One of the fun parts of working in a casino is that you meet a lot of interesting people. Unfortunately, along with these paragons, we also have to endure the occasional complete asshole. The ones that really try our patience are the ones with so much money that they feel they can be pushy, rude, and overbearing, and get away with it.

Even though our bosses know that the average Joe would never be allowed to behave in such a fashion, the money that they can afford to throw in our direction affords them a modicum more leeway than the crowd. (Sigh!)

One such valuable customer visited us recently. He had put up a quarter of a million cash to play with, as there was no chance we would ever give him credit again, for more than just the obvious reasons. In fact the guy had managed to get himself barred for a considerable period of time as he damaged a major piece of artwork, after going on a drunken rampage when he had lost all his money. You might say that he was more of a piece of work than the art.

A lot of groveling, a ton of false contrition, and a big dollop of cash to pay for the repairs, eventually got him back in our management’s good graces, but never in mine.

Towards the end of this visit, he was playing in our high limit area, where, due to a piece of unacceptable behaviour, he was told to go elsewhere.

That elsewhere turned out to be my pit, where I still, at half past three in the morning, had several games in action. He squeezed himself forcibly into a chair at one of the $100 minimum tables, and demanded, “Give me fifty thousand.”

This wasn’t good. I knew the man much better than I would have liked, and this meant he wanted to play for a while. I immediately advised him, “Sir, we have already announced that the next shoe at this table will be the final shoe of the evening.” At this juncture, he merely nodded, and played relatively quietly.

Of course this respite wasn’t to last. At the end of the final shoe, having blown half the fifty grand, he started getting vociferous. “I want another shoe.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I told you that we would be closing when you sat down. I can’t give you another.”

“Get me your boss.”

Me, still all smiles, but inwardly grinding my teeth, “Of course, sir.”

It will come as no surprise to all of you that when I phoned my boss in his office, and explained the situation, that he didn’t want to talk to the man. After all he had only recently sorted out his unpleasantness in another pit. I was advised, “I’m busy. Tell him I will be up to see him when I’ve finished what I’m doing.”

Predictably, when I passed the message on, he went apeshit. “I was promised a fucking private game. I want to fucking play!” His nose settled about four inches from mine, and his voice ratcheted up to frothing at the mouth levels. “This is fucking ridiculous.” Play at the two remaining tables had stopped while everybody in earshot, which meant the whole casino, listened to his rant. “This is bullshit.”

He continued in this vein for a bit, and when he had wound down a little, I told him, “There’s no point in getting in my face. You want to be in my boss’ face.

“Fucking call him again.” I did, but took the opportunity to phone the security supervisor, not that there weren’t a couple of our guards already lurking close by. When I had spoken to my intentionally absent boss again, and returned with the same message, he started off again. This time, though, after spewing out some less than original invective at me, he made his final demand, “Either get your fucking boss up here now, or throw me out!”

It might have been Christmas. I don’t know any of my peers who would have acted diffrently. “Certainly, sir.” I caught the Security supervisor’s eye, and raised my voice for all to hear. “THROW HIM OUT!” I turned my back to him, and let the guards do their job.

The next day, he approached me, and said, “I must apologize for last night. I was drunk.” He even gave me a hug, which I couldn’t avoid. I smiled and told him not to worry, not meaning it in the least. There was no way he had been drunk. The problem was that although he was a total piece of shit, he was our piece of shit, and he had dropped the whole quarter mil.

Hello everyone, I’m still alive. I have been writing novels, as I seem to have run out of casino related stories. I’m not the only person in Atlantis casino who had been writing novels, and one of them, Ray Knight -also an old Chester’s boy - has got himself a website for his writing. I have added a link to his site.

I have been trying to update this site to make it more navigable, but my webmaster has been very busy. I hope to put most of my stuff on this site when he does, including the completed novels, unless they actually get published, at which time I will remove them. (I’m not holding my breath, but I will submit them prayerfully when I’ve done what I can with them!)

Of course if I get any new casino stories, they will be posted.

On a personal note, my PSA is back down to single figures after some radiotherapy, so I can assure you I will be around for a good bit longer.

One of the most colouful denizens of sixties and seventies Nassau was a fat, bearded, middle aged man called Gene Toote. He was the main man in the numbers racket at the time, and one Christmas eve he was standing outside a shop he ran on Bay street, then and now the main tourist mecca. He had a bottle of XO brandy and a stack of plastic cups, which he was filling generously for his acquaintances and customers.

He was in a holiday mood, and he had many pleasant chats with the passers-by, at least until he spied an old man, almost a derelict, trying to slip past him. He made a grab for the poor guy, snarling, “Where you goin’, motherfucker, you owe me.” The guy was now down on the pavement with Gene holding him in an arm lock. “When am I gonna get paid?” he asked, giving the arm a vicious twist.

“Sorry, sorry, Mr. Toote, the man choked out. I’l have your money Friday.”

“See you do or I’ll break something.”

He let go and his face conjured up a happy smile for a friend he saw. The man scuttled away.

Gene, as you might have guessed, employed a little muscle to help him in his businesses. In fact he probably had more private muscle than anyone else, muscle that he found a use for when they were bored.

When the casino on Paradise Island opened in 1967, he saw an opportunity, and had the balls to come over and offered to ‘protect” the property for a fee. This didn’t work out.

The situation was handled very professionally and discretely. He was invited to dinner with the top men at the Cafe Martinique, their best restaurant. They enjoyed a very good meal, and nothing was said until the meal was over. “He was then told, “Gene, it’s not going to happen. You have taken on something that is way too much for you. It’s not only us, you know, do you seriously want to go up against Santos Traficanti and Meyer Lansky?”

Between them, they ran all the gambling on the East Coast of the US, and were not men to be trifled with. The unsaid threat was that, if he made a nuisance of himself, then he would be dealt with by them. The verbalized one was that if anything unpleasant happened, it might be assumed that he had become unhappy.

One of the others made a conciliatory gesture, telling him, “No hard feelings, Gene. We’re both in the same business. Come over now and then and enjoy a nice meal.”.

That was a precaution in case he went whacko and tried to burn the place down

When you work in the gaming industry, you get to have a feel for people, by judging their actions before, sometimes well before they speak, as they bear down on you with intent. It’s a survival mechanism, and helps you avoid some of the more eccentric and aggrieved customers who want to vent on you when their issue is really with someone else.

One of these tell tale bits of body language is the hand extended for a handshake well before you get close enough to grasp it. These people invariably want something. They want cigarettes or cigars. They want more time. They want their average bet raised. They want you to do something that someone else has already refused to do for them, no doubt with good reason, and so on. These people are a pain.

One of my colleagues was understandably reticent, earlier this year, to grasp an outstretched hand that he saw floating across the table towards him. While he was conducting an inner debate as to how to react, the dealer’s hand shot out and gave it an enthusiastic shake instead. This woke my colleague up, as, for a dealer, this is one of the things that are definitely forbidden.

An instant before he was to have started his knee jerk chewing out of the dealer, he recognized the face attached to the arm. It was Bill Clinton.

Perhaps his first instinct was right, after all!

This is one you may have to know a bit about craps to fully appreciate. It happened around 1970 in PI Casino when we not only had those huge ungainly New York layout crap games, but operated them with a ladderman. A ladderman is a supervisor who sits on a raised platform directly behind the stickman.

It was the game from hell, at least as far as the dealers were concerned. The table was crammed. The philosophy was to get as many people as possible around the game. “All you need is an arm and an eye.” Was what we told the players. There was a hand going on and the props were so busy that they couldn’t book all the action clearly. The prop bets were a total mess. The stickman was praying for a point as there would undoubtedly be arguments over who had what bets if they hit and anyway it was going to be a bitch to work a lot of them out. The base dealers were praying for a point to come out as well.

At this juncture the ladderman could see how worried and nervous the stickman was. He decided to be evil. Moments before the dice were due to be sent out, the ladderman leaned forward and whispered into the stickman’s ear, “Did I ever show you a photo of my sister?” So saying he held a photo in front of his face. I don’t think it was of his sister as it was a legs akimbo shot with finely detailed gynecological imagery.

The stickman broke up laughing and couldn’t move the dice while everyone wondered why he had suddenly turned incapable.

I guess it was better than calling Aces!

Pom Pom was not his real name. No one actually knew his real name except perhaps the clerks in the payroll office. He told all and sundry that he was Pom Pom and it stuck.

Pom Pom, who was a man of a certain age, was on staff from when the Casino on Paradise Island opened in 1967. He was Haitian, and then as now they ended up with the most menial jobs available. His was to be a sort of housekeeper/busboy. It was a very low profile calling and this was emphasized by his uniform which was black.

He tended to potter around the room, cleaning ashtrays, picking stuff up from the floor and removing empty glasses and bottles from around the slot machines and gaming tables. He made sure that no one ever had cause to complain about his performance.

He worked very hard to establish a persona, something he did extremely successfully. Late at night when the business was winding down and many of the tables were closed, he would drink from the abandoned glasses. He was not subtle about it. It wasn’t just that his supervisor would not be around that late, he intended to be seen.

The people he wanted to notice his behaviour were all the old American supervisors and pit bosses who were heavily experienced and who had come not only from Vegas but also from other gaming Meccas like Steubenville and Cuba. They thought they knew every thing. They didn’t.

Once they had seen his pretend show of ducking down behind a closed crap game and knocking back all the half filled glasses while being “caught” and giving them a broad wink or a sly grin, he was established as a harmless drunk. He wasn’t.

There was no madness in his actions. He was a clever and daring man, and he had seen an opportunity. In those days there were no surveillance cameras in the Casino, so the only people watching him were those experienced Americans who now had him tabbed as an alcoholic. He may well have been, but most of the drinks he so theatrically consumed were probably melted ice by the time he reached them. Even so the unusual combinations must have tested his constitution.

With nearly all his work finished he would sit at one of the closed blackjack tables far from the remaining action and slump forward with his head on his hands. This was another routine which he had to establish for his character. He would mostly sit as near to the drop box as he could get.

Eventually he was ignored, which of course was what he wanted. With the stage set he became a fisherman. The rod he used was a long pair of surgical forceps and the fish were hundred dollar bills.

It was later surmised that he tracked those games which had a decent amount of cash in their boxes so the funds would be less likely to be missed. This went on for a long time.

It ended due to the most likely and usual reason: greed. Ripped bills started turning up during the counting process, probably because he was trying to get bills that for one reason or another had got stuck. This at last made management do some serious thinking and he was duly caught red handed.

Based on the time he spent with us he was estimated to have got away with between three and five hundred thousand dollars. Regardless he was deported wearing a five hundred dollar suit and carrying luggage which if it wasn’t Gucci was in that class.

Not a bad wage for cleaning ashtrays.

Gerry Cohen sent this story from the mid-seventies.

You may be interested in the following story from my early days at Charlie Chester’s. You may even know the punter in question - Ray remembers her. Anyway if you like the story, feel free to use it.

Lady Chappel was a regular at the blackjack tables of Charlie Chester’sCasino in London’s Soho. She was one of those ladies of high status but limited means who would pass their afternoons (they didn’t do nights) at the casino tables, wagering modestly and eating complimentary tea and sandwiches. On this particular occasion she broke her usual habit and left the blackjacktable during the shuffle to venture into the alien territory of the roulettepit.

The ball was already spinning and she said to the dealer, “If I give you five pounds, would you please put it on red for me?”

“Certainly madam,” replied the dealer, and waited for the money. And waited… Lady Chappel, meanwhile, was dredging the depths of her handbag trying to finda note. Just as the ball dropped she located one and offered it to the dealer. “No bet!” he announced. “I’m sorry, it was too late.”

“Well, why couldn’t you tell me that at the beginning!” protested Lady Chappel.

This story is in the “How dumb can you get?” category. Shortly before I started working at Charlie Chester’s in London, another man who was shall remain nameless started working there. He chose to work as a dealer as a backup earner while what was to be his main career got going.

What was to have been(And hopefully panned out as) his primary field of endeavour was the entertainment industry. Specifically he was a stage magician.

This was something that should have been kept a secret.

Quite soon after he started work there was a quiet day, and he got talking to his supervisor. Pretty soon he was showing off doing all sorts of card tricks and dazzling his colleagues with his sleight of hand.

Pretty soon after that he was shown the door.

That isn’t the sort of skill Casinos want their dealers to have!

This one was just told me by one of our big players. It stars that complete Australian degenerate, the late Kerry Packer.

Packer was in Vegas at one of the big Casinos on the strip. He was playing at a very high limit crap game and he had friends with him. Kerry was being the typical Aussie. Loud, brash, playing to the crowd and being a showman. He was beginning to annoy the small guy playing next to him.

The man said, “So You’re a big player are you?”

Kerry’s reply was something like, “Well yes I am.”

“I guess you’re pretty rich then?”

“Everone says so.” Or something similar

The little man suddenly became a lot less little, “I’ll bet you a million that I’m worth more than you.”

This was a red rag and a challenge to Kerry. He couldn’r resist a bet and he was convinced he would win, “It’s a bet!”

“Pleased to meet you.” The man said, “I’m Paul Allen.”

“Well I guess you got me then!”

Kerry paid up.

Paul Allen, for those of you unfamiliar with the name was co-founder of Microsoft with Bill Gates. Four or five times richer than Kerry.  

 Yesterday Richard Mayhook who worked at PI Casino for a single year, but whose uncle Peter worked there for 34 years, was killed when the scooter he was driving was rear ended by an SUV. It was a hit and run, Richard was thrown a hundred feet. Like me he was trying to write a book.

He may be remembered as the only expatriate dealer who had their work permit pulled by immigration. That was a story I wrote without mentioning his name.

May he rest in peace.