James Swain - Super Con

“Why not tell us now?” Night Train asked.

“Because I don’t know which ones they are.”

“You’ve lost me, man.”

“MGM’s blackjack tables have been compromised by a faulty piece of equipment that makes it impossible for the pit boss to detect marked cards. I plan to secretly mark cards in five MGM casinos. I need to visit the different MGM properties to determine which are the best targets. Then I’ll contact you and give you the names of which casinos will be taken down.”

“Don’t the casinos change their cards every few hours?” Night Train asked.

“They used to, but it was costing too much money,” he said. “Now they change cards once a day, early in the morning. It’s an easy schedule to work around.”

“Mark them how?” Night Train asked.

“I’m going to use luminous paint to mark the tens, jacks, queens, kings, and aces.”

“Don’t you need special glasses to read that stuff?”

“Tinted sunglasses do the trick,” he said.

“But a pit boss can read luminous marks,” Night Train said. “That’s why a pit boss will come up beside the dealer and watch the game. They have a special way of reading the backs of the cards. I saw it on the Discovery Channel. Or was it bullshit?”

“It was real,” he said. “Like I said, the equipment at MGM properties is flawed and won’t allow the pit boss to read the marks. We’re home free.”

“If this scam takes place at five casinos, how are you going to be in five places at once?” Night Train asked.

“The scams will be staggered over the course of the day,” he explained. “I’ll hop between casinos and work with each of you.”

He paused to let everything sink in. Satisfied that his partners were on the same page, he continued. “Each of you will scam a different MGM casino. Before you show up, you’re going to call the VIP host and announce your arrival. By doing that, you’re guaranteed star treatment when you walk through the front doors. Got it?”

“That shouldn’t be too hard,” Night Train said.

“When you visit your assigned casino, be sure you wear your Super Bowl rings and lots of bling. Remember, you’re pretending to be BPs.”

“BP? Like the oil company?” Choo-Choo asked.

“BP stands for Big Player. Also known as a sucker.”

Choo-Choo scowled, as did the others. They’d been pissing away their money for years without understanding the arrangement, so he explained. “There are three kinds of players in a casino. Advantage players, who have an edge over the house. Think card counter. Then there are cheats that rob the joints, like me. Everyone else is a sucker. There are no winners.”

“No winners?” Choo-Choo said.

“No sir. If you won all the time, they’d ban you.”

The football players nodded. So far everything he’d said had made sense. Now came the tricky part.

“Blackjack games have different betting limits,” he said. “Low-limit tables have minimum bets of five dollars and maximum bets of five hundred dollars. High-limit tables have minimum bets of a hundred dollars and a maximum of ten thousand dollars. The games I’m going to rig will be low limit. Know why? Because surveillance hardly watches low-limit games.”

“How do you make money in a low-limit game?” Night Train asked. “Even if you’re cheating, you can’t win that much.”

“You’re going to ask the pit boss to raise the limits at your tables. But first you play for a little while and lose. That’s when you ask the pit boss to raise the table limit so you can bet more. When the pit boss asks you how much, you say, ‘Ten grand a hand.’”

“Will he go along with that?”

“Of course he’ll go along with it. It’s what suckers do when they get behind. At that point, you should have drawn a good crowd. I’ll be in the crowd, wearing my tinted sunglasses. That’s when we start scamming.”

Night Train wasn’t far behind and said, “You’re going to read the dealer’s cards and signal us how to play our hands. Is that the deal?”

“Correct. I play your hands for you, and we clean up.”

Night Train flashed his famous smile. His teammates also looked happy. If the boss was good with the scam, then so were the troops.

“Remember,” he said. “You’re pretending to be suckers. That means talking to the crowd and flirting with the girls. In other words, don’t get serious when you start winning.”

“Just keep acting like dumb shits, is what you’re saying,” Night Train said.

“I can do that,” Choo-Choo said.

“No problem,” Sammy chimed in.

Clete and Assassin grunted that it wouldn’t be hard to act like dumb shits.

“Last thing,” he said. “When you reach a million bucks in winnings, you ask the pit boss to raise the table limit to fifty grand a hand. The pit boss will say yes, in the hopes you’ll lose everything back that you’ve won.” He paused. “Are we good?”

“I think we’re real good,” Night Train said. “Aren’t we, boys?”

His teammates bobbed their heads in unison. Loyal to the point of being blind, they would have jumped into a vat of boiling oil if Night Train had asked them to.

It was time to explain the signals. Signals let a crew secretly communicate inside a casino. For the super con, Billy planned to employ a sky signal. A sky signal was visible to the crew but invisible to the surveillance cameras, which filmed straight down from the ceiling.

The sky signal used a common beer bottle, held at chest height. If the bottle was in the left hand, with the right hand below but not touching it, this meant take a card.

If the bottle was held with the right hand, with the left hand below, this meant to stand pat. The difference in these two actions was plainly visible to a player at the table but couldn’t be seen — or filmed — by the eye-in-the-sky.

Left hand holding the bottle, take a card. Right hand holding the bottle, stand pat.

The third signal was called the chin. If Billy dipped his chin, it meant start the play. This was also invisible to the eye-in-the-sky.

He ran through the signals a dozen times, just to make sure the football players got it right. In conclusion, he said, “If I take a drink of my beer, it means we’re done. Any questions?”

There were none.

“Now get to practice before you’re late,” he said. “The prop bets can’t be fixed if you guys are benched at the start of the game.”

“You got it, boss,” Night Train said.

And with that, the football players burst out laughing.

Mags came to the set filled with confidence, the burden of Grimes’s threat to destroy her career a thing of the past. The world was her oyster, and she couldn’t wait to nail today’s scene and deliver the kind of performance the CBS honchos needed to green-light Night and Day .

To her surprise, the set was deserted. No cameramen, no crew, no snippy director with a bad attitude, and, worst of all, no Rand. The shoot had been cancelled, the equipment packed up, and no one had bothered to tell her.

“Somebody should have called you. I mean, you are the star,” Amber said.

“This is Hollywood, honey. They call you when they feel like it.”

She checked her cell phone. There were no messages, leading her to wonder if Rand was sick in his room. On a hunch, she called the hotel’s main line and asked for him.

“I’m sorry, but there’s no one registered in the hotel under that name,” the operator said.

“He’s staying in your damn hotel. Check again,” she said.

The operator’s fingers danced on a keyboard. “Here he is. Rand Waters. According to my computer, he checked out late yesterday. Is there someone else you’d care to speak with?”