The Art of the Con (34 page)

Kepplinger made so much money that he eventually became complacent, taking too much from the same group of players until they became sure he was cheating; unable to see any evidence from across the table, they resorted to violence. In the middle of a big hand, Kepplinger was suddenly grabbed from behind and lifted out of his chair. When his coat was removed, the device was discovered. All seemed lost for the card shark until his attackers demanded that he make three more machines for them to use! The group teamed up and were soon the scourge of San Francisco's card rooms.

The Kepplinger concept became a powerful utility device that is still used today. Whereas the original device was sewn into a jacket, variations like the Martin holdout allow the machine to be strapped to the arm and worn under the wearer's shirt. Modern versions are operated by the foot, so there is no need to cut holes near the knees. This variation is known as a “toe-spread” (as opposed to a “knee-spread”), a name that once caused great pain to a close friend of mine.

After waiting years to find a working device, BF called me and asked if I could fly out and give him a lesson on how to operate it. Since I'm not a professional card shark, I had never used one under fire, but I could show him how to set it up and the sleight of hand required to position cards for the steal. Since it was intended for use in a magic trick, I agreed to help and jumped on the next plane to Madrid. When I arrived at his apartment, BF was limping. Since talking to me, he had been experimenting with his machine but complained that operating it hurt so badly, he was ready to give up and sell the damned thing. Confused, I asked him to demonstrate what he had been doing, and by the time he had finished setting up the machine, I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe.

My friend had figured out how to strap the apparatus to his arm and how to wear it under his clothes, but when it came to operating it with his foot, BF took off his sock to reveal a big toe that had turned completely black. He looped the wire around the same toe and then pushed his foot gently into a shoe. Grimacing, BF proceeded to demonstrate, but the amount of pressure required to operate the thief was so high that BF was literally strangling his toe to death! Had I not intervened it might have fallen off before he figured out that the wire was supposed to be placed over the outside of his shoe. In fact, many holdout men wear cowboy boots because the pointed toe is easier to use than a rounded one.

Gambling devices rarely come with instructions, so knowledge is often sold or traded between individuals. The prospective cheater then retires to practice for many hours a day until he or she can move without being detected. BF went on to use his machine in front of an audience, inviting them to stare at his hands as cards vanished and appeared before their eyes. If a magician can use a Kepplinger machine under those closely watched conditions, what chance would you have of spotting one in a game?

While the mechanics of this particular holdout have changed little since 1888, there are several ingenious variations on how and why it is used. One idea is to replace the thief with a mirror, angled to give the operator a table-level view of the cards being dealt, revealing enough information to gain a powerful advantage. A modern version of the same idea uses a tiny camera that is extended to see cards being dealt from a shoe. An even more sophisticated scam recorded the indices (the value and suit in the corner) of cards as the cheater rubbed a plastic cut-card along eight decks before inserting it for the dealer to cut. The rubbing action opened the deck just enough for the camera to see each card riffling off the plastic cut-card. This information was played back so the hustlers were essentially playing from a stacked deck. The “Secret Blue Book” also features shiners (mirrors) hidden in stacks of chips that allowed a crooked dealer to see every card he dealt. Modern variations contain tiny cameras and transmitters that can peek at cards being dealt by almost anyone at the table.

In 2010, security at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut became suspicious of two baccarat players who had been consistently winning and behaving in a way that suggested deception. When they removed the players from the casino floor, one was found to be wearing a modified version of the Kepplinger machine. He had been using the device while his partner covered any suspicious actions by waving a scorecard to distract the dealer. The casino's security team was experienced enough to suspect that something was wrong; this consistent form of misdirection created a pattern they could identify, but the machine itself was almost undetectable. This one-hundred-year-old contraption was used to steal almost one million dollars from a modern casino, and while these two jokers got caught, more sophisticated hustlers are almost certainly getting away with the same scam elsewhere.

The old gaming catalogs record a point in time where there seemed to be a way to cheat almost any game. Some of these methods were so practical that they are still being used today, but as technology has continued to develop, cheating devices have become much more sophisticated. Computer software, used to process information for advantage players, can now be run on a smartphone and hidden in plain sight, instead of being taped under the player's clothes with a network of wires. Crooked devices or gaffed apparatus alone don't get cheaters very far. They all require skill—especially physical dexterity—to use successfully.

Hop

Gambling sleight of hand is all about getting the money and can vary from crude concealments to feats of skill so fantastic they are almost impossible to believe until you've seen them with your own eyes. In the last four hundred years, countless cheating techniques have been invented to achieve almost any outcome with an ordinary pack of cards. I have personally dedicated almost forty years to mastering hundreds of moves, and there is a growing community of magicians and cheating aficionados who collect and learn these methods without ever intending to use them. For a grifter, one good sleight, perfectly executed, can be the foundation of a cheating career. Very few are adept at more than a handful of techniques.

One exception was Roderick Dee, aka Rod The Hop.

I met Rod in 1997 and we quickly became friends. Whenever I was in Las Vegas, we would spend long nights trading secrets in The Peppermill restaurant on Las Vegas Boulevard. As a child, Rod was a keen amateur magician with a gift for difficult sleight of hand. As a teenager, his interest drifted toward cheating and he was soon using his talents to steal from small money games. By the time we met, Rod was an expert mechanic but spent most of his time as a slot thief, using the latest technology to beat slot machines around Las Vegas.

With a deck of cards, Rod was unmatched. He preferred the smaller, plastic cards used in most card rooms at the time and could execute moves with frightening speed and accuracy. I had little to share in terms of cheating other than my personal methods and a couple of Gin Rummy moves I'd invented, but Rod had a voracious appetite for any form of deception. He loved good magic and we once spent several weeks improving conjuror's moves by combining his approach as a cheat with mine as a magician.

Over the years that I knew him, Rod was in and out of prison, thanks to his addiction to easy money. He was always on the cutting edge of cheating devices for slot machines and at one point was using a method to register a one-dollar bill as a hundred, which the casinos insisted was impossible. That device was the last in a long line of doohickeys that included bright LEDs at the end of a long piece of plastic and stiff wire bent into the perfect shape to reach internal mechanisms, with countless variations adapted to different models of slot machine. Eventually, he returned to the card table as a mechanic for hire and was flown around the United States to deal winning hands for his employers. Not all of these were shady back-room games. Many were held in expensive homes owned by the rich and famous and Hop often found himself busting-out (beating) famous actors or sports personalities.

For Rod, his relationship with magicians proved to be a lifeline—an opportunity to use his skills to entertain. On several occasions he performed demonstrations of card table artifice for private groups. His close friendship with Jason England, a magician and expert on crooked gambling, helped Rod to stay out of trouble until Rod passed away in December 2013. Without Jason, I think Rod would have died in prison, because his love for conjuring was a powerful, positive influence on his life. For Jason and me, cheating is a world that we both might easily have slipped into, but knowing Rod has given us a valuable insight into what happens when you steal for a living. I might not believe in karma, but in my experience, cheating rarely has a positive effect on one's life. Rod made hundreds of thousands of dollars in his career, but it was soon gone and his life was filled with troubles. For me, Rod was a dear friend, a confidant, and a constant reminder of the reality of being a cheat.

Rod differed from his contemporaries because he was genuinely fascinated by the art of sleight of hand. While many cheaters only care about a move that will make them money, Rod collected sleights he thought were clever and could perform most of them effortlessly. Hop also liked to adapt old methods or invent new ones for the games he was playing, and over time, he taught me that no gaming procedure was completely safe or impossible to simulate.

Perhaps Rod's most amazing skill was his ability to operate a Kepplinger-style holdout. A few months before his death, a handful of Rod's friends gathered at Jason's house to watch him demonstrate and expose his technique. With the machine Rod was able to move cards in and out of his sleeve without the slightest flash or tell, but this was not the device that Rod would go on to use in high-stakes poker games. Before being diagnosed with terminal cancer, Rod was hired to deal private games where even though he never needed to make a secret move, his partners could play every hand as if it came from a stacked deck.

As technology advances, cheats are constantly looking for new ways to win. Marked cards have evolved from simple adjustments to standard back designs and special inks that can only be seen with a trained eye to systems that use special glasses or contact lenses to see markings that are invisible without them. The introduction of tiny hidden cameras has allowed grifters to push deeper into the infrared spectrum until their marks can be completely invisible without the right equipment. The simplest application of this is a hidden camera that transmits an IR image to one of the hustlers. When combined with a computer program, this method of marking cards can be devastating.

Rod was hired to perform an honest shuffle and to position the cards, completely squared, in front of a tiny camera that would read the edge of the deck, which was secretly marked with IR ink. To the camera, the ink on the edge of the deck formed a barcode that revealed the exact location of every card in the deck, which the computer would then use to predict who would win that hand and what cards each player would receive. This information was simultaneously sent to one of the players who would use it to good advantage.
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The system Rod used can now be bought online for a few thousand dollars, available to anyone who cares to take the risk. All the dealer needs to do is square the deck and place it in the exact position required to get a read, but there are other issues with this system that require skill to overcome. First, the cheaters need to be able to play well enough to use the information without making it obvious they have advanced knowledge. Knowing that a seven-two off-suit will prove to be the best hand is of little use if the other suckers start to wonder why anyone would play those cards. Second, the device can be unstable and often breaks down, which is why Rod was hired to deal; whenever the machine malfunctioned, Rod would start cheating the old-fashioned way. Lastly, Rod was able to assist the device and deliver better quality hands to his partners using false deals that were dictated by the computer.

Even with this kind of system, it takes patience to get the marks' money and many hustlers usually resort to switching decks to save time. A hustler once told me that he was brought in to fill a seat at a private game where the host was the only mark and everyone else at the table was there to cheat him. When the sucker went to the bathroom, one of the cheaters reached over and stole hundreds of dollars from the victim's pile of chips.

“What are you doing?” my friend asked.

“Saving time!” the hustler replied.

Just because something seems highly unlikely, even impossible, it doesn't mean it can't be done by someone with the time to practice or build a working solution. When it comes to cheating games of chance, some people will go to fantastic lengths to steal. Some methods require nothing more than a willingness to take the shot, regardless of risk or danger; other techniques take years of practice to perfect seemingly fantastic feats of skill that no one would suspect, let alone detect.

It would be impossible to describe more than a tiny sample from the spectrum of cheating methods, but I hope to have illustrated enough of their ingenuity, perspicacity, and tenacity to prove that no game is safe when it can be played for money.