The Man Who Cheated Vegas Casinos For Years And Stole Millions | Cheating Vegas S1 EP2 | Wonder

In Las Vegas, over 35 million people try to get rich every year, most leave empty-handed or worse, but cheaters and Las Vegas are always looking for new ways to beat the system and Las Vegas security is equally committed to stopping cheaters. They have a feeling that I'm special because I can do this. They'll say I have a chance to make money. They'll go home and practice it, practice it, practice it, come in and beat us, but every time they're the cheaters. they believe they have beaten the system the system improves these are the crimes that push Las Vegas to improve its game these are the factors that change the game cheaters have been around since gambling began in the United States in the Old West you had we see the opportunity to catch him and justice was swift today thousands of cameras monitor every moment of every game that means cheaters have to be smarter than ever technology seems endless the biggest challenge for us is keeping up with that Technology is a high-tech game of cat and mouse, but every once in a while a criminal appears who is able to go completely unnoticed and in the process changes the game forever.

These men and women would justify that you know that stealing in all kinds of ways the casino industry is dishonest or something. other nonsense and they would convince themselves to agree to stealing keeping track of the city's most notorious cheaters is the job of the Nevada Gaming Control Board their version of the FBI's most wanted list called the black book was created in 1960 had six people that were originally included and they are all organized crime figures and these people were not allowed into any

casinos

, but when the old gangsters died, a new generation of tech-savvy cheaters took over and were added to the list. a threat to the casino industry and there are around 37 or 38 in the black book at the moment, most of them are professional criminals who deceived

casinos

for

years

before being caught.

Any time you arrest someone from a law enforcement standpoint, it's a success, so it's kind of how I see putting someone in the black once you're in the book, you have the right to dispute it, but no one He has gotten his way nor has he litigated his way out of it. The only way out of the black book is to die. then you get one of the most notorious cheaters who ever lived. The book points to the city's hardware. It is an ongoing war in the industry between the manufacturers on one side and the cheaters on the other.

Enter the city's biggest money makers in Las Vegas. 120,000 slot machines in operation, one for every 5 residents, they are called one-armed bandits because they are responsible for more than 75% of casino profits and with all that money on the casino floors, slot machines are and always have been bright beacons for cheaters. Seeking a quick payout since the early days, cheaters have attempted to trick machines with slugs or coins tied to strings that could then be removed, but as machines became more sophisticated, so did cheaters, one of the leaves of the most successful slots of all. time is a former television repairman named Tommy Carmichael for over two decades Carmichael designed tools that allowed him and other cheaters to scam

millions

on slot machines and every Las Vegas slot machine you see today was designed with Tommy Carmichael in mind, The devices that Tommy Carmichael could create would allow a very surreptitious entry of a machine and a very surreptitious violation of the security features of a missionary who was successful and worked on a large population of slot machine makes and models at the time.

This is Carmichael, 62

years

old. He agreed to sit down for this exclusive interview to reveal how he took Las Vegas for a ride. He was like a giant ATM. Wherever you wanted to go on vacation, you were going to retire. Also, the story begins in Carmichael's television repair shop. A friend of his passed by. with what he told him was a

cheating

device, the cheese slot machines and it was called the top and bottom joint, this is how the top and bottom joint works in 1980, slot machines had come a long way from the first machines, originally , slotted discs were connected to ends of three spinning reels inside to win a jackpot, all slots had to line up perfectly and that's how slot machines got their name, but in newer machines, the levers are attached To the spinning reels, these levers have metal contacts on the ends that rest against a fixed board which is also covered in contacts, the contacts are connected to a circuit board and when a jackpot is won it completes a circuit and turns on the hopper motor that dispenses the money the

cheating

device brought to Carmichael's store that day connects the hopper motor that triggers a payment this device the top and bottom joint comes in two parts the bottom tool is made from a short piece of guitar string with a small wire the winner in the lower left corner of the machine and hit the circuit board that was there, the wire draws current from the circuit board and sends a low power of electricity through the slot machine, then the top tool, a piece of metal shaped like the number nine, is inserted into the coin slot, this completes an electrical connection. circuit powerful enough to activate the hopper that dispenses money and the coins flood out.

Carmichael's friend is making hard money in Las Vegas, while Carmichael is barely scraping by in Tulsa. He wants in on the action, so he flies to Nevada to try his luck. his friend's device in 1980, security cameras do not exist to capture his activities, in fact, they will not be installed in casinos for more than nine years. Carmichael sits in front of a slot machine, inserts the upper and lower joint and suddenly, Tommy Carmichael has a new cheat in his Vegas career Carmichael begins to travel to Sin City to perform his scam, the machines held around seventy-five dollars yes, on a good day, working all day you could make three thousand dollars a day, which was good money, Carmichael's daily earnings are the equivalent of more than five thousand dollars today I would stay there and let have someone else run the store.

I would be there a couple of months at a time, but when I came back it seemed like the store never made any money, so I finally closed the store completely and moved there and started from that point. In fact, Carmichael begins to live large, making and buying new friends. You know you have Las Vegas and it's designed to separate you from your money, which it's very good at. Even though you're making more money, you're also spending more money, we sold out the show, he had a pretty good dinner for me, eighteen hundred dollars a meal, pretty good for a group of five people, he found a way to make money faster and did it. did.

He didn't care and probably enjoyed being a criminal, so he decided it was worth the risk. Me and the machines were never the problem, it was the people around you, without attracting attention, you need to take this money out of the machine without them noticing or hearing. or pretending to be doing something that was the most complicated part of the whole thing to avoid suspicion. Carmichael never stays in one place for long over five years. He visits casinos all over Las Vegas and then in 1985 casinos caught some criminals using the Upper and Lower Device in response, slot machine manufacturers develop a way to recognize the surge of electricity the device creates.

They were putting in slow-blow fuses and machines and if you tried to trick it with the end of the wire, this fuse would blow and close. Soon these improved slot machines are everywhere and for Carmichael it seems like the end of easy money for him. He was starting to make two three hundred and four hundred dollars a day at Good Lucky because everything was dwindling to nothing due to the continuous cheating. He has to find the old machines. To take advantage of him, he would hit several slot machines and a casino at once and the M field, raising suspicions about him on July 4, 1985.

Tommy Carmichael is caught cheating while playing a slot machine near the strip. Nevada Gaming Control Board agents arrested him. he had the tools with me and when they searched me they asked me what's your thing, not so good. I think you know and that was it. Carmichael is in serious trouble. Cheating, especially using the device, cheating is a crime punishable by up to six years. In prison for his first crime, Carmichael is sentenced to five years, but while most people find his careers on hold during a prison stay, Tommy Carmichael uses it as breeding ground for his next big scam.

Prison is a situation where you choose your own friends and there were slot players there so we all hung out together one of these slot sheets is a man named Michael Balsamo Balsamo has been in and out of prison since 1980 Michael Balsamo was a career criminal that was his life that was his lifestyle and he practically dedicated himself to deceiving the casino industry. Carmichael and Balsamo realized that they had a lot in common, they were a kind of flexible partnership in the sense that one helped the other and vice versa, you scratch my back, I scratch yours and they.

He began to devise a plan to reunite when they were released from prison in 1987. Tommy Carmichael is the first to be released. His probation stipulated that he had to return to Tulsa and stay out of Las Vegas. Carmichael has no intention of complying, but since his TV business is long gone, he needs coverage, he makes a deal with a local contractor, he had a construction site and I was supposed to be a salesman for the construction site. , so he was writing me a check and would give it as my salary, but look. He was actually living in Las Vegas and every time he had to show up from parole, he would fly from Las Vegas to Tulsa here and have my parents and I go back to gambling and come home to Las Vegas while he waited for Michael Balsamo to come out.

Carmichael investigates the casinos since his old tools no longer work. Carmichael needs a new one that will fool the latest generation of slot machines. He develops his most audacious scam, but posing as the owner of a casino. He would go to the actual manufacturers. like he was some kind of person in the market who bought some new slot machines and I, the salesmen, opened the doors, took things apart and showed them to him, he would talk to engineers at trade shows, they would show them the innards of the machine . For Carmichael, two things are now clear: one, hooking up the hopper will not be an option and two, in order for him to even figure out how to beat this machine, he will need to purchase one that Nevada's regulatory system allows for slot machine sales. machines there are stores where you can go to buy a slot machine anyone can buy a splash problem is that the machine costs a thousand dollars and Carmichael is broke and also Michael Balsamo, who also just got paroled, they decide to raise the money together by doing what I know they travel all over Nevada looking for the last of the old machines they can still fool.

We actually went and played on the upper and lower union, the old tool where we made history. In fact, we played with nickels to get enough money to buy a new one. machine once he has it Carmichael gets to work Tommy Carmichael had the ability to take apart a slot machine, interrogate its security features, and develop techniques to circumvent them. Carmichael soon realizes that the new machine has a weak point: the counter that regulates the amount of coins to be paid out, he discovers that the counter can be overridden by activating a small microswitch deep in the machine with the counter out of commission. , the machine continues to spit out money, but Carmichael must create a tool that can access this switch, no easy task.

It took him about six months to create something really good and it was called a slider. It was made from a concrete test and was approximately 11 and a half inches long in metal. It passed through an air hole in the machine once inside. The slider has to slide under a secondary security door and then rotate 10 degrees to activate the microswitch, but if Carmichael builds the tool with a fixed curve, it will get stuck on the hundreds of wires inside before reaching the door, This is a problem, but Carmichael has a stroke of inspiration: he runs a piano wire through the tip of the tool so it can be tightened after going under the door, it works and it would slide to the microswitch and stop thecount every time the machine was always paying you, but you never knew how much it was paying because you could actually hide it from the county with the slider Carmichael and Balsamo went back to business, they split up Balsamo takes a slider and starts visiting casinos in All over the country Carmichael claims working in Las Vegas the slider was earning around $1,000 an hour because that is the rate at which the Machine would spit out quarters with the new device.

Carmichael is making money ten times faster than ever and for the next two years he enjoys all the spoils of his trade, but then in 1989. Casinos find a new tool and advances in security camera technology mean that Cameras can now be installed anywhere and in Las Vegas, this means that casinos everywhere can now closely monitor all aspects of the game, including Carmichael and Balsamo slot machines, preventing cameras from becoming the priority. number one, they would inspect an establishment, they would look for obstacles with cameras because the marketing department would hang signs, they would beautify the place, they would put up flowers, all of a sudden, you know, some of the best cameras for a particular area were Well Masked, Tommy Carmichael, the world would walk into a casino and that's what they were looking for.

Carmichael gets away with it for a year, but then in 1990, surveillance officers notice him acting suspiciously at a machine and call agents from the Nevada Gaming Control Board. to follow Carmichael home and stake out his apartment building, they were sitting in the parking lot and I was going to try to catch me at the casino but Carmichael got a lucky break for some reason that night they took me out to go do something else and whenThey returned the next day. I was no longer there. I moved into a house and worked. We got everything under different names and everything, but they came back.

It had disappeared from them. It's a close decision. Carmichael will have to be more careful in the future. Months later, casinos are introducing the latest slot machines designed to protect the money counter overnight. Carmichael's slider becomes obsolete in the cheating versus casino game. Casinos are back on top, but once again Carmichael is not ready to give up the fight. They once asked me to do it. I have sometimes felt guilty for not accepting money from casinos and I have actually asked myself. I said, yeah, you know, you try to reason these things out and I'm thinking, well, honestly, I know I felt like I didn't.

I don't know the gaming industry. it's so cheating with cards or live games that it happens in front of you and you have a kind of Cannes right when it comes to slots you don't stand a chance in 1990 Carmichael is ready to cheat again but there is a problem, his device cheating is useless the mechanical slot counters have been replaced by latest generation optical sensors this optic with a small beam of light and what it did had a transmitter and would transmit a beam to the receiver and the coin would pass through this light and this is how we count money, once the machine has counted the allocated payment it stops the flow of coins, so I came up with a tool that actually sat there with a little light and brought Bema to life to the receiver, so when the coin passed the machine never noticed while the light was on, the machine didn't count the coins when they came out of the sleeve so they got a lot of coins they were not entitled to.

Carmichael calls out the new trap device to him. the light and with him the game has changed again this time in his favor Carmichael also realizes that he can make more money outside the casino by selling glow wands to his clients, fellow cheaters and scammers, making one would probably cost him two or three Dollars. sell them for ten or twelve thousand dollars, a huge margin on the illicit sales of glow sticks plus his own cheating slot machine. Carmichael is making more money than ever. Oh there was pop, it was so much fun with nothing but Disneyland. a big party most of the time Tommy Carmichael's operation was a big threat to the casino industry because he had a lot of cheaters involved using devices that he had created and they were stealing thousands and thousands of dollars a day, but Carmichael doesn't limit himself to just scamming Las Vegas, he and his fellow hustlers took it easy on the road across the United States and drove to Reno just to do something, or Lake Tahoe or Landing City or Biloxi, he hung out with a crowd of drug dealers and they were partying.

Many remember that at their core they are all scammers, so it's not like they were friends, as you know, it wasn't like they were a SEAL team where everyone trusted everyone, they were waiting for the knife in the back, but with so many people They use Carmichael's glow sticks, there is more room for error, the glow sticks get stuck in the machines and are abandoned only to be found by casino workers who deliver them to the Nevada Gaming Control Board where the device was real: the black shrink tube and the black electrical tape. but there, because we had to repair the device, it had broken just now Julie is going to demonstrate how it is inserted through the coin return and placed correctly within the game.

Notice that the credit meter remains at six credits. Gaming agents create a video to show off the slot machine. The machine manufacturers how their machines have obviously been compromised significantly more than six and realize what was happening in the slot machine industry and introduced a delay, so if you heard a payout and where the coins every six or seven seconds, there would be a slight delay. The delay was to outsmart the beam, so the beam would stay on and the delay would say, well, there shouldn't be any light, so the machine would shut down. would turn off.

The good guys are ahead again, but not for long. Carmichael modifies the light wand, so the cheater can quickly turn off the device during the timeout, you just had a switch on frequently, it was probably the simplest electrical circuit areas problem solved, it's back to normal, but then, in 1996, alert surveillance officers finally caught Carmichael in the act. I noticed the money was coming out and the counting of foreigners stopped at the machine and here we go again, security arrives. Carmichael responds quickly, pulls out the glow wand from the machine, throws the tool, and the tool travels well across the casino.

Security I'll go there nervously looking everywhere for this tool I can't find the tool I told him I told him there is no tool but the glow wand is finally found It seems like Carmichael's luck has finally run out, right? They didn't have a case because where did that happen? I mean, it's mine or someone else's that they already had or I had a very good lawyer. The prosecutor did not consider that there was sufficient evidence. The surveillance cameras were not on the machines. enough to show him actually using the device on the machine and the authorities cannot arrest him for being in Las Vegas illegally since his probation expired four years earlier, something the proper charges against Carmichael have eluded justice, but once again he is in high on the radar in Nevada.

Gaming Control Board and its next misstep could easily be its last. Carmichael maintains his covert operation; Then, in 1999, his fellow prisoner Michael Balsamo re-enters the scene. He had done well with Carmichael's cheating devices in the past and he is eager to take advantage of Carmichael's. latest technology I think Tommy Carmichael would tell you that his fatal mistake was involving Michael Balsamo in cheating because Balsamo was a little out of control, he didn't really care what he did or how he did it. Balsamo has big plans armed with light tread as he takes off into new casino territories across the U.S.

Three months later, Balsamo is arrested and the glow wand is confiscated and handed over to the FBI. An investigation begins when officers remove the ball. Simoes' phone records continue to list a Las Vegas number. Tommy Carmichael. The Nevada Gaming Control Board joins forces with FBI agents to intervene. Carmichael's phone, his days of cheating in Las Vegas are coming to an end, but instead of attacking immediately, the agents listen to the coin. Carmichael, who has no idea that the authorities are following him, is hard at work on a new trap trap because once again slot machine manufacturers. they have caught up with their innovative devices, they just introduced machines called ticket in ticket out, ticket in ticket out is when you make money instead of making money, you get a ticket and then you go and collect the ticket on Carmichael's glow wand . it's useless because the new slot machines have no coin release to manipulate so you buy a ticket on the slot machine like the older slot machines the machine still accepts bills and coins so Carmichael devises a tool to trick the machine slot machine, he calls it the language that was. a tongue depressor and he actually went into where the coins were with it and what he was doing is taking the coin acceptor with this device.

Carmichael's tool takes advantage of a flaw in the design of the machine's optical counting system after a coin. When placed, it falls directly past a series of three lights, but Carmichael discovers that he can trick the counter by moving his tool back and forth in front of the middle light by flashing the center light, even if the other two were off, not I would. No matter, you would think that the coins were going through that step stuck together in less than a second. Carmichael's tongue tool activates the machine to give you hundreds of dollars in game credits, the same as putting in money and now you collect it.

A third problem is a new device and I'm Jesse Carmichael, I asked several of your fellow cheaters to test the device and help you solve the so-called top problems. We would follow them to these places and watch them steal money. It is a long overdue surveillance package. but we're doing it for a reason we're building a bigger case the tipping point the reason we threw the hammer at them is because they had perfected and successfully tested a 25 cent pointing device and were upgrading it to a $5.00 Minting Device The $5.00 machine can lose a lot of money in a very short period of time.

It had the potential for losses worth

millions

of dollars. We were going to film it making a couple million dollars a piece and then just retire it. This one works. completely different, everything else happened Carmichael still has no idea the feds are following us, he's moving fast, so now the FBI has to act when carmichael flies to Atlantic City to get some easy money, the agents are waiting for him, They catch him red-handed. Using his tools and arrested in 2000, the cheater who changed the security game by defeating every piece of technology he found pleads guilty to running an illegal gambling enterprise, always looking for a good angle.

Carmichael receives a lighter sentence by agreeing to show the authorities how all of his tools work. work, I mean, 20 years, it was 20 years of this, going to wheels, falling, you know, but there are still dozens of other cheaters using the tools that Carmichael created and one of the most audacious is Michael Balsamo, who now has taught his entire family to rob Michael Balsamo was about Michael Balsamo and got a lot of people in trouble in Las Vegas. Balsamo's wife, Stephanie, and his mother-in-law, Bhuvana, soon mastered the art of cheating at slot machines. They used the glow wand to take advantage of the older casinos.

I haven't upgraded to the ticket machines yet. Surveillance footage shows the family in action. Stephanie was the one who mainly did the work. She was the one who was stealing. Inserting the trap device. I'm collecting the money. The role of her mother. It was sitting next to her and placing a very large bag in a strategic position where she was a blocking agent so that the cameras couldn't see exactly what was happening, but it was all orchestrated to divert attention from the activity they were in. doing. they were doing, which was changed. Stephanie Balsamo is extremely adept at using the glow wand.

It literally takes less than a second of maneuvering to get it out of her purse. She just sees her hand go into her bag. It normally leaves a person and enters the hopper. you see it in real time you will never see it she is so good and so fast when the video slows down you can barely make out the edge of the light wands they handle the way it is designed it fits in the palm of your hand and follows the curve of your finger so you won't see it for at least a year. The Balsamo family wins the battle of cheating against casinos, but the game is far from over on the 28thApril 2006, while Simoe's wife Stephanie and her mother raise suspicions. of security officers throughout southern Nevada in less than an hour had attacked three separate casinos ten miles away from which they had never lost, at least Stephanie never, if she sat down at a machine, walked away with buckets of coins after reviewing hours of surveillance.

Those responsible for the video games finally have enough evidence to arrest them. On June 5, 2006, Michael Balsamo, his wife Stephanie, and his mother-in-law Levana are arrested and charged with multiple counts of manufacturing and possessing a trapping device. In 2008, everyone goes to trial while Simoes. mother-in-law is convicted but given bail balsamo's wife Stephanie is found guilty and sentenced to 16 to 32 years in prison while Michael Balsamo never came to trial while out on bail disappears Michael Balsamo fled to Argentina we receive reports Of his family members who passed away, there are doubts that he actually died because he is a scammer and to this day he is still listed as a resident of Las Vegas, at least Balsamo is out of the picture and Carmichael is back. in Oklahoma you were banned from ever entering a casino again in Nevada, as for slot machines, they continue to evolve to become safer, slot machines are computerized today, their computers, so to cheat a slot machine today in Today, it is almost necessary to be a computer expert. a hacker and without a doubt there is someone like Tommy Carmichael trying to find a way to defeat them.

Tommy Carmichael and Michael Balsamo spent the better part of two decades conning Las Vegas. There's no way to know for sure exactly how much was

stole

n, but experts believe it. It was millions and in an ironic twist of fate Tommy Carmichael, the slot machine mastermind who is now banished to Tulsa, is not done with Las Vegas yet. He has one more success. Carmichael develops and patents an anti-cheat device that he intends to commercialize. The casinos had been approved for gambling and had all the licenses and everything done, but as soon as they found out that I was their inventor, they said that now the gambling industry, which had lost millions thanks to Carmichael and his inventions, does not want nothing else. to see with him, it's game over.

Tommy Carmichael is a very brilliant person who if he had used his intelligence for good he would probably have been a much richer man than he is today, but casinos should not only look at technically savvy cheaters. For other criminals change the game using sheer force The heart of every casino is the cage, a highly secure area where money is counted and chips and tokens can be exchanged for cash like a bank, but honestly, this is more secure than any bank. where all the money is, so we take your security here more seriously than anywhere else.

For years the cages were considered rock-solid fortresses despite a few unarmed casino guards, a couple of cameras and a dark reputation. They were their only protection. It was perceived that organized crime had a lot of influence in Las Vegas and then they were owners or co-owners of all the casinos. The popular consensus was that anyone who robbed a casino would end up dead the next day buried somewhere in the desert, but in the 1990s corporations began building and buying casinos. The cages still had millions on hand, but security had not changed and without the mythical layer of protection Mod, the once impenetrable fortress became vulnerable.

No one knew it, but a violent external force was about to change the cage security game forever. Aladdin casino tourists work the slot players crowded around the gaming tables at 9:00 p.m. Black and white surveillance cameras capture a suspicious group entering the casino. They have masks. They have weapons. They start screaming. People tear people down. They head to the cage. The bandits are small enough to dive under the 15. inch clearance under the cage bars, open all the drawers, grab all the money they could as fast as they could while ransacking the cage, the staff of the casino offered no resistance, you're not supposed to fight these guys, just let them take it out of your place.

No amount of money is worth your life. The thugs inside the cage jump out and run to the door in less than two minutes. The thieves pocketed $47,000 in cash. This was the first time something like this had happened. A total takeover of the casino cage. The area's casino cameras see it all, but after reviewing the grainy black-and-white footage, they still don't know the identities of the masked bandits. They could see enough skin color under their masks to know they were black, but no one was going to be able to. To identify we had no real leads to follow, there really was no physical evidence that would lead us to anyone.

Two days later, the LAPD was serving 28 search warrants related to a gang homicide. The police showed up at one of these places and packed up. it flies off and lands practically at their feet, they look in the bag and there's a bunch of Aladin casino money wrappers in there, of course that's our first clue that the guys who robbed the casino had a connection to Los Angeles, but no one is sure exactly what The connection is, the LAPD immediately calls the Las Vegas police and since the investigation has crossed state lines but the FBI gets involved, the three agencies focus their attention on a possible connection to the gang, but Nothing comes of it and the investigation cools down two months later, the Flamingo, another casino. with easy access to the cage he gets hit, four guys come running with guns, all masked, the vault, the counter, they grab the money, they all leave, they get a

stole

n gang, they leave, they took the search in two minutes and left there with $150,000 once again, the thieves.

They leave no clues, little evidence, and no suspects desperate to prevent a mass exodus of customers. Las Vegas increases camera coverage and adds security on casino floors. The reason everyone was so worried about this series of robberies was because they didn't want it to affect tourism. I didn't want anyone to feel safe in a hotel in Las Vegas and that's what this gang was making people feel unsafe. They weren't sure. Nobody wants to go to the hotel. You know, it looks like Baghdad, but there's no stopping it. The bandits two days later beat Harris only this time they intensified the attack four young men come running with only a whip a lady hit another guy on the head two of them fall on the counter they grab another guy by the hair they throw the gun at him in his head the pipe behind the counter rifle the drawers jump back on the counter everyone runs out with a little over ninety-seven thousand dollars they crash into a door and enter the Harrah's parking lot where they change into another police vehicle The officer sees this truck leaving with the lights off at 3:00 in the morning, begins to follow it, the man leaves, the chase begins, they get on the helicopter, the patrol cars converge and there is a 20-minute high-speed chase to Las Vegas, the subjects.

He rammed a police car saying that a robot whose control hit a fire hydrant crashed into a telephone pole and all the police scattered K-9 units chased them on foot thirty harrowing minutes later they arrested the four robbers and the driver of escape, unmasked authorities discovered that the terrifying Casino cage attackers are just Los Angeles gang teenagers hoping to boost their street cred. Gangs will use children for many things. They will use them as lookouts. They will use them as messengers. They will use them to pass messages. Sometimes they do. deliveries or carrying money because they know that even if they get caught, the kid won't have any incentive to talk because he won't be watching as long, he's younger, and besides, the younger they were, the sillier they had to get like this. risk, that means one thing to the authorities: we didn't have the guys who had been setting this up and were responsible for robbery after robbery, so that's what we were trying to find out.

The police pressured the attack team, interrogating them for hours. search for the ringleaders, but whoever is running this dangerous scam has been careful, the teens don't even know the names of the guys they are working with. A year goes by, it took so long that time worked in our favor because these gang members were continually getting in trouble with the law and when they got stuck enough they would look for a way out thinking, well, you know, I know a little about this robbery. to the casino, so we have a lot of bits. Authorities uncover not one but two ringleaders behind the violent cage raids.

Melvin Foster and Chet Govan are unlikely partners in rival Los Angeles gangs. Gang loyalty is really lost when it comes to making money. Melvin Foster was a member of the Los Angeles Bloods gang. He came up with the idea for the robberies after he traveled to Las Vegas and recognized a serious flaw in the casino sites. Alvin Foster knew very well that most casinos didn't have powers and stuff, they were more like a bank counter, but there was a lot more money behind the counter than you would find in the typical bank. Foster had made a plan that began by choosing casinos with cages near the exits and with the fewest cameras and security guards.

Foster was ready but he wanted to increase his chances of success, for that he needed a partner, someone smart, someone like him, But who could he trust, family, he turned to his cousin Dino and Chappell Chappell suggested a partnership with his rival boyfriend. Crips gang, his name was Chet Govan, who was called short dog on the street in 1994 in Los Angeles, on a normal day, these two gang members would kill each other before speaking. Boys are supposed to be rivals. We tried to tear off our heads. but then you know they robbed that kind of activity together Foster had the mind and Govan had the metal they needed each other, even if no one could understand the association on the street Foster and Govan used young gang members from the toughest neighborhoods in Los Angeles to storm Las Vegas. unopposed casino cages to find young men on the streets Ted was willing to get involved especially because they thought they could make some quick money, it was very easy because they knew they were willing to go out and do something crazy after the heist the gang used to escape of the cars.

The first was to escape from the casino. The second car was waiting in a parking lot. Then they changed to that car with the money and headed to Los Angeles. The masterminds waited near Chicle Cove. An American foster would not be near the casino during the robbery when she They learned that the robbery had been carried out by Govan and Foster returned to South Central Los Angeles in their own car this way they would never be connected to either the robbers or the physical evidence of the robbery or even the incredibly Foster money. an NGO van didn't give a dime to the brazen young gang members who carried out the heists guys they're working for I'm not going to play share it with oh no, use them until they can't use them anymore, yeah and they move on to the next conference they want to do something stupid once Foster and Govan are arrested the two rivals quickly fight each other the authorities now have enough to lock them up Foster gets 18 and a half years in prison Govan is sentenced to 22 The five men we caught next of the Harrah's robbery they all play and received between 10 and 18 years each for Las Vegas.

The robberies changed the rules of the game when it comes to cages in today's modern casinos. The cages are deliberately placed at the back, away from exits that make a quick escape virtually impossible, they are also being watched from all angles. I have more cameras per square foot in this area than anywhere else in the casino. I have 60 cameras in this small area. I have cameras built into the bars, but in addition to that, we are more vigilant in front of this cage than ever before. We have security here 24/7, not only an officer, but the inside of the cage has also been renovated, which makes the money less accessible because those people could. to slide right into the cage we had to look at that and say it didn't really work, it was a very glaring weakness that no one had really thought about, but when it was shown to us at that point all the bars went lower. so that someone can no longer do that the lowered bars are just the first new layer of protection the initial door that you enter through to enter the cage takes you to the chip bank area where they will make transactions bringing chips to the table bringing chips that have been redeemed from a game today the cage is no longer in an open area, it is a multi-room maze beyondthat door that will have a cage going to the main cage but next to it there will be another door so go in a door that door will be closed and locked behind you both doors can't be opened at the same time and then to To actually get into the cage, you have to go through another door and then usually behind it we'll have our counting areas, so you'll go through three or four doors to get to the counting area where we're actually counting the money. .

Despite all the new defenses that casinos have implemented, there will always be another element of change that will change the rules of the game. You will find ways to beat the system, the only thing everyone in Las Vegas can trust is that the battle against cheaters will never end