AN HONORABLE PROFESSION (Beating the casinos by hook or by crook; a Las Vegas memoir.

AN HONORABLE PROFESSION

Beating the casinos by hook or by crook; a Las Vegas memoir.

Jim Pennington

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Published by:

Jim Pennington at Smashwords

Copyright (c) 2012 by Jim Pennington

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Cover photograph :

The Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Sign

(c) Pobrien301

Everyone cheered as the king and her brothers led Eliza back to the palace where they lived happily ever after.

Hans Christian Anderson

Circa 1850

"There are no happy endings."

Baldy

Circa 1994

Table of Contents

Prologue

Off the back of the turnip truck

Work

Play

Taking the sport out of it

The good old days

The sporting life

Squaring up

On the run

Busted

Epilogue

Glossary

Prologue

"Unit Six To Mainline…….. Take it Slooow."

Damn, how many times is it now I’ve heard that same message rasping from the PA system overhead? More to the point, how many more times will I hear it? Jolted back to the present by the unwelcome interruption of my daydreaming, I gaze out the window to the sidewalk leading away from the entrance to Unit Six.Yup, here they come, right on schedule. A long snaking column of men; men of every size, shape, age and color. Each one is clad in some combination of gray sweats or standard issue khaki. Most are wearing tennis shoes, although here and there I can make out a pair of brogans or high topped work boots. Whatever they have on their feet they’re careful not to put a foot off the sidewalk. Like many things here, doing so is strictly forbidden.

The first time I witnessed this thrice daily ritual I was somehow reminded of an old Monte Python skit. You may know the one….. a soccer match between The Gynecologists – decked out in surgical masks and gloves, and floor length surgical gowns – and a team comprised entirely of Long John Silver Imitators – one-legged men sporting pistols, cutlasses, eye patches and the like. I thought it was comical, too, that first day, watching a bunch of guys jostling their way down the sidewalk trying to keep pace with those around them: trying to move fast, yet not break into a trot. No trotting allowed. (Running you can absolutely forget about.)

Same thing today, though the comic aspect of it has paled some. The guys in the front row, faces contorted, arms flapping for balance, are leaning forward at an odd angle, as if they were battling a gale force wind. Smack in the middle of the front row, like always, is Big Bob Big is right. Old Bob must go, no joke, four hundred pounds. That boy would be hard to get around if he was simply standing there. But he’s not. He’s chugging right along. Chugging along at a pace that ensures no one will pass him before the whole crowd reaches the finish line a hundred yards or so up the way.

Why this weird behavior? Simple….. to be first in line at the mess hall. Not a race I’m interested in participating in, the race to chow. You can take my word for it, the food’s not worth racing for. Barely worth walking for, come to that. Anyone interested in gourmet dining is in the wrong place. This is a Federal Prison Camp and the food they habitually serve up often sets me to wishing I’d stuck more to the straight and narrow in my life.

Surprisingly, some do like the food. Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising. It takes all kinds to make the world and there are definitely all kinds here. No gynecologists to my knowledge, or Long John Silver Imitators either. (The Feds must have a special place for those guys.) But there are perpetrators of every kind of non-violent crime you can think of and a few crimes you’d never in all your life think of.

There are cops ( a few) and robbers (the bank kind, mostly ones that confronted the teller armed with nothing more than a note.) Plus a large contingent of marijuana growers….. some of whom are in the midst of truly horrific sentences. There’s even one clown here for dropping a needle into a freshly opened can of soda then hollering that the thing was in there when he opened it and demanding compensation. Lucky for him they don’t give out extra time for pure stupidity, he might never get out. Add in a creep who’s doing time for stealing pet dogs and selling the unfortunate beasts for medical experimentation. Surely a crime that calls out for a very long sentence. A crime, in fact, that has me rethinking my position on the death penalty.

We’ve all kinds of white-collar crooks. Many in that crowd spend their time complaining that it was all a big mistake. Yes, they accidentally got their money mixed up with someone else’s. That, or the law framed them up out of pure malice. There’s a priest here, which some might not find surprising. Not to mention doctors, lawyers – now there’s a good idea – and an Indian Chief or two.

Except for one or two I have little in common with my fellow prisoners; I’m a different kind of felon. My beef had to do with gambling. About all any of these guys know about gambling is that Las Vegas is the place for it. The Gambling Capital Of The World, as everyone knows. A great place to take the wife or girlfriend for a few days of fun. And as many of them learned through bitter experience an especially great place to blow the bankroll going up against the craps or blackjack or baccarat or sports or even poker. Or, if they were pure suckers, roulette or the slots. That sort of thing wasn’t for me. I lived much of my adult life in Las Vegas making my living from the casinos.As a dealer at first, then as a hustler or scuffler as those of us who played and beat the games were sometimes called. Working or playing, I made the money any way I could. Stealing or on the square, it was all the same to me.

It was much the same for the people I came to run with. If any of them ever held a job it was in the gambling business, and usually with an eye out to stealing something. When they gambled they had the best of it….. or imagined they did. And it was a rare one among them who wouldn’t take more the best of it than the law allowed. Indeed, it would be fair to say that the vast majority of them had the attitude that the joints were fair game, there to be robbed. Or even that, as a friend of mine once offered up in that respect….. "They ought to be robbed."

Exactly. I couldn’t have put it better myself. If there was a legal way to get the money fine, but if there was an illegal way, that figured to be an even better proposition. So over the years, as my skill and knowledge grew, I did more and more things, while expanding my activities beyond Las Vegas to any casino that would hold still long enough, and even into activities that are sometimes found on the edges of the gambling world. While beating casinos isn’t a bad way to make a living – there’s money in it and the hours are good – it can be dangerous. I should know. Presently I’m doing 41 months for cheating a casino at blackjack. To the tune of more than a $1 million the judge in the case ruled. Unfortunately, I didn’t get nailed where you might expect – in Las Vegas or some other part of Nevada or even Atlantic City – but on an Indian reservation many hundreds of miles from Nevada. I say unfortunately because cheating at gambling on an Indian reservation turns out to be a Federal offense. Thus what seems to me a rather stiff sentence.

There is one thing. I find I have a lot of free time on my hands just now. Time enough to reflect on the long and convoluted journey that led me here. If you want, I’ll tell you about it. Tell you how it began in Old Las Vegas, back before the corporations took over, before the Gaming Commission began shining a light into every corner of the business, before modern technology made the thief’s life a difficult one. Back when the living was good. When the days were hot, the nights were warm, money was easy to come by. and stealing from the casinos was held to be an honorable profession.

June, 1964. Freshly discharged from the Army, I returned to my parent’s home in the Pacific Northwest. Hadn’t a clue what I was going to do next. No job I could think of interested me. I couldn’t see much point in going back to school. I already had two failed attempts at college behind me. The last quarter of the second school I hadn’t bothered to attend classes. In fact I hadn’t bothered to register for classes at all; just paid the dorm fees and used my room for a daily poker game hangout. The campus authorities didn’t much like the idea when they found out about it.

Then an old friend of mine, Ron, suggested we move to Santa Barbara, California and go to work for his brother-in-law who owned a pool cleaning business there. Ron was a first class lay-about, a man utterly without ambition. I figured if he was willing to give the pool cleaning business a try I might as well try it myself. The winters in Santa Barbara were sure to be milder, and if nothing else it figured to be a good place to meet girls.

So I loaded my clothes and a few other possessions into my three-speed Renault Dauphine – that’s how long ago it was, a Renault Dauphine. -- think there are any of those babies still in working order? – stuck what little money I had into my wallet and headed south with Ron in a two car convoy. Two long driving days later we found ourselves amidst the palm trees, beaches, and frantic freeways of Southern California. Land of dreams. Ron moved in with his sister and brother-in-law. I found myself a tiny studio apartment. The next thing I did was trade the Renault for a 1958 MGA roadster, the kind of car I had longed for since I first laid eyes on one.

Ron and I began learning the pool cleaning business. The first thing I learned was that I didn’t much like it. Out there in the hot sun straining to keep the water sparkling and free of algae while the pool’s owners hovered over you with a disapproving air; like you were the hired help or something. Besides, I didn’t much like having to lug around the tools of the trade—all those poles and scrapers and various containers of liquids and what-all -- in my snazzy MG; a dead giveaway to my lowly station in life. I was soon thoroughly sick of the job.

So one September morning, almost without thinking about it, I emptied the car of pool cleaning gear and without a word to anyone headed out across the Mojave Desert toward Las Vegas. I didn’t know a living soul there. As I was gassing up I counted my bankroll. I had exactly two hundred dollars.

I’ve been attracted to gambling all my life. Even in my high school days I had this vague idea of wanting to be a professional gambler; someone who gambled for a living in the casinos. Insane idea. I knew nothing whatever about casinos and how they operated. Nonetheless I harbored a secret fantasy that there must be some way to beat them. A craps system seemed most likely. Oh yeah, I could see myself….. every night dining on fillet mignon and imported beer, laid back without a care in the world, courtesy of my casino winnings. Yes, a professional gambler; that would be the life for me.

What I’d settled for up to then were two days in Reno during my college days and a single afternoon in Las Vegas while in the Army. None of this was on my mind the morning I left Santa Barbara. I had no plans. I just wanted to get to Las Vegas and have a look around. Much like Micawber, I figured something would turn up.

You would not have recognized the place. There was no beltway around the city, much less a freeway passing through it. Indeed, the highway coming from Los Angeles simply morphed into the Strip, whose street signs actually read Las Vegas Boulevard. The majority of the population, maybe sixty-five thousand, lived in the few square miles bounded roughly by Tropicana to the South, Bonanza Road in the North, Nellis Boulevard to the East, and Jones to the West.

Just North of Bonanza, then as now, lay the seedy little burg of North Las Vegas, avoided, then as now, by all who could do so. To the Southeast was the city of Henderson, perhaps several steps up from North Las Vegas and many years away from becoming the up-scale destination it is today.

McCarran airport, named for a late, corrupt, Nevada Senator was laid out a mile or so South of Trop. Beyond that there was little but desert.

Gambling was legalized in Nevada in 1931 and there were still a few around who could remember that day. There were still others who came in 1933 to work on the construction of the massive

Hoover dam, and stayed on. Actually, Hoover dam began life as Boulder dam. In 1947, on orders from President Truman, the name was changed to Hoover in honor of the former president, Herbert Hoover. Some of the old timers, uncomfortable with change, still referred to it as Boulder dam. (When the cost of changing all the signs and documents to reflect the new name became public a howl of protest arose regarding that cost. Some unknown wag came up with a simple solution….. Herbert Hoover had merely to change his name to Herbert Boulder and the cost to the public would be avoided.)

There was still a decidedly Western cast to the features of the town. The locals, with most of the casinos joining in, annually celebrated Heldorado Days with a parade featuring horses and cowboys and cowboy look-alikes. Most everyone dressed up in Western garb and many men, even casino employees, engaged in a beard growing contest. There were pretend jails where those deemed to be insufficiently embracing the theme could be locked up for a short time and be made fun of. (Nowadays there are no pretend jails and I suspect those locked up in the real ones find little humor in them.)

The sickly glow from the last above ground atomic explosion at the Nevada Test Site 90 or so miles up the road had barely faded from the sky. It was only four years earlier that the famous El Rancho Vegas had burned to the ground, and not that long ago the Gaming Commission actually closed the Silver Slipper casino for cheating. The town was even then trying to throw off the straight-jacket of segregation. Blacks had always been confined to an area between Bonanza and Carey to the East of Rancho Drive known to one and all as The West Side.

There were other rules that were different as well. There were no neighborhood casinos. The two places the laws allowed casinos to be built were downtown on Fremont Street from about seventh street west to Main, and on Las Vegas Blvd. south of Sahara Ave. Let’s see if I can remember….. downtown you could have found the El Cortez, Fremont, Horseshoe, Golden Nugget, Mint, Pioneer Club, Golden Gate, and the Las Vegas Club, along with a handful of others whose names escape me and who have long since been swallowed up by their neighbors or been re-named.

Out on the Strip, running south, lay the Sahara, Thunderbird, Riviera, Stardust, Silver Slipper, Sands, Desert Inn, Castaways, Dunes, Tropicana, and furthest out of all, the Hacienda. Most, if not all, were run by mobsters from various big east coast and mid-west cities. Nearly all are gone now, those casinos and the wise-guys who ran them.

If you wouldn’t have recognized the town you sure as hell wouldn’t recognize the casinos. To begin with, they were much smaller. Out on the Strip you could literally park your car in front of most of them. No spot there, and you wanted to avoid tipping the valet, you could park around in back. But be prepared to climb into an oven when it came time to leave; there was no such thing as covered parking.

The idea was to get you in the joint to do some gambling. In that regard the rooms were cheap. As was the food; eating at the snack bar or buffet didn’t require a bank loan. There were fewer kinds of games for the players to blow their money on. For the pure rubes they had the Big Six wheel of course. (There were even a couple of chuck-a-luck games, but you don’t want to know.) Slot machines were ubiquitous. There were ones that took nickels, others that took dimes, still others took quarters, a few took fifty cent pieces, and the real money makers swallowed silver dollars.All operated mechanically – coin in, coin out – offered none of the monster jackpots found today, and were attended by low-paid change girls. Those hard working ladies wore heavy belts of coins around the waist, and wandered thru the slots ready in a moment to supply you with more coins to jam in those machines.And in case you couldn’t find a change girl you could head to a nearby change booth, a six or eight foot tall kiosk attended by a change person and doubling as a handy place for the help to keep an eye out for nefarious behavior.

There was roulette, of course….. the double zero kind that could run a man out of money near as fast as the Big Six wheel. Craps and Blackjack (also called twenty-one, the terms are interchangeable.) were the main pit games and without exception their lay-outs were covered in green felt. (These days you can find a gambling lay-out in most any color you can think of.)

A few of the joints had poker games, but none offered horse race or sports betting. By law race and sports books had to be stand-alone businesses. As for baccarat, the first one I remember was in Caesar’s Palace around 1967. A game I distinctly recall because they dealt it not with chips but with cash money….. featuring great piles of hundred dollar bills. (That went on for a few years until some guy with balls the size of cantaloupes snatched up all the hundreds he could get his hands around and bolted for the back door. Don’t remember if they caught him, but I hope not.)

Nearly always the most valuable chips (or checks as they are sometimes called, to those in the business the terms are interchangeable) on a craps or blackjack game were worth a $100 There were $25 and $5 ones as well, but for dollars they were still using actual silver dollars. (Within a year of my getting to town those babies had been replaced by metal slugs or cheaply made chips like they used in the poker. Wish I’d saved me a suitcase or two of those silver dollars.) The chips themselves were good from casino to casino, not to mention being treated like cash in stores around downtown.

The table limits were much smaller too. A $500 bet was considered a damn big one, while on the down side it was not uncommon to see one or two dollar minimum games. (To get an idea of the value of money then, think about this….. in 1964 the average major league baseball salary was just under $15,ooo. As of 2010 it stood at $3,340,000.)

The vast majority of dealers, mostly men, were outfitted in black pants, white shirts casino issued ties – mostly bow – and green aprons meant to discourage dealers from sticking cash or chips in their pants pockets. Their shirt pocket was a different proposition. Dealers put their tips (also called tokes) right in there, then each break emptied them in to a container located somewhere in the pit. Each shift, designated dealers counted the take and divided it amongst those who had worked that shift.

They could accept cash bets too— all they had to do was announce money plays and let her rip. There was such a thing as a finger bet as well. A player could call out a bet with no chips or cash in sight, and if the floorman or pit boss liked the player’s looks the bet was accepted. Furthermore, if a man got lucky and made a big win he could cash out any amount, no questions asked. But if he ran out of cash and needed to call home for more he had to go to a pay phone, cell phones did not yet exist. But he need not worry, there were plenty of pay phones to be found in a casino and a battery of operators to answer incoming calls and at need page a gambler over the noise of the casino. Best of all, shuffle machines and surveillance cameras had not even been imagined by the casinos. If a man was inclined to stealing something they had to catch him at it in real time; no going back over things.

When I pulled into town that overpoweringly hot summer evening I had two things going for me; I was very good with numbers and I looked like a choirboy, the very soul of innocence. Just turned twenty-five, I looked a clean-cut eighteen. It would have been impossible to look at me and suspect I was up to no good.

At the time, of course, I wasn’t. I barely knew anything about square gambling let alone cheating. The sum total of my knowledge on that subject? A kid I played poker with in high school and afterwards had an uncle who was some kind of rounder. Uncle supplied my friend with new freshly marked decks of Bee brand playing cards and taught him how to deal a deuce – or as the uninitiated would say, seconds (the second card from the top of the deck.) My friend showed me what he’d learned. I was dazzled. By the marked cards and my friend’s skill. Experience informs me that the marked cards were amateurish; nothing that would have fooled anyone who knew his business. My friend’s move was a different story. Having seen a number of deuce moves over the years I rate him right up there skill-wise. As for his heart, easily as important as the skill end of the proposition, who knows? The kid went on to keep himself in pocket money in college, beating his fellow students, mostly ignorant farm boys, out of their allowances. Must have been like finding it in the street. He ultimately became a professional man, license and all. I always wondered how he would have made out as a twenty-one dealer in Las Vegas.

1. Off the back of the turnip truck.

By the time I’d checked into a motel and found my way downtown it was well into the evening. I parked the MGA on a nearby side street and wandered over to Fremont Street where the casinos lay. The first one I came to was the Fremont Hotel. I stepped inside. Directly in front of me, not a hundred feet from the door, was a cardroom. Apparently just what I had been looking for but hadn’t known it.

It’s been well over forty years but I can see it in my mind‘s eye as if it were yesterday. The cardroom sat on a main isle that ran from the cashier’s cage on my right over to the keno lounge on my left. In the rear of the room were three pan tables; in the middle were two more pan tables and a poker table. The front row, right there on the isle, had a $5 and $10 razz game on the right, and a nickel ante $2 limit six card stud game on the left. I knew nothing about those games, but right there in between those two, right in front of me, was a twenty-five cent ante $2 and $5 ace to five lowball game. Just my meat. I’d played something very much like it up in Idaho and knew all about it. Or so I imagined.

I sat my ass down in that game and the cards proceeded to run over me. That night and the next night and the next and the next. The first week it seemed like I won every hand I played. How sweet it was; beat holy hell out of cleaning swimming pools. The money seemed almost free.

I quickly found a place to live; a motel over on Las Vegas Boulevard a few blocks from what they called Casino Center. The place was new, clean, came equipped with a handy little refrigerator in the room and went for something like twenty-five bucks a week. Twenty five a week? Can that be true? What do you think it would go for today?

A nice thing I’d fallen into. I could come and go as I pleased. Sleep late, laze around, grab a bite to eat, and wander over to the Fremont cardroom. Those days there were three, maybe four cardrooms downtown, all dealing small limit games. What high limit games there were in town, and there were some big ones, were out on the Strip. The casinos out there seemed out of my league; it was some time before I ventured out that way.

Much like the town itself, you wouldn’t recognize casino cardrooms as they were then. Rather than big business, poker was almost an afterthought. The casino executives seemed indifferent. They knew cardrooms didn’t make all that much money, -- though they seldom lost any – so they paid little attention. The gambling commission seemed to pay them even less. Poker was not where the big tax revenues were to be had, or so it was supposed. The long process of time would prove that supposition wrong.

There was an unseen advantage to having a cardroom in a casino; it was a handy spot to employ men who were owed favors, or a place to stash an idiot brother-in-law or suchlike; men who could not be trusted around the customers….. or around the money, come to that. All the cash that passed thru the pit might tempt a man to do something he shouldn’t. Yes, poker was a nice little backwater where nothing could go wrong and no harm could be done.

The Fremont cardroom was a prime example of that phenomenon. The manager, Paul W., had once been a big time bookmaker who had been rousted out of the Midwest by a Federal investigation of some sort. About the only time he was around was to play in the $10 kondition pan game that ran night and day. So the room ran itself. Each shift boss did pretty much as he pleased. The day shift boss was Paul’s brother, Freddy, a man with but one arm. He was often referred to as One armed Freddy or, more accurately, as the one armed bandit. It was widely held that Freddy could steal more money with his one arm than most men could with two.

The guy in charge of the swing shift was an old man – old to my eyes at any rate -- called Jimmy D. Jimmy seemed to believe he was plagued by incompetent help and was laboring under impossible circumstances. If only he had better help he could run a smoother shift, but he was too nice a guy to fire people whose behavior was anything much short of murder. Which didn’t matter much; Jimmy had some kind of old-time connection to Paul W. so his job was safe regardless.

Mike The Singer, the former head of a second rate East coast band was graveyard boss. The rumor was he had connections to the East coast Outfit. He sure acted like he did. He was a pure gold plated tommer. You’ll be hearing more about him later.

The cardroom employed game starters, otherwise known as shills or, to old-timers, mules. A shill might be a break-in dealer, a retiree looking to earn a little pocket money, or a man down on his luck and often burdened by an over fondness for alcohol. (Who had heard of drug problems?) Most shills couldn’t play a lick.And since they played with house money the poker boss was eager to get them up out of the game and fill the seat with a live one.

The razz game was a special case, run as a concession by another bookmaker driven West by the Feds. Louie S., and his partner Raggedy Phil played their own money or staked others to start the game. They had their own dealers too, one on days and one on swing, who at all times dealt the game except for their breaks. It was a tough go for Louie and Phil; the rake was only 5% of the pot up to a $2 max. That might run, tops, $40 an hour and they had to split it with the casino. Juicy for the two dealers though. Tokes must have run $40 or $50 a shift. This when you could rent a well- appointed apartment for $200, $250 a month.

As for the game itself, the players were certainly an eclectic bunch. Hustlers, suckers, squares and thrill seekers of every stripe. (Remember, almost no one had heard of hold-em.) There were dealers….. poker, twenty-one, craps; cocktail waitresses, hookers, pit bosses, bankers, and businessmen, farmers, cops and a robber or two. People from all walks of Las Vegas life. (For all I know there may have been a space alien: we weren’t all that far from the now legendary Area 51.) Indeed, razz was a wildly popular game back then.

The game is simply seven card stud except the low hand wins, the best being A-2-3-4-5 and straights or flushes don’t count against you. In this game everyone anted a half a buck and the dealer dealt everyone two hole cards followed by an up card. To get the pot started the player with the highest up card (by bridge suite, the King of spades being the highest possible card) had to open it up for, I think it was, $2. Then the low cards would get to ramming and jamming, punishing the goose with the high card and testing if he wanted to gamble.The trouble with the game was you had to have five cards to make a hand. Starting with A-2-3-4 followed by something like K, 4, A was not uncommon. Forever suffering that sort of thing seemed to have unhinged some of the long-time players. But if you got lucky at razz and moved up to higher limit games you could get hold of something.

Oh, I nearly forgot. An occasional crossroader might drop in. A few cheaters, well known and not so well known, played in the game from time to time.The first time I ever saw a man holding out a card was in that game. One day I was idly sweating the game from the rail when one of the players asked for a change of decks, a common enough request. When the dealer complied a player sitting with his back to me knocked over his drink – on purpose to my eyes – and in the ensuing confusion stood up and slipped his hand in his pocket. There was a card in that hand. (In light of deeper knowledge, a strange move. He could just as well have gone to his pocket without troubling to spill his drink. The guy was a famous cheater too.)

Another time a guy named Crazy Al was out with a card. He got in a jam pot with a tourist and wound up showing the poor goose the nuts. As Al stacked his chips he looked over at Loball Art, a regular in the game who happened to be standing on the rail and who knew very well what Al was up to. How was that Art? he grinned. Pretty good in Pioche, but not too good in the big city. was Art’s reply. The players played on.

What a temptation that game must have been to the thieves of the world. Razz, and loball draw as well, must surely have been invented by thieves. You couldn’t ask for a better game to cheat. Well, maybe blackjack, but that’s another story.

The $2 and $5 loball attracted a different crowd; mostly local pleasure players. The game had not yet lost its popularity to hold-em so it ran much of the time and earned a little for the house. The rake was the same as the razz 5% of the pot up to $2, but the hourly take wouldn’t have been near the same. Couldn’t be. Most of the pots only had between fifteen and thirty dollars in them.

The cardroom’s chief money maker was the six card stud game. There was no thought of taking a mere 5% of the pot in that game. It was more like 10% and sometimes a lot more….. with no limit to the top side of it.Today that wouldn’t make anybody blink given that the standard rake is often 10% of the pot up to $4 or $5 and sometimes $6. That sort of thing works because poker – especially hold-em – has become wildly popular and the minute one player gets broke there are two or three more clamoring for the seat. Back then, it wasn’t so. A smart floorman would instruct his dealers to use some judgment when raking the game. If they went too strong in the pots with no players waiting to play there was the danger too many players would get broke too quickly and the game would break up. No game, no rake, no tokes for the dealers. (Speaking of tokes, nowadays it seems the players feel they must throw the dealer a dollar or more every pot, regardless of size. Oh well.) Most dealers took that to mean they could rake the pot as they saw fit. (The gaming commission had set no standards.) A player who was a reasonably good toker – dealers held varying opinions on what reasonable was – could expect to get a break on the rake-off. Tourists, unless they were especially george, and all stiffs, were on their own.

Every cardroom employed what was called a brushman. That man’s job was to keep the games full of players, especially in the small limit stud game. A good brushman hit on every human who passed by. An especially aggressive one would sometimes actually leave the poker pit and go searching the casino for live ones. Besides that chore he had to move the shills in and out of games, empty ashtrays, clear away empty glasses, get change for the dealers as needed, and anything else that came up. Hard and busy work for not much money.

At the Fremont there were the pan games as well. For the dealers it was a separate proposition; poker dealers dealt poker, pan dealers dealt pan. In a pinch a poker dealer might help out in the pan – a monkey could learn to deal the game in no time at all. The average pan dealer couldn’t play poker let alone deal it. It was much the same for the players. They each played their own game with little overlap.

As the days drifted by I began to learn my way around. I’d been wildly lucky at the loball to begin with. When the cards quit running over me I found it a lot harder to win. It began to dawn on me that it was next to impossible to make a living out of the game; the limit was too small and there was not enough action in the average pot. So I tried the six card stud. In that game there were more rounds of betting and more action in the pots. Although the rake was stronger the dealers knew me by now and gave me a break. Even with that it was tough to make any kind of a living from the game. About all that saved me was the quality of my opponents. They mostly played very poorly, were drunk, or both. There were a few others like me hanging around the room trying to somehow survive by playing. We had one thing in common….. we had a lot to overcome and little chance for long-term survival.

Two of the regulars in our game were hard-core drinkers making their last stop on the road to oblivion. They kept pretty much to themselves. The rest of us – we could hardly be called hustlers, the real hustlers were out on the Strip where the money was – kind of hung out together in the joint. Why not, we were on the same side weren’t we?

One was a man called Louie R. I’d never known his like. To my young and ignorant mind he seemed dazzlingly clever, a guy who only because of bad luck was temporarily at the bottom of the ladder. Italian, raised in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, Louie had done time in Leavenworth for sticking up an Army payroll during World War II. That news didn’t bother me in the least. Only made him seem the more exotic. His wife, too, had a colorful past. Among other things she had experience as a madam. Until recently she had supplied Major Riddle, a well known casino owner with his heart’s desire….. young black girls. There had been some sort of misunderstanding and the party came to an end. Now Louie and his wife were looking around for something else and in the meantime he was trying to grind out a living playing poker. His prospects were not good. Aside from being a mediocre player he was a steamer. Get too much loser or suffer a couple of bad beats he’d go on tilt. Start ramming and jamming the pots. Might even go over to the craps. A fatal flaw in the best of players.

Louie became my mentor, so to speak. It was Louie who taught me how to shuffle checks. (chips, here, too, the words are interchangeable.) I was as proud of that skill as if they’d made me casino manager of the Fremont. An entirely useless skill, shuffling checks, but it made me feel smart. I might not have been a real hustler but to the uneducated eye I might look like one. I was often invited over to Louie’s apartment where his wife would fix me lunch or dinner while he regaled me with stories of friends of his who cheated the slots or worked as agents for crooked dealers or took dealing jobs themselves with the sole intention of stealing everything they could lay their hands on. My first inkling that things weren’t always on the up and up in Las Vegas. I don’t recall being surprised.

Louie liked to style himself as a thief, or teef as he pronounced it. He wasn’t; didn’t have the know-how. The best he could come up with was for us to play top hand in the six card stud game. When he had a pair to start with he’d sign me, and I’d do the same for him. Let me assure you we were a long way from being the first guys to think of that lame move. Depend on it, even as you read this, in cardrooms everywhere players are signing their hands to their confederates. Anyway, it seemed like a pretty good idea at the time so we worked out a simple set of signs. Probably saved ourselves a few dollars over time.

Before long we were doing the same kind of thing with most of the other regulars. I was playing in the game with Lennie The Beak when he went to kicking me under the table to get out of the pot. One Armed Freddie nailed the move, if you can call that a move. A little later he called me aside: Listen kid, if you want to steal something….. go get a pistol.

As the months passed I stumbled along always on the edge of going broke. All that saved me was that I qualified for unemployment insurance from my Army days. Without that little dab of money I’d have been doomed. And I had no fall-back position if I did go broke. I wasn’t smart enough to take an occasional run through the slot areas looking for sleepers, as unclaimed coins laying in the coin receptacles were called. (I once met a guy who claimed he averaged ten dollars a day using that trick. Ten dollars……? the bastard must have had shark blood in him. To find that kind of money a man would have had to be on his feet twenty-four hours a day.)Guess I should have tried it. Ten dollars a day would have seemed like a ton of money.

It didn’t even enter my head to look for a job. What kind of job would I have looked for? The only thing that even vaguely interested me was gambling related. I could forget that. I had no training in that business and sure as hell couldn’t afford dealer’s school; that cost money I didn’t have.

Would-be hustlers came and went, my friend Louie among them. He and his wife moved to the North shore of Lake Tahoe where he took a job in the restaurant at the Nevada Lodge. I was nearly washed away myself. I got so short of dough I had to sell my beloved MGA for a few hundred dollars cash. Replaced it for something like fifty bucks with an absolute wreck of a 54’ Chevy. Didn’t have that sucker long either. Horse, a poker dealer at the Fremont I had become friendly with, convinced me we ought to take a ski trip to Lake Tahoe. I’d never been on a pair of skis in my life. So what? I still had some of my MG money; a ski trip sounded like fun. So, early one morning we jumped in Horse’s car and hauled ass for Tahoe at 90 miles an hour. Squaw Valley. Famous for the 60’ Winter Olympics. First day, right out of the box, without troubling to take so much as a single lesson, I went sideways on the beginners slope. A frozen binding on my ski boot failed to release and I broke an ankle. Towed ignominiously back to the start line on a child’s small sled, my skiing career was over before it got fairly started. Didn’t bother seeing a doctor; I knew the ankle was broken. So Horse and I jumped back in his car and hauled ass for Las Vegas at 90 miles an hour. He dropped me off at the local hospital for repairs. Had to tell them to put it on my tab. When I left the hospital several days later the Chevy had disappeared. I didn’t bother looking for it; it wasn’t worth the trouble. Instead I hobbled around on a cast for the next six weeks. A far longer time than I had that Chevy.

I was now in serious trouble. Stranded in the desert without transportation, no marketable skills, and nowhere to turn. Despite that, I sure wasn’t going back home having to admit defeat. Downtown Las Vegas had become my world and I intended to stick it out.

One day about this time Tall Paul wandered into the Fremont cardroom and began playing regularly in the six card game. Weird guy. Thirtyish, tall, thin, bad complexion, bad haircut, wore cheap suits and possessed a slightly oily personality. There was an air of mystery about him as well. He was very intelligent, had a sardonic sense of humor, and was obviously well educated on top of being fluent in both French and German. Why was a man like that hanging around the Fremont cardroom? He didn’t say. In all the time I knew him he never once spoke of his past. Not so much as a hint of where he was from or where he was headed. I didn’t ask.

Paul had himself an apartment just off the Strip, an apartment that looked beyond the means of a $2 limit stud poker hustler. Strange. I was visiting him on day when he showed me a spy move. Beckoned me into his bedroom and over to the dresser. He then plucked a single strand of hair from his head, wet it on both ends with saliva, and pressed it firmly to one of the drawers in such a way that the drawer could not be opened without disturbing the strand of hair. Volunteered that he always did that so he would know if the maid had been snooping. Your guess is as good as mine why he showed me such a thing. Was he pretending to be James Bond? Was he an undercover agent himself? Had he been one? Who knows? I always suspected he was a cashiered CIA agent or some-such thing. We became not friends, but friendly.

One day Paul did let me in on one of his secrets. He said when he first got to town he was about broke. What had saved him, he went on, were the slot machines. He knew a trick for beating them, or at least some of them. Was I interested in learning the trick? The deal was, the thing was not strictly on the up and up, and I’d have to give him a piece of everything I won. Was I still interested? I thought it over for a nanosecond and told him I was interested. Very interested.

The world of slot machines was in transition. The first electronic machines had been invented and were in the process of supplanting the old mechanical standbys the casinos had been using to grind the suckers out of their dough since the beginning of time. Crying shame. Not the grinding of the suckers, but the advent of the electronic machines. For it was the old-timey slots Paul knew how to beat. Or rather, one particular brand of them. The machines in question were built by the Jennings Company and were easily identified by the brass Indian head that adorned the front of each one. If you knew the gaff you could free-play some of those babies. Evidently the machines had a design flaw; some part inside got bent or broken. Or maybe a slot mechanic fixed one up for a friend. For whatever reason there were some out there and if you found one it was free money.

There’s little chance of it but if you ever come across an old Jennings here’s what you do….. and don’t forget, I’m in. Drop a coin in the coin slot and pull the handle. (For you newcomers out there, you may be surprised to learn that slot machines had handles. They did; that’s how you caused the reels to turn.) The reels will spin and come to a stop – one, two, three. You’ll win or, more likely, lose. Now comes the best part. After you’ve pulled the handle do not, as most players do, release it, but rather keep a grip on it while you let it return to its’ original position. Three or four inches from the stop position put the brakes on. Now slowly, sloowly, ease the handle on back. If you’re lucky, before it reaches full stop, you will hear a soft clicking sound and feel the slightest tremor in the handle. Stop. Now, without bothering to put another coin in the machine pull the handle again. The reels will again spin and stop – one, two, three, just like before. As long as you don’t let the handle go past the click on the return stroke you can wail away on that mother to your heart’s content. Or until you’re out of breath. It’s hard as hell getting money out of one of those machines. But don’t give up. Every now and then you’ll catch a cherry or three bells or some-such, and a few coins will come tinkling out. Those are yours. And if you should accidentally go past the click simply pop another coin in and go back to work.

Some advice:Although you don’t need to put a coin in every pull, pretend you are. Otherwise someone might get suspicious. A jealous customer perhaps, and it could go something like this: A guy whispers to his wife….. Lookie there Mildred. That boy’s not puttin’no coins in that there machine. Let’s go tell on him.

Was free-playing one of those machines legal? Who knows? You could argue it both ways, I suppose. Did I care? Not in the least; I was ready to go. Paul took me to one of his machines and demonstrated the move. I loved it. The only thing to do then was to try every machine in town.

In the beginning I couldn’t afford to even try the quarter machines; searching for a lucky one a man could go through a lot of coins. Even after I got hold of a little money and could afford to go beyond quarter machines I did not. The half dollar and dollar machines were invariably situated close to the slot booths and under the watchful eye of the help.

Hardly surprising. In those days there were so many gaffs for cheating the slots it would make you dizzy. You could drill a tiny hole in the side of the bugger, slide in a wire, and turn the reels to your liking. String em’….. attach a thin line (thread, fishing leader, or the like) to a coin, drop it down the slot, and pull the handle. Then pull the coin back out and repeat the process. Play till you win. Slide a specially made tool up the coin drop; out comes the coins. There were magnets you could press to the side of the machine and turn the reels that way. All that too much trouble? Get hold of a key and unlock the sucker. Or if you can’t lay your hands on a key open her up with a pry bar. That’ll definitely get you the money, but likely get you some heat as well. The scams were endless and many of them far more subtle and sophisticated than I’ve described here. The casinos knew quite well that people were trying to rob their slots and so were constantly on the lookout for scamsters. All with the naked eye. Many years were to pass before cameras came into use.

When free playing you couldn’t just go in there and pump the well dry. Some caution was required. Hanging on to the handle was a dead giveaway to anyone who knew the gaff, and could be seen from a goodly distance. You always hoped your machine was one in a long row of machines. Then you could expect square players playing on your left and right to give you cover. It was very important to stay on guard; not get so engrossed in your work that you lost track of the slot employees. If one of them got to looking your way and showing interest in your play you had to put them to sleep. Let go of the handle now and then; drop a coin in the machine next door. Whatever it took.

There was another dead giveaway you could not get away from. Like all the mechanical slots of the day the Jennings had a small, elongated window on the front located just to the right of the coin slot. Behind the window could be seen, lined up each in its own little niche, the last five coins played. Every time a fresh coin was put in the machine and the handle pulled the lineup of coins marched in lockstep one spot to the right, with the latest coin assuming the left-hand spot and the right-hand most coin dropping away, out of sight. Plunging down into the dark musty interior of the machine, never to be seen again by human eye. No….. wait; it only seemed that way. From time to time someone actually got winner to the slots, though they seldom stayed that way.

Anyway, when you were free-playing a machine the coins in the window did not move. Instead of them plunging into eternity they remained firmly in place. Anyone passing by and glancing over could plainly see that. So it was important not to let some nosy employee sneak up behind you. But it was also important not to be always looking around you like you were up to something. That sort of behavior was subject to waking them up. The thing to do was be cool and alert at the same time. It didn’t hurt any that the casinos were full of mirrors. A man trying to beat the slots could use those mirrors to his own advantage. I seemed to have a natural talent for that sort of thing.

How much could be taken from a machine? Alas, not that much. There came a time if you could free play an electronic machine you could suck a bushel basket of coins out of the sucker. All you could carry and then some. Not in those days. The Jennings came equipped with a pay tube that held something like 90 or 100 coins. When the tube was full any additional coins put in it fell to the bottom of the machine where they collected in a bucket. If by some miracle you actually caught a winner your payoff came from the pay tube. That was the target….. the coins in that tube.

Think it was easy to hit a jackpot? Think again. Those old mechanical slots generally had twenty symbols on each of three reels. Unless the machine was rigged each symbol was equally likely to appear. Rigged? Oh my, you say, that couldn’t happen in Las Vegas. They wouldn’t rig their slot machines. No need to. Right. (Years later I was visiting a friend of mine who happened to be a shift boss in a Strip hotel. He pointed to a giant $1 slot machine looming out there in the middle of the casino. The owner told me that if anyone ever hits the jackpot on that thing to call him before I pay it off.Where were we? Oh yes….. if each reel held one jackpot symbol the chances of getting a jackpot were one in 8,000. (Twenty to the 3rd power.) Today’s computerized monstrosities have as many symbols as the manufacturer chooses, or plays as if they do. (That’s up to the individual casino, of course.) Which means there are no systems for the slots; a machine is not ready to pay off. If you play one of those mothers you have to take your chances like all the other suckers.

The Jennings machines also had a small glass fronted receptacle built into the front directly above the coin drop. This receptacle held baby jackpots -- $2.50 or $5.00 on nickel machines,$12.50 or $25.00 on the quarter ones. Hit one of those things the coins drop out, the bells go off, the lights flash, and a slot employee comes by to refill the receptacle. Hope to hit one of those while you’re trying to empty the tube. You’ll know when you have. Catch three bells and clink, a single coin falls out. Or clunk, none at all. Success. But your work is not done. Now you’ve got to put eighteen or twenty coins back in. Why…..? you wonder. So that some tourist doesn’t wander up after you’ve gone, drop a coin in, line up, say, three oranges, and get a dry clunk for his or her trouble. Players expect to get paid when they hit three oranges. They’ll put up a squawk if they don’t.

If I’d never made a penny from the slots it would have been worth the trouble. What an education I got. Go ahead, you try it……. Try to coax 90 coins out of one of those three reelers. If I was ever going to be tempted to play the slots I was cured beforehand. I wouldn’t put your money into one of those bastards. It was pull the handle clunk; pull the handle clank until I sometimes wished I could take a pry-bar to the damned things.

There were times when they seemed perversely human. It could be harder getting twenty coins back in than getting 90 coins out. You go putting twenty back in the first thing you know there comes three bells and out pop a bunch of unwanted coins. Followed a few pulls later by three oranges and still more coins. It was tempting to quickly drop in another coin, pull the handle again, and kill the payoff before it dropped. (Remember, those were mechanical devices; they worked in slow-motion compared to today’s monsters.)But killing a payoff would be dangerous business. What would a slot employee – or fellow gambler for that matter – think of someone seemingly trying to lose his money?

It generally took about a half hour to complete play on a machine. That wasn’t all playing time, of course. The customers wore holes in the carpets trudging back and forth to the change booths for more ammunition. I had to pretend to do the same: Put a long look on my face and go buy another roll of coins I didn’t need. So if I had three machines in a joint I figured to make fifteen, twenty bucks, including any jackpots I might catch, for an hour and a half’s work. About like a job.

Quarter machines were so rare they weren’t part of the calculation. I never had more than one in any joint. And for those of you with a criminal bent….. the reason I didn’t grab a quarter machine and cycle and recycle the coins through waiting for a $25 or $50 jackpot was simple. It might take two days of play for one to show up. So if one came up, fine. If