Gambling casinos obviously are a profitably business in the long run because the house edge works in their favor. Where gambling is legal, the government regulates and oversees casino operations. Gambling boards will see to it that casinos stick to the rules of the games and that they don’t outright steal money from their patrons.
What was the situation like when (some) casinos in the United States and Cuba where under the control of organized crime? Could a gambler who walked into such a casino expect to be treated fairly? Let’s say a customer was so drunk that he didn’t understand what was going on around him. Would a mob-run casino take advantage of this patron by not paying out a big win or by cheating when the casinos employees handle his cash/chips?
Or was the gambling experience (from the customer’s view point) the same as in a legit casino?
As far as i know, when the Mob owned the Las Vegas casinos, they liked to skim money “off the top”. the payout on the games was probably the same (as it would be in a state supervised house), but the Mob would take 5-15% off the top-and pay no taxes on it. I read a book by a long-dead Boston mobster (Vincent Theresa), who organized gambling trips to London, Haiti, etc. , for wealth gamblers. he reported that wealthy gamblers were regularly cheated in card games, and encouraged to drink quite a bit.
Perhaps the slot machines “house-take” would be set a little higher. I think the main difference would be with cheaters, today one would be asked to leave, whereas before one would get beat up with baseball bats and buried in a shallow grave somewhere out in the desert.
Casinos are heavily regulated and already favor the house, so no need for them to cheat at the games. For everything else they probably lie in the middle of the spectrum for entertainment/hospitality management. The mob needs legitimate businesses to launder their money, not to mention they sometimes find them more profitable than their outside the lines businesses.
Were the casinos ever used as a way to pay out to individuals? If Joe did a job for the bosses and needed to get paid $50k legitimately, then what better way than to have him “win” a few big score games at a casino? Seems like a great way to disperse cash.
There were rumors that Frank Sinatra never had to pay his losses but took his winnings. So something like that can be done without any cheating at the games.
Today a cheater goes to jail. A blackjack card counter, which may be viewed as a “cheater” by casinos, but not legally so, would be barred from further play after they decide that his play is profitable.
This ploy was used in Ian Fleming’s “Diamonds Are Forever” to pay off James Bond for the criminal activity he performed undercover to get inside the organization. That was in the book, they may have skipped this in the movie.
I just watched an episode of “The Real Story” (available on Netflix if you can find it using their crappy interface) that showed the real story behind the movie, “Casino.” First, the FBI tried to prove “the skim” by busting the guy taking the bag of money out of the casino and handing it over. But, someone tipped off the mob as to when the actual bust would happen and the FBI got embarrassed really bad after years of surveillance . So, they had to prove it through how the casino accounted for the money, which was by falsifying the slips that went with the money that went out to the floor. The casino overstated what was sent to the floor. The difference was the “skim” money.
Actual cheating in a casino (palming cards or switching out dice or something) is often a crime, so you’d probably be asked to leave in handcuffs these days.
Taking advantage of a poorly-designed game in a legal manner (counting cards, for example) is not, but will likely get you asked to leave if you’re actually winning.
In mob run casinos in early Vegas players and employees were treated very well – there was plenty of money for everybody.
Many of the casino people in the early days of the Las Vegas Strip came to the business via the illegal casino hotspot around Steubenville, Ohio and/or Cuba. The operations were mob owned but that doesn’t mean all the employees were “in the Mafia.” Many of the games were crooked, rife with loaded dice and bottom-dealing and marked cards.
Customers and employees were treated very well in “family” owned casinos unless they were caught stealing too much; there are still some pit bosses around Vegas with crooked, obviously broken fingers. Some employee stealing was overlooked because the people mainly just went across the street after work and lost their booty in another casino – the money was still kept in the family.
Most Vegas casinos still had a “whack out man” (a highly skilled cheat who would be put on the table to take back some of the winnings when a player scored too big a win) or two until the corporations took over during the Howard Hughes days but by the 1970s they weren’t really used any more. Generally the big casinos really do have too much to lose to be caught cheating for piddly amounts. Players are very unlikely to be cheated by big casinos in Nevada … although in tiny out-of-the-way places you still take your chances.
While a high-roller in the 1960s would be catered to and treated like a king (free room, free booze, free food, free cigarettes, even free showgirls for the really big players) and may occasionally have left town with more money than he started with, it was not likely he would leave town with a lot more.
I have the book When the Mob Ran Vegas that covers this topic extensively. The mob didn’t routinely cheat the general public because they needed to maintain some semblance of fair play and there was no need to but casino owners cheated each other, professional gamblers cheated the house and everyone cheated the IRS. There were also some schemes that cheated high-stakes gamblers and celebrities.
It was still there, but Tiffany Case made the pickup of a stuffed dog filled with diamonds at Circus Circus by (badly) squirting a squirt gun at a clown face.
The problem with claims like that is that they generally come from the mobsters themselves, and these are not exactly the most reliable people in the world even when their claims are not as blatantly self-serving as this one. (Ditto for the even more dubious claims that Lansky and other mobsters were active in opposing the Nazis.)
True. But the main reason for the big families to run the casinos was to cheat the IRS and to launder money from their other operations, not to fleece the gamblers. Those functions worked better if the house was clean. From what I read most of the crooked games happened because local guys got greedy and went against the big boss to make their own slice bigger. Lansky was a smart guy and knew the odds were in his favor as long as gamblers kept showing up.