Speaker 1: Hey everybody, and Welcome to Life is a Gamble. It's
been a while since I dropped one of these episodes,
but I am back. And before we jump into today's guest,
I just want to say you can always reach me
at Life is a gamblepod at gmail dot com and
you can find me on Twitter at RWM twenty one.
My guest today is Andrew Wimhurst and he has a
new book out called Thieving Bastards Through Confessions of the
World's Greatest Cheats. So Andrew, Welcome to Life is a Gamble.
Speaker 2: Hey, Richard, thanks very much for having me on the show.
I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: So as I understand it, this book was thirty years
in the making. Is that correct.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. I've been working on for thirty years.
I've been recording interviews with people for thirty years that've
been sitting in boxes and in my study in all
that time, traveling to America to meet people, sit down
with people and have conversations. But yeah, the idea for
this book started in the eighties.
Speaker 1: So it really you were planning to make it as
a book as opposed to just interviewing these guys for
your own edification.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. So I'm a big fan of books
that are about interviews with people. I just find that
books of interviews are like an unfiltered experience. You can
really understand the way a person thinks and what's happened
in their life, and what the psychology is behind you know,
what motivates them. I think it's just fascinating. In fact,
I'm a big fan of all of these books. I've
really enjoyed your book Gambling Wizards, which I've had a
chance to read lately. I haven't had a chance to
read a lot of books in the last few years
because I've been focusing on this book. But I've been
reading your book and really really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1: So thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I read a book. I read a book in
the eighties called Cops Their Lives in their Own Words
by a guy called Mark Baker. It's published in about
eighty five, and I just found it really fascinating. That
was when I really started to get interested. This is
as a teenager, and then I sort of drifted into
an interest in card magic, which quickly became an interest
in cheating at cards, which has been a strong passion
for many years. And I was in the National Library
in Australia, and I found a book in the stacks
there called Road Hustler by Robert Pruce, and it's a
sociological study of professional card cheats in North America and
Canada and up in the sort of the Eastern States.
And the book originated with he had a student who
was a former cheat in one of his classes and
let slip that this was his background, and so in
writing this book, he includes a bunch of anecdotes from
that sheet, some short paragraphs about what it's like to
be a cheat and so on. And as I was
reading those, I just found them absolutely fascinating, really really fascinating,
And I thought to myself back then, wouldn't it be
great to have a book that was like Mark Baker's Cops,
but was about professional cheats. And that's where it started.
And I never stopped thinking about that, and I wasn't
sure I'd be able to make it work. But over
time I got lucky and with some hard work, I
actually was able to put together enough information and contacts
to actually put the book together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would assume it was very difficult to get
these guys to talk to you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely, it's a long, long process to do that,
and I started with early contacts and I built from
one contact into multiple contacts, and I built over the years.
So when I was young, I was into card magic
and I was into cheating stuff, and I started working
doing shows demonstrated in cheating techniques here in Australia, and
in doing that and looking around at the different people
who were doing that sort of work, I came across
a guy called Darwin Ortiz, who was a card magician
passed away a couple of years ago, and as a
young kid, I wrote to him. A letter came back
from him and we started a friendship and we became
very very good friends over the year. So he became
one of my closest friends. I knew him for thirty years,
and you know, he's the first person that I spoke
to about this. And I know that Darwin had written
a book called Gambling Scams, which was published in the eighties,
and that book includes a couple of anecdotes from the
contacts that he had. Because he grew up in the Bronx,
he hung around with people involved in cheating. He was
connected to an underground supply house in New York city,
which was one of the big, biggest ones in the country.
He had close friends in there, and he was the
person who gave me my first couple of contacts. But
I told him about the book idea. He thought it
was a great idea, and you know, he just knew
I had a passion for it and he trusted me.
So he actually trusted me with his contacts and set
me up with a couple of guys and had started
from there. Now, none of those guys are in the book,
but the original no, no, no, no no. In fact,
in fact, one of those guys was my first major rejection.
This is the guy that hung up in my ear.
He said he wasn't a snitch. This is the guy that, yeah,
you know, and I'm okay with that. I perfectly understand that.
You know, I've always been very upfront with the people
that I interview that I want to build a trust
relationship where they can trust that I'm not going to
put anything in any of these books that they don't
want to have a peer in the books. So anyway,
that guy that sort of closed off to me that
one relationship. But that guy was long retired. He ran
a big underground cheating supply house. When I spoke to him,
He's in Florida, and he said, I'm not a snitch,
and and I kind of get it because there are
some people that I've interviewed. All of the people I've
interviewed have strong connections to criminal activity, but a couple
of people that I've spoken to had connections to you know,
the mob, for example, and those people really aren't interested
in having their stuff appear in the book. It becomes
quite sensitive for those people. And so I totally get that.
And he was heavily involved in supplying equipment to underground
clubs on the East Coast for decades. And the company
goes back one hundred year is it's not one of
it's not Casey Card company, it's not one of those companies,
but it's another company in New York City that was
in the garment district. And in fact, he was the
first person that I met. I remember, I traveled to
the States to visit Darwin and to go to Vegas
and some other places and go and set me up
with a meeting with this guy. And it was one
really hot summer's day and I went to the garment
district and knocked on this door, and this huge bear
of a man greeted me at the door, and he
looked like Danny A. Lo the actor, you know, this
big Jewish dude, and yeah, he had this underground supply company.
He took me in, showed me what was happening in
the room. At the front, they had all of these
are Hispanic ladies who were marking playing cards and cutting
playing cards and repackaging them in the boxes so that
the boxes looked perfect, and then they would resell them
and so that people across the country could order any
style of card they wanted marked in a system that
they preferred or shaved so that they could be stripped
for gin or whatever the game was, and they would
mail them out to all their customers across you know,
New York State and across the country. And then at
the back there are a bunch of guys who were
all out there working on loading dice and you know,
flattening dice, six ass flats and magnetic dice, and they
had read tables they were building and all sorts of stuff.
So it was quite in my opening experience, Wow, are
they still in business? That company's not in business as
far as I'm aware. Yeah, you know a lot of
these companies were shut down in the early sixties to yep,
going no, no.
Speaker 1: I I was just going to say that. I when
I was trying to get people to do interviews for
my book, I told them, you know, I would try
transcribe our conversation and edit it, and then before I
showed it to anybody, I would give it back to
them and they could go through it, and anything they
wanted cut would be cut, you know. And fortunately that
was enough to get people to talk to me. And
usually if I didn't already know them personally, at least
I had some you know, goal between friend that knew
both of us pretty well.
Speaker 2: So yeah, so that's exactly my experience, the same thing.
And in fact, it's funny that your book and my
book are kind of the poll or opposites, you know,
gambling wizards, thieving bastards. It's like the two hinds of
the spectrum.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It's interesting. Yeah, I find that quite amusing. But yeah,
I when I interview people, and I'm still interviewing people.
I did a big interviewer a couple of weeks ago
with a guy who was a pool hustler in the seventies,
and there's some really interesting stories about pull hustling in
Los Angeles at the time and up and down the
West Coast. So looking forward to actually working on that.
But every person that I've spoken to, that's been my
system that I take the material, I do an audio recording,
I transcribe it. I don't you know, all of this
done with all of this stuff was unmandrolically by hand.
He knews Ai. AI didn't exist when I was doing
this sort of stuff, listening to the stuff and just
doing that laborious process of transcribing it, cleaning it up
and then so what I would do is, you know,
some of the guys that I spoke to were actually
quite elderly people who'd been cheating in the forties and fifties.
And there's a guy who's in volume two, for example,
who was a crew hustler on the West Coast out
of New York but moved to the West Coast. A
lot of these guys are older. They're very hard to
understand when you speak to them. You know, their voices
are all broken free age and everything, and they ramble,
and they sometimes they'll come and tell a story four
or five different ways. And some of these interviews that
I've done are multiple interview sessions. So I've got hours
and hours of interviews with these guys, and I've transcribed
all of those interviews, and then I've gone back and
if they tell a really interesting story, but they might
come back to it, because you know, being of a
certain age, you'd forget you've told a story. I'll come
back to it and they might have a fresh spin
on it, or they have a very funny way of
expressing it in one story that they don't do it
in the first iteration. So I'll go back and I'll
just take the best bit and just cram it together,
you know, so I'll connect it so that it reads
as well as it can. And then and then, just
as you do, I would email it to the guy
and we go through it and they say, look, I'm
not happy about this or whatever, I'm happy about that.
And some of them are quite surprised, you know. Some
of them are like, didn't realize I swore so much.
Because there's a lot of vulgarity in some of these stories,
and especially the guy Bobby Machines, who was a practicing attorney.
He was like shocked at the language that had sort
of come out in the interview because he wouldn't speak
like that in his professional life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was really interest.
Speaker 2: I'm just going to say one I was just going
to say one more thing is that some of the
stuff that's like the book is warts and all. There's
a lot of warts and all stuff in there, and
you know, some sort of shocking revelations for some people
who sometimes knew some of these people, not realizing the
extent of that, for example, their drug dependency and all
that sort of stuff that they'd been through, or being
in the life where you're involved in other criminal activity
that's not necessarily accept behavior and polite society. You know,
people who were pimping, working miss pimps, as well as
cheats and that sort of stuff. So a lot of
that stuff's in the book, but there's sort of a
line that I drew where I didn't go beyond a
certain point with detail. You know, with some of this
stuff gets even worse than that with some of these people,
and I just sort of left that out. Or some
of these cheats would come back and they'd look at
something they said about somebody and if it was a
negative thing and the person was long dead then that
you know, they'd say, okay, I'm fine with that. But
they also would sometimes say negative things about people who
are still around and we would talk about that and
I'd say, well, maybe we should leave that out. So
there's a bit of that stuff that's removed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, the cheating landscape has changed tremendously over
the last fifty sixty years, and a lot of the
cheating that was going on back then. In Guardena, California,
they had these poker clubs. They still have poker clubs there,
but back then the players dealt the cars and the
deal was passed around, So there was just rampant cheating there.
And on the East Coast and in the Midwest, there
were a lot of these games that were in Elks clubs,
moose clubs, or these these picnics where they would set
up these you know, casino nights. And but that landscape
has really changed. Have you been able to inter and
the people in your book really are kind of from
that older era. Are there people that you've interviewed that
are in the modern era? And I would think if
a guy is still out there doing it, he'd be
much less likely to want to talk to you about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's that's one hundred percent right. I mean,
I know people who are doing stuff now, and those
people aren't really aren't interested in talking about what they're doing. Now.
A lot of that older stuff has been exposed that
the game procedures have changed to eliminate the opportunities that
used to exist back in the day. As you will know,
there's pass the deck poker is you know, it's long gone,
so a lot of that sort of and draw poker
is not the game anymore. All of those opportunities are
sort of closed off for these people. But things that
apt and people have adapted certain things to suit the
modern age, and of course stuff is still going on.
There's some very sophisticated stuff going on that I'm aware
of that I just I'm not really willing to talk
about because the people that tell me about it would
I'd be persona and on grod. I wouldn't be able
to talk to these people anymore if I did that.
Speaker 1: Well, so much of that is public now because there's
there's a cheating scandal here in the States, like every
other week in poker. I mean, it's just and in
you know, the poker clubs and things.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, that's true, that's true. And of course
there was that big, big NBA scandal where they use
celebrities to get people to be comfortable with the private
gaming arrangements that they had set up. And I wrote
a couple of blogs related to that on my website
about the sort of lessons to be learned from that.
And it's quite interesting that from my perspective, is that
some of the technology that was used in those scans
is technology that was developed by one of the people
that I interviewed in the first book, a guy called
doctor X. And these are the things that they people
in the media call X ray tables, and they're not
X ray tables at all, but the technology is really
fascinating technology that it originates through experimentation with optical like
laser beams and optics that are involved in like special
Forces night vision goggles and all that sort of stuff.
It's like really interesting adaptations military technology to the sort
of card cheating space. And so, did you want me
to mention what the x X ray table is or
talk about.
Speaker 1: That or sure, yeah, yeah, sure, yeah.
Speaker 2: So when I interviewed doctor X, and I interviewed him
about twenty five years ago, so you know a number
of the interviews in this book were old interviews. And
I remember him telling me about the X ray table,
but he didn't call it the X ray table. He
caught it the octopus. And he caught it the octopus
because it had like eight extensions, and so you could
target people around the table. And what it is is
it's a series of optical lasers that shoot photon beams
beneath the table, and the photon beams are pushed up
through translucent plates, plastic white plates that are underneath the table,
underneath the cloth, and these beams are invisible to the
human eye. They operate outside the spectrum of visibly for humans,
but they can be captured by a camera that's set
up to see those verbams. And what happens is they
burst up through the tabletop and they burst up through
the plane cards, and the camera can capture the light
traveling through the playing cards plastic or paper cards, it
doesn't matter. And the ink of the pips, it doesn't
actually burst through the ink of the pips, so you
could actually see the pips in reverse on the camera
which is set up in a separate room. So what
it is is it's an example of an elaborate peak,
like the peak that was at the Lambs Club all
those years ago, classic sort of scams, especially cheap gin
rummy and games things like that. So it's like a
high tech peak technology. And I remember him telling me
about this. You know, they're not even my cards. The
light goes up through the table, you know, you can
it's like you're reading the card from the other room.
You can see everything. And I remember him telling me
this and thinking, man, no one's going to believe this.
No one's going to believe this, right, And then late
late last year, the NBA scam broke, and I'm like,
thank god, you know, And so so I called the
the US Justice that the office in New York, and
I spoke to the press people there and I got
some photos for the book, and I was able to
blue that in the book.
Speaker 1: So I tried to get Doctor X to come on
this show because he's quite a character, and but he
he wasn't really willing to talk about the stuff that
I wanted to talk about, Like he likes to talk,
you know, he's yeah, but yeah, but but I haven't
been able to make that one work. And by the way,
just as an aside, I think you'll find, after all
of the hundreds of hours you were put into writing
this book, that the way to go is to just
have a podcast instead, because then you get to.
Speaker 2: Do the energey when you don't have to do all.
Speaker 1: The grunt work of transcription, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I totally get that, but but I you know,
I'm kind of old school and I love books, you know,
and I feel that putting something in a book is
just a really fantastic way of capturing information and people
when people engage with it, you know, their imagination as
they interpret what they're reading is what really sort of
holds for them, and you know, creates these lasting memories
of the information and everything else. So I kind of
I prefer book. So my plan is to actually produce
a few more series if I can. We'll see.
Speaker 1: Sequels to this one about Cheeks or the other.
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm hoping to Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've got some
other ideas as well, but definitely I've got When I
decided to print this book, I actually had a book
that was twice as long, and I realized it was
way too long. It's going to be like a doorstop,
like a giant bible or something, and so I thought
I'll cut it in half. And so I had to
make some decisions in doing that. A number of the
people in the book have passed away, and they didn't
have a chance to see the book in its final form,
although they all got to read their interviews, you know,
So I basically I sort of chose some of these
things to make sure that people in there would get
to read them, you know, because some of those people
are still alive, and some of them I held over,
you know, people had long passed. I thought, well, I'll
move this to the second volume. And getting back to
what you said, there is somebody in the second volume
who's working today. So there is some quite interesting stuff
on some current activity that will appear in the second volume.
And there might be a few more people who are
working today in the second volume. But we'll just see
how it goes. Just you mentioning doctor X. He's an
interesting interview in so many different ways. But he was
one where I really had to change names and place
names and stuff like that, because when we spoke about it,
he was still heavily involved in it all those years ago,
and he said, look, let's change this. So I came up,
I changed with the names and they to protect people.
And then he got to read it, read it again
last year of the year before, and he's like, oh
my god, you changed all these names. Because his life
had changed a little bit, he wasn't quite so concerned
about it. I said, well, yeah, so that's that's where
we are with doctor X. But I'm actually going to
be spending some time with him later this year, so
I'm hitting out to spend some quality of time with him.
He's a very interesting character.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd like to go visit him. He seems to
have like a museum there in his home of all
kinds of interesting, wacky wacky stuff. Oh so I want
to go back to the mechanic because I thought he
was a really interesting case. Because once you feel the power,
once you know you can do this and pretty much
go out and make money, it will. It was very
interesting that he that he was doing this to put
himself through law school and then basically stopped.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So he is a really interesting guy. And in
the book we call him Bobby Machines. Obviously that's not
his name, but to spoake to him and I said,
we've got to give you a name because he was
still he's still quite a public figure. He's passed away
since since we interviewed the guy. Yeah, really so, but
eight of you. Yeah, I thought mutual prison Burroughs visited
him recently. I don't know, that's no, no, that's actually
you're probably thinking of Bobby asil So Bobby.
Speaker 1: Recently.
Speaker 2: But that's right, that's what I was going to say.
He only passed away about a month ago. Yeah, but
Bobby Machines. You know, when I interviewed Rod Rod the
hot Rod d Rod d was the first person I interviewed.
I think pretty much Rod perhaps, and maybe Bill Zender
and Ron Connolly, but I think Rod was the first person.
And because he's one of the He was a friend
of mine, a good friend, and we used to chat
a lot, and so I really wanted him to be
in the book. He never got to see the book,
which is unfortunate. But when we were talking, he mentioned
this guy, Bobby Machines. He said that when he was
a young cheat and he got turned out, and you know,
he was almost going to get himself killed hanging around
a card room in San Diego and doing a couple
of basic moves. He got turned out by a couple
of guys. There's Black John and Bobby Machines with the
two guys that turn him. But he said to me,
this guy, man, this guy was fantastic. He's one of
the best mechanics I've ever seen. And I don't know
if you probably would have met Rod, but I think
Rod was one of the best card mechanics I've ever
met in my life. I would put him up there
is probably the best at poker. I don't think there's
anybody who can touch him or could touch him. And
some of the shuffle stuff that he did was just
out of this world really. But anyway, he said, look,
there's this guy that turned me out. And I used
to sleep on his couch and he showed me moves
and he said he played a machine hold out machine.
So you know the old Blinger holdout machine, which is
an elaborate body worn device that's hidden inside the jacket
up the sleeve and you have to get specially tailored
cuffs so that there's no catch on the thief as
it comes in and out of the arm that takes
the card. And he said This guy was unbelievable. He
could work the machine like you wouldn't believe. But he
could also do like a double gypsy, you know, steal
two cards and put two cards back, which is a
super hard move with a machine. And I was like, man,
this is great. And then I thought, jes it would
be so great to speak to this guy, you know.
And then Rod passed away and I thought, well, that's it.
I'm not going to be able to find this guy.
And then I spoke to a guy and who's a
crossroader and we were talking about it, and he said,
I think I think I might know who this guy is.
Like there's a name that Rod mentioned and it sounds
like this might be the guy. So basically, the two
of us did a little bit of a detective work
and we found found a guy. And I reached out
to the guy and left a message on his answering machine,
which is you can imagine being a lawyer and attorney. Yeah,
it's respectable. And you get this phone call from this
from this dude and this random dude in Australia who
rings up it as get a mate, you know, and
I just said on the phone, I said, hey, listen,
you know, I think we had a mutual friend who's
a dear friend of mine, a guy called Rod d.
Rod's obviously passed away long time ago, but Right and
I had been speaking, and I've been working on a book,
and part of the book is talking about Rhyd's life
and the life of people who knew Right I worked
with Ryde. I was wondering whether maybe we could have
a chat about the project, you know, and so on,
and so I remember I was, I was getting some takeout,
and I'm in the car with my daughters and the
phone rings, and I put, you know, comes on the
speakerphone and here's this rough as he just sounded so
rough for an attorney. And he goes blah blah, blah,
blah blah, and then he said, you know, I don't
know if I can swear, but he said, effort. Let's
do it, you know, like I say, he said, yeah,
let's do it. So the next day we recorded this
this first of us a series of interviews, and they
were fantastic, really interesting. That guy was a bit of
a beast.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, And as I say it, just it's it's
pretty rare for people to get out of that life.
Speaker 2: But super rare. Yeah, yeah, super rare. So so there's
sort of three people in the book who got out
of the life. So Ron Connolly was involved in some
stuff as a young man, and then he became a
peak in clubs and became a senior surveillance expert in clubs.
So that's an example of somebody who transitioned or what
frustraders say. The expression they use is he turned his
collar around, you know, so he went and batted for
the wrong team kind of thing, which is a huge
no no like. And you see that in the book
with some of the comments from people like Black John
when he talks about a guy called Toak who was
a cheat like a machine man who actually became a
peak and worked with Ron Connley and other people, where
they actually hate these guys and they're quite quite aggressive
about what they would like to do to some of
these people. And I believe Toke actually did get beaten
up a few times. But yeah, Ron turned his collar around.
And Ron had a very successful career and up until
the time he retired, he was probably considered the world
expert on cheating at poker. For he's work in the
clubs in California, Robert Assioll moved on and had a
I think he was pretty well established financially. He was
one of the smart guy though. He he had a
long retirement as far as I understand, and he moved
to Colorado so he could be close to his family.
But he I think he lived well in retirement. A
lot of these guys don't live well in retirement. A
lot of these guys live in penury. Basically, it's like
a it's you know, the psychology of a lot of
these guys is, as they say, easy come, easy go,
And the money they make is pretty money. It's money
that would just flow through the hands, and they don't
care because if they go and they burn money one day,
the next day, they can just make it back. They
just sort of it's to them, it's like, you know,
you just walk around and you just pick it just
grows on trees effectively, because suckers are suckers and they're
always going to throw their money at you. So that's
the way these guys operated, and that's why you hear
these stories like you know the story of the old
cheat Wilbur Kelsey, who was a machine man in a
California who was still working machine in his eighties and
got caught and got beaten up and ended up in
the hospital. So you know, these guys will beat up
an eighty year old man for cheating. It's a risky
business and a lot of these guys have busted up us,
you know, as they say, we say in Australia. Rod,
for example, Rod was complicated. Rod was super talented, super skills,
super smart, all that sort of stuff. He had a
bit of a gift of the gab as well. He
had was a bit of a silver dung cavalier as
they say. But he was also heavily involved in drugged
you know, he was involved in the drug trade and
got trouble in that sense, and so then had a habit.
You know, he was put on He got onto heroin
through a woman that he was dating who was a
prostitute and drug addict, and yeah, it was it just
it just ruined him essentially, and you know, ruined his
judgment and everything else. And towards the end of his
life he was still working private games as a muster mechanic,
but the kind of cut he was getting was nothing
compared to what was being made in the game. So
a game might you know, they might take off some
sucker for two hundred thousand dollars in a private game,
and Rod would get nine thousand dollars. You know. You
know that's the sort of money that was trickling down
his way because he wasn't in a position to negotiate,
because they knew how desperate he was. And I was
speaking to somebody just yesterday who spoken to a partner
of Rod's and said that, you know, Rod's habit never
gotten the way of his work when he was working
with partners, but everyone just sort of knew that. You know,
at a certain time of the week, like on a
Thursday or something, Rod would disappear and you wouldn't see
him for four days. You know. They said that he
was never he's never high when he worked, but he
was thinking about it, I think, getting back to Bobby Machines, Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, no, go ahead, I was.
Speaker 2: Just going to say that, Yeah, he was very successful,
but he was he had he was super smart. Obviously
he was super smart. He was a guy who got drafted,
went to Vietnam, fought in Vietnam, came back and used
the GI bill to study. He had some kids, and
obviously he was separated from whoever the mother was, and
he was left with a couple of kids, and so
he would look around for ways to make money, and
for him, he found the easiest way to make money
was the steel at every weekend, so he would get
in the car and he would go to the clubs
and Sandy and Sacramento and Gadina and he would steal
you know, a thousand or a couple of thousand dollars
in the early seventies, and he lived just fine as
a student, you know, studying to become a lawyer. And
then he tells the story in the book that he
was always just a means to an end. He just
had discipline. I guess, which is that's the sort of
thing that separates the true master sort of cheats from
the guys who are in the life for their whole life.
And as you know, scuffling at the bottom is that
he was smart, and he had discipline. He had a plan,
and he stuck to the plan. And the day that
he found out that he'd passed the bar exam was
the day he stopped cheating forever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, amazing, you know. I moved to Las Vegas in
nineteen seventy seven and started work as a blackjack dealer,
and I worked with a lot of these old guys
who had been in Hot Springs, Arkansas and Newport, Kentucky,
and a lot of them had been cryders. And you know,
my big regret is that I didn't spend more time
talking to those guys and getting more of their stories,
because it was just amazing to hear the kind of
stories they had and the people they knew, and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, look to me, that just sounds like, yeah, that
something that I would love to have been able to
have the opportunity to speak to those guys. Like Volume
two has an interview with a guy who bought in
World War Two, learnt to gamble as a soldier in
the Pacific, got a purple heart, was blown up by
a hand grenade, ended up in the hospital, and then
he came back to New York and got turned out
by a bunch of road hustlers, went on the road,
and he was cheating for the forties until the day
he died. I interviewed him in the early two thousands,
and so he was one of the classic old road hustlers.
And he's the only guy that I've got that's of
that sort of that sort of vintage. I met other
partners that he worked with, and I know people who
knew those partners, like Ron conleeknew and of those partners,
guys like Frenchie the Hawk, who was a guy who
was around Farmer's Market and worked in the clubs in
Gardena and these guys are all in Cruise. And another
guy who is a name that might be known to people,
Tony Georgio, who was an actor in Hollywood. Tony Georgio,
like magicians know that Tony Georgio claimed to have been
a cheat, and he wrote some articles for a magic
journal called the Georgio Letters, where he talked about all
the cheats he knew and all that sort of stuff.
And some magicians have asked me in recent years, you know,
was Georgia really a cheat? One hundred percent? Georgia was
a cheat, and he cheated for twenty years. He was
a professional chick for twenty years up until the early
sixties when he became a professional actor. And he was
a good actor too, by the way, but he was
he was a very scary kind of guy who was
this big man, big Italian dude, and he had like
a pretty scary, rough looking face, like a pugilist, bit
of a gargoyle, and in fact was he was lined
up to play Cobrassi and The Godfather, and then at
the last minute Capolo said, no, We'll go with this
other guy, and the guy who ended up playing Luca
Brassi replaced Georgio in the role. And the person that
told me this story said that Capola said he wanted
somebody who was scarier than Georgio, and he said to me,
which is crazy, because I've never met anybody scarier than Georgia.
And so George actually does appear in the movie. And
so in the scene where Luca Brassi gets garrotted, one
of the guys behind the bars stabs him in the hand.
I don't know if you remember the scene. So they
pin him at the bar while they strangle him. But
the guy cleaning the glass who lights his cigarette is
Tony Georgio. That's the guy, and if you see him
in that short scene you can see what a menacing
kind of person he was in real life. And it
was actually him that suggested to the director that they
stabbed him in the hand when they do the scene,
So the director incorporated that into the film, but he
was in a bunch of movies. Escape from Which Mountain.
He was in Magnum Force. He's the guy with a
shotgun in one of the scenes, the leader of a
gang that gets killed by Benisewood. And and he's an
amazing guy. And he was a master mechanic, very good
with dice and cards, and you know, I got to
meet him a few times in Los Angeles, and we
spoke a lot on the phone, and we also chatted
online a lot in the early days of the internet.
And i'd spoke to spoken to him and said, look,
I'd really like to interview you, and he said this,
you know, in his rough ways, like there's no way,
you know, he had this this very scary kind of voice.
And I was like, okay, that's fine, that's fair enough.
But I interviewed one of his partners, a guy called
called Phil h Phil Hertzog, and that's a fantastic interview
being volume too. But the whole time that I was
interviewing him, he's saying to me, you know, he had
this whole old man voice. He's like, whatever you do,
don't tell Tony I'm talking to you. Don't say a
word to Tony. They're all scared of Tony, right, So,
but Hertzog was the real master mechanic like in that
in that group, he was the guy that probably had
the best chops. And that's that's just a great interview.
I really enjoyed that one. There's sort of sort of
a code to this story. You know. I worked as
a diplomat overseas for a number of years, and I
remember I was on a Friday, I was at the
mall shopping when I lived in Saudi Arabia, and I
got a phone call from somebody who was very close
to Tony Georgio and he said to Tony was dying
of cancer, and he said, Tony's ready to talk to you.
He wants to do the interview. And I said, I
just can't do it. Like I'm in Saudi Arabia, it's
just not something I can do. And so that's one
of my big regrets. Like you were talking about those
guys from Arkansas and other places, and that's my big
regret is that I didn't actually get to record Tony
for that interview, because that would have been a But
I did speak to somebody who knew Tony very well
and There's an interview in the second book with Darwin
or Tears, who knew him very well, and Darwin recounts
a bunch of stories that Tony had told him about
his work. And Tony worked with a partner in Cuba
before the Castro period, and they ran razzle for the
mob in the casino there, and razzle's the old carnival game.
And they made lots of lots of money running razzle
as a casino game, right, which.
Speaker 1: I did not see. That's the first I've ever heard
of razzle being dealt in the casino.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and it was huge. And Tony told this
story to Dah and he said, me and my partner,
you know, we had this deal with the mob. It
was fifty to fifty and we were just making money
hand over fist, you know, just making tons and tons
of money. And then of course the mob came back
and they said, okay, listen, things are changing. Now it's
sixty forty, and then it was now it's you know,
seventy thirty. It was a classic kind of you know,
like a buyout, like a forced buyout kind of thing.
And so Tony just said screw it, and he said,
I'm going back to the States and he left his
partner and his partner stayed on working this scam. And
Darlin said to me, you know, everything that Tony told him,
he spoke to other cheats and they all backed up.
It was all validated, like people said, oh, yeah he
did this or yeah he did that, So he legitimately
was a hardcore cheeter. And there's a book called Havana
Turn by TJ. English, and there's a whole chapter that
talks about the mob's casino activities in Cuba, and it
actually talks about Rezzle in that book.
Speaker 1: So that's a huh, yeah, I will check that out. Yeah,
I lean more toward I'm much more interested in the
people who were cheating in casinos than you know, the
card rooms and things like that. And you know one
of the guys who was an old cheat that I
talked to back you know, I met this guy back
in about nineteen seventy nine or something, and you know,
his move was to play what they called switches, which
is to literally have two guys. It's kind of like
the move that Bobby Azel claims to have invented. I
had always heard it called the muck switch, where the
switch is happening under the table. But these guys would
switch on the table and one of the moves was
to just basically throw the to the other guy and
the two cards would pass and into each's hand. But
back then, there were really no cameras, there was no video,
there wasn't any of that. So but he said, you know,
every once in a while, like the guy would miss
and the card would just go sailing across the table,
and you know, and the dealer would be like, what
the hell just happened? Yeah, but I remember him saying
that he ended up giving it up because they just
lost their nerves, you know, because if you got caught
back then that you know, it was a pretty serious thing.
Speaker 2: Big problems, Yeah, big problems.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I love those stories. I love hearing that stuff. And
you're right, you know, things have changed in terms of
you know, there were no cameras, there were peaks in
the ceilings and things like that. But now with these
camera systems, the resolutions crizy, and there's so many other
things that limit, you know, the ability of cheats to
function in effectively in casinos. And it's all it comes
down at technology, and the same technology that helps governments
to prevent transnational crime, you know, people smuggling, drug smuggling,
state and nonstate actors engaged in terrorism, all that sort
of stuff. All of this technology can easily be applied
to cheating stuff. Now, so especially for me, you know,
if you look at biometrics is just to killer problem
for people involved in cheating. Once they know, once they
have your scan, your biometrics and they identify you and
you're confirmed or suspect kod of being a cheat, then
biometrics is going to pick you up everywhere. You just
can't beat it. There's you know a lot of cheats
wear disguises, and they'll still wear disguises, and those disguises
are effective up until the time that people have an
elevated suspicion of who you are. Those disguises will allow
you to function until you draw attention to your But
once once you draw attention to yourself, biometrics just bypasses
all of that because there are things that even if
you wear disguises, you can't change. You can't change or
capital distance, you know, the distance between your eyes, this
points on your face that just can't be modified in
a way that will defeat biometrics and then the other
factor is AI, the ability of AI. I'm not a
big fan of AI in other regards as somebody who's
an author, I think AI is terrible in that sense.
But in terms of casino security, AI allows very fast
pattern recognition and analysis to be conducted. You know, like
all of that really hard work analysis and identifying trends
and tracking of locations and of activities and all of
that sort of stuff can be done in an so
that you can you can wag ahead of the game
in terms of your analysis. So there's that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the other thing is because of all
the financial reporting. You know, forty years ago, fifty years ago,
you could walk up to the casino cage and cash
fifty thousand dollars and they would not dream of asking
you your name. Like that was you know, people, it
was considered like privacy, a privacy thing, like you wouldn't
ask somebody their name just because they want a bunch
of money. And now you know, you can't cash out
three thousand in most places without having to give ID
and once they know who you are as you say,
you know, they have the databases, and so yeah, it
gets more more difficult and you know, the the real
killer is going to be within the next ten years,
it's all going to be cashless. You're going to you're
going to have to buy in on your phone, and
that means they're going to know who you are.
Speaker 2: You know, the digital trial. You just can't get away
from that digital trial. So so cheating, I think the
cheating and casinos is going to be you know, it's
going to be the collusion in it. So that sort
of inside of threat is going to be the biggest
deal for cheating and casines. You know, it's still it's
still going to be the case that someone somewhere is
going to try and get some papers and markets in
or casino from the inside so that people from the
outside can take it off. And if they're smart, they'll
take it off over time. They won't be greedy. And
you know, because you know, one of the lessons from
from these books my book is is that greed is
a killer. Discipline and greed are the two problems that
cheets have.
Speaker 1: So we have a mutual friend and I say to him,
you know, the problem with you guys is not only
do you guys not want to have a losing session,
you don't want to lose a hand, you know. I
mean if they just played a little bit of cover
and settled for only having a fifty percent advantage or something,
you know. But yeah, they do so many stupid things
that just shoot themselves on the foot.
Speaker 2: Yeah. That and that comes through in the book when
we talk about people like Santa Rosa Jimmy. You know,
he just couldn't leave a nickel on the table. He
just had to steal everything. You know. It's like it's
just a lack of discipline. And because those guys had
the mentality of a road hustler, it's like, well, it
doesn't matter if we burn it up here tonight, We're
just going to move on to the next place, you know.
So they don't care. But then you read somebody like
Bobby A when he talks in the last chapter of
the book, and he's like he's so angry with his
partners because he's like, if you guys had had some discipline,
we could have gone forever with this play. We could
have just made money. Everybody could have been fine if
we've just flown under the radar and not developed a
profile of activity. But these guys, they just couldn't do it.
They just lacked discipline. It's just it's not that they're dumb,
but they are dumb. I mean, they're not low IQ,
they're just not They just don't have a strategic view,
right right.
Speaker 1: So are you are you a I mean, I know
your background isn't magic, but do you work as a magician?
Speaker 2: No, I don't. I don't. I worked as a magician
many years ago, and I very quickly got involved in
a gambling demonstration. So my whole thing was I mean,
I like card magic. I've still got good friends who
are a really good card magicians. In fact, one of
my closest friends in life is a guy called Jason
Danny who had Jason on the show. Yeah, I saw that,
and Jason's kind of like my little brother, you know.
We were both very close to Darwin or Tears, and
we both do high end hard techniques and that sort
of stuff. But I don't do as much magic anymore.
I mean, I still remember like five tricks that I
used to do, and I can. I can dust them
off and do them, but it's really just not my interest.
My interest is the techniques of cheating, and that's always
been a passion for me. So if I'm sitting down
with a pack of cards. I'm practicing various card controls,
you know that come from the table deals, and especially
dice switches. I just have a I started off doing
a lot of card stuff, but now really my focus
is dice moves. I like those traditional dice moves, and
I guess I've always liked the challenge. So dice moves
for me sit at the very sort of pinnacle of difficulty.
The very very good dice moves are very hard to do,
and I do all of the hard high end dice switches,
the palms which is in the tip switch and the
fly switch, and that sort of stuff I don't do.
I think the next level above that is these dice
controls like the air ball that Robert Asil talks about
in the book and that I've known three people personally
that have actually worked that in clubs and casinos and
have made money doing it. But as you find when
you read the book and from Roberts comments, basically they
were covering their nut. It's just not effective. And what
we're talking about for the listener is that you take
a pair of dice and you shake them. It looks
like a fair shake and then you throw them and
you kill the six on one of those those dice,
and it's an amazing thing. And I don't know, you've
probably had a chance to see somebody do it, but
when you see it, it's out of sight. It's crazy.
Speaker 1: So just to give the listeners a little more detail,
one die spins in the air. This is not a slide,
but the dye goes in the air and but does
not bounce off the back wall and it's spinning and
so it stays with the top side up and the
other die bounces off the wall. Yeah, and the problem is, yeah,
I've gone out and tried to make money at this
with somebody who spent many, many, many years working on it.
And the problem is that from above, from a camera,
it looks like a slide because you don't have the
depth perception. And even from you know, a boxman could
think you're trying to slide to die too. So you
can't do it over and over and over. You know,
maybe you get to do it once or twice, and
then you've got to try to go to another casino.
It's just it's just a very difficult way to make
any serious money.
Speaker 2: That's right, And you're right, you've got to turn it
from the eye in the sky. It looks bad. It
travels in a flat move across the top of the table,
even though as you've as you well know, because you've
seen it, you can put the cane across the table
and it's flying over that cane, you know, so you
know it's getting air. But it just doesn't look good
from the camera. So yeah, it's just but it's as
Robert Assiel caught it, the Impossible Dream.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's different from all these guys who make
money by teaching people how to dice setting all of
these it's just such a sucker thing. And and and
and Bobby A is very very critical of those people
in the book.
Speaker 1: Yeahs as well he should be.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, anyway, I want to thank you for doing this.
This has been great and for the listeners. Again. The
book is called Thieving Bastards and it is available on Amazon.
Is there if are you on any social media? If
people wanted to try to get a hold of you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So the book is available in hardcover from my website.
I'm in Australia. It ships from Australia, but it's it's
it's a big, heavy book, and it's a high quality book.
I know you've had a chance to read the book
and see it physically. It's a super high quality product.
But yeah, it's available from my website which is www
dot Thecolddeckcompany dot com, so you can get it in
hardcover there, and it's also available as a kindling. And
I'm also I'm on Instagram as the Cold Deck Company.
If you search for Andrewimhurst, you'll find me on.
Speaker 1: And I'll put links to your website and your Instagram
and put I'll put links to all of it in
the show notes so people can confind you.
Speaker 2: Thanks. I really appreciate it. As I said, I've been
reading your book and I really enjoyed the especially the
chapter with Chip Reese. And I was quite interested to
find out that he was the manager of the poker
room at The Juice from about seventy nine into the
early eighties, which is interesting because Rodd got his start
working as a cheat in the Juice.
Speaker 1: Oh I know, and am I heard like whenever whenever
he was putting in a cooler on the poker table,
Chip would like high tail it out of the room.
He didn't want to be around when when that kind
of stuff was going on. So yeah, he has some
great stories about dealing at the dunes. It was too
bad that those those didn't really make an end of
the book.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, well actually.
Speaker 1: I heard, I heard the very first time that he
dealt he he was dealing seven cards, standing, sat down,
shuffled the deck, dealt out the hands, and he dealt
himself in. And because you know, because he was he
was used to guardina where the dealer is, you know, yeah,
and the players are like, buddy, you know, you don't.
Speaker 2: Need to play. I thought it was interesting that Chip says,
he says, you know, a lot of these cheats they
learned a cheap before they learned how to play. And
that's exactly what Rodd says. Oh, I said, you know
to me, he said, I learned how to cheat before
I learned how to play. And then once you learn
how to cheat, you never learned how to play because
you don't need to, right right. Well, thank you very much, Richard,
I really appreciate the opportunity. I really appreciate it absolutely.
Speaker 1: Thank you, and have a good one everybody. I'll see
you next time.
Speaker 2: Free audio post production by Alphonic Dot com