond ring, and Marcus wasn’t watching any football game – he was away ripping off another gas station. ‘That scam kept me in gambling through my teens. We must have done it 150 times. It preyed upon human greed. The attendant was trying to scam us, but we scammed him!’ laughs 48-year-old Marcus.

The one-hit wonder years

By his own admission, Marcus’ formative years were seriously biased towards gambling. ‘I woke up gambling and went to sleep gambling,’ he recalls. But that irrepressible betting mentality got him into hot water when he made his first trip to Las Vegas. Ensconcing himself in the baccarat pit at the Riviera Hotel, he was up $100,000 in a week. But no sooner had he won it than he’d lost it all – on his 21st birthday – and was thrown out of his $1,800-anight hotel room onto the streets with the ‘winos and bums’.

‘I knew I had to get a job. But the only thing I knew was gambling,’ Marcus declares. Having blagged his way into ‘dealer school’, he honed his skills and ended up dealing in the 4 Queens casino for ten months, with a view to moving up the gaming pyramid to venues like Caesars Palace. The million dollar, euro and pound question is, how did Marcus make the transition from local gamekeeper to global poacher?

‘One day, a sharp-looking guy, refined, well-spoken, about 40 came in. He was from New York and right away there was a rapport. He said to me, "Why don’t we continue this conversation after you get off work?" Generally dealers don’t meet players – but there was just something about this guy.’

The enigmatic man introduced himself as Joe Classon and the riddle he posed was to change Marcus’ life forever. ‘It’s not what I have in mind. Rather it’s what you have in mind,’ Classon said. Bemused and ever so slightly confused, Marcus realised he’d been set a challenge to devise a scam of his own, and subsequently came up with the best plan he believes he’s ever thought of.

By carefully fixing up the baccarat shoe, ie putting the cards in a certain order, he’d set up six player hands to win in a row. But what was most ingenious was that the hands were only set to start when the next dealer started her shift – the unsuspecting victim was a cute Korean dealer called Bang – meaning that if the pit-bosses suspected anyone, it would be her.

Marcus never found out what happened to Bang, but he did find out that Joe Classon headed a three-man team of ‘past-posters’ – along with Duke and Jerry – who had been working together for seven years, ripping off casinos from Vegas to Atlantic City and Monte Carlo to London. The team needed someone new because they’d been taking too much ‘steam’ – exposure – and Richard Marcus had just proved himself.

First past the post

I ask Richard to explain what past-posting is. ‘It’s where you make your bets late and switch chips,’ he says. ‘Remember that move I showed you at the beginning, where I tapped your hand? That’s the ‘blackjack move’ – the first move I ever learnt – and it still wins after 25 years. If I win the hand, I swap the chips in. If I lose, I leave the bet and you take the $15.’

So if it wins, you swap the chips, the dealer scratches his head and you pocket $1,005, but what then – just keep doing it?

Marcus shakes his head. ‘Only one move per table. You can’t fool the dealer twice. But on the blackjack move, we never left the table right away because that would draw heat. So my next bet would be a legitimate one of $505 or $305. The important thing is that I’d always put a $5 red capper on top to coincide with the move that I just did. That shows I’m just some sort of quirky guy with a ‘thing’. If you lose, you drop your bet. The idea is to give them a little ‘betback’ to smooth out whatever steam there is.’

Marcus explains how each scam was akin to a military operation – perhaps unsurprising given that Joe Classon served with the US army in Korea – and each member of the team had a role to play.

‘When they started introducing ‘markers’ to mark the winning chips in roulette – devised to ward off past-posters – we thought we’d be in trouble,’ Marcus continues. ‘But as long as you had a mechanic, a check-bettor, a claimer and a security guy, it was easy. The mechanic was the one who laid the bet while the check-bettor placed bets in strategic positions which ‘made’ the dealer turn in a certain way – just enough time for the claimer, on the other side of the table and nowhere near the move, to move in and shout, "Woo-hoo! I finally won $100 on the straight-up. $3,500 payout!"’

The ‘security guy’ would always be Joe himself and he would closely watch what the casino personnel did after a ‘move’. Did they get upset? Did they talk about it? Did they alert anyone? Priceless information for any future scams.

All very nice and A-Team, but surely in this world of high-tech surveillance, even those with the sleightest of hands will get caught? Marcus smiles confidently and sets a riddle for me. ‘What kind of move do you think we could come up with where cameras help our cause?’

Savannah turns up the heat

Racking my brain for all of three seconds, I must admit defeat and tell Richard to spill the chips on his self-titled ‘Best Move Ever Invented’: Savannah (which was named after the team’s favourite lapdancer, apparently). ‘It was in 1995 when I was leading my own past-posting team,’ Marcus reminisces.

I was in the kitchen fooling around with our reserve $5,000 chocolate-coloured chips. I took a few red $5 chips and put them down on top of the $5,000 so that they were like a shark’s jaw hanging out. I put Pat (Marcus’ right-hand man) in the dealer’s position and said, "Pat, can you see that chip from over there?" After a while, we conceived the right angle, and me and Pat looked at each other in shock because we knew we had stumbled upon the greatest discovery in casino cheating.’

With a furrowed brow, I slowly nod as though I actually know how this could work in practice – when in fact I don’t have the faintest clue – but before I embarrass myself by owning up to the fact, Marcus continues. ‘So how it would work is this. On the layout I put a $5,000 chocolate chip and two $5 reds on top. Pat stands by the wheel. If the bet doesn’t come in, Pat shouts "Damn!" and I pick the bet right up and it’s gone. We thought the dealer would see that every time, but he only saw it one in five times. If he caught me, I would just do my drunk routine, pretending I didn’t know what was happening. In my right hand are three $5 chips and I put that down. The dealer thinks that’s what it was anyway.

‘If the bet does come in, Pat stays quiet and I go, "Yeah! I just won five grand!" The dealer lifts the two reds and – Boom! – the $5,000 chip is there. But the dealer can’t just pay it. That’s a huge bet. So she calls over the pit boss who comes over and demands they play back the surveillance tape. They run back the tape: legitimate bet.’

Bam! It hits me. After more than three hours and dozens of chip demonstrations, I finally get it. I get why Marcus is considered the greatest casino cheater in history – he’s never been caught. I get why ‘Savannah’ rewrote the surveillance rules and is considered unbeatable by all the Vegas experts – it was so simple that the authorities could never stoop to that low a level of thinking. And finally I get why Richard Marcus can now live a casino and work-free life, kicking back somewhere on the sunny French Riviera – he’s made a helluva lot of money.

Nevertheless, I ask him if he’d ever be tempted to get back in the game. ‘Only if Miami Beach opens casinos will I come out of retirement,’ he says. ‘It would be bigger than Las Vegas with all those beautiful high-rise hotels and the drug money. Not really boasting, but I could probably make $1 million in a weekend – it would be a rampage.’