During the following week, I pondered when and where we'd proceed with this new card-marking business. There weren't that many casinos left in Vegas that dealt blackjack from the hand (card shoes had long since taken over, mainly to prevent players from touching the cards). There were more of them up in Reno, and in Atlantic City and the rest of the world there were none. I finally decided that the best bet was Reno. We'd fly up there Friday night and work the town for the weekend, completely on an experimental basis. There'd be no bet increases when we knew we'd receive an ace off the top of the deck on an upcoming deal. Nor would there be any outrageous plays that might tip off the pit that we had advance knowledge of the cards.
On the Thursday afternoon before our scheduled departure, I stopped off at the home of my surveillance friend Donnie. I usually did that at least once a month to get the casino lowdown, or just before taking a trip out of town. If anything was "hot" about Reno, Donnie would know it and warn me off.
As soon as he appeared at his front door, I greased him up with a hundred.
That hundred ended up saving my life. "I got two nice cassettes to show you," he said with a giggle. We settled in on the sofa after he shoved the first tape into the VCR. It started out as an overhead color shot of a blackjack dealer with a lone woman player at his table. The woman was seen putting a small stack of green chips on the table, evidently wanting to change them into reds. Then the camera zoomed in on the small green stack.
"Look closely at that stack of green chips," Donnie said. I looked closely but noticed nothing.
The dealer placed a tall stack of red chips on the layout in front of him, then slid it to the woman. He put the small stack of greens into his chip rack, at the front of a tube holding black chips. That was not uncommon, and I still hadn't noticed any move on the dealer's part. The camera now zoomed in on those green chips sitting in the black-chip tube.
"They're not chips," Donnie said, and he froze the image with the remote. "Look at them closely now."
I still could not distinguish anything unusual about those green chips, and chips were my business. "I still don't get it," I said.
"You will in a second." He fast-forwarded the video. When it resumed, the woman was placing her stack of red chips on the layout in front of the dealer. She'd played a few hands we missed on the fast-forward and now wanted to change her reds back into greens. The dealer's hand went into the black-chip tube to grab the same green chips she had arrived at the table with. The camera zoomed right in on his hand as he grabbed those chips. Like Donnie had said, they were not chips at all. It was a hollow green cylinder that looked like a small stack of green chips and had a bottom base that moved inward on springs. Just before the dealer removed it from the rack, he lightly pressed the top end of the cylinder to activate the springs on the bottom which sucked up black chips. Then he slid it back to her and she left the table with her little green cylinder containing five blacks, $500.
Donnie replayed it twice, and on the second viewing I actually saw the tube of black chips diminish when the dealer pressed on the device.
"Twice a day and they clear a grand in the dark," he said. "They just got too greedy."
"Not bad," I commented. "What's next?"
Donnie got up and popped in the second tape. It was from an overhead camera above a filled-up blackjack table, also in color. I immediately recognized the yellow logo screened into the green felt of the table: the Treasure Island casino. I could identify any Vegas .
