James Swain - Super Con

“There you go,” she said.

If there was any person inside a casino who Billy feared, it was the pit boss.

Pit bosses ran the blackjack games and were trained to watch dealers and players for any suspicious behavior. If cheating was suspected, a pit boss would pick up a house phone, call security, and have the offending party hauled away.

There were more than five hundred pit bosses employed in Las Vegas. One hundred of these were seasoned pros who could smell a hustle a mile away. The rest didn’t know jack and had gotten their jobs because they had juice within the casino.

Billy maintained a database of pit bosses, which included the pit boss’s name, his casino, a description of his physical appearance and hair color, and whether or not he was a problem. The information was kept on Billy’s phone, giving him easy access.

The first MGM property he and Mags visited was the Luxor. The most outrageous joint on the Strip, the Luxor was designed like an Egyptian pyramid and had a three-hundred-thousand-watt beam spitting out of the top along with an ersatz Sphinx guarding the front entrance.

“I’ll wait for you in the bar,” Mags said.

He took a stroll through the blackjack pit. He counted four single-deck games where a dealing shoe was not in use. One of these games would soon have its cards marked with luminous paint. A flashy female pit boss with red hair stood in the pit’s center, supervising the action. He pulled her up on his database. Her name was Lexie Lowman, and she was new.

He found Mags at a table in the bar. “Pit boss is green. This shouldn’t be too hard.”

“You going to run interference for me?” she asked.

“That was the plan.” Taking a stack of hundreds from his pocket, he slipped them to her beneath the table. “Here’s your play money. There are four tables with handheld games in the pit. Pick any one. I’ll join you in a few minutes.”

“Got it. That bridge in your mouth is hideous.”

“I was just going to say the same thing about your disguise.”

“Thanks. By the way, did you bring the paint?”

Taking the tin of luminous paint from his other pocket, he also passed it beneath the table. Mags slipped the tin into her purse and rose from the table.

“It’s great to finally be running together,” he said.

She flashed a smile. Beneath the hideous makeup and sloppy wig, she was still a beauty, her smoldering green eyes an invitation for the best kind of trouble. Slinging her purse over her shoulder, she sauntered out of the bar and entered the blackjack pit.

It didn’t take Mags long to pick her spot. Like a shark smelling blood in the water, she sat down at a table with a break-in dealer, which was a dealer in training who worked a low-limit game during slow times, and threw three hundred-dollar bills onto the felt. The dealer made the exchange and pushed two stacks of chips toward her.

Billy left the bar a few minutes later and approached Mags’s table. The seats had filled up, leaving only one empty chair. He grabbed it.

“Name’s Ty Lubbick,” he announced. “Nice to meet you all.”

The other players at the table grunted hello. Casinos were fun places at night. But in the morning, they were deadly, the atmosphere as lively as a supermarket checkout line.

“Is this a lucky table?” he asked, keeping up the banter.

“It hasn’t been so far,” one of the players grumbled.

“Maybe we can change that.”

He tossed $200 onto the felt, and the dealer turned it into chips. The dealer said, “Place your bets,” and each player placed chips into the betting circle.

The dealer clumsily sailed cards around the table, hitting drinks and stacks of cards. Sailing cards was an art that this dealer had yet to master, and he mumbled an apology.

Billy looked across the table at his partner. Mags lit up a cigarette and returned the pack to her purse. Her fingers found the tin of luminous paint, unscrewed the lid, and applied a tiny amount to all five fingertips. Every painter had a unique style. For Maggie, it was the ability to load up for five applications at once.

As Mags checked her hand, her first and second fingers did the dirty work and painted the backs of the cards. The movement was light-years ahead of what he’d been practicing in his condo, her movements so polished they were nearly invisible.

The dealer coughed violently. Most dealers hated players who smoked but couldn’t voice a complaint without fear of losing their jobs. The consummate pro, Mags knew better than to have the dealer pissed off at her.

“Should I put this out?” she asked.

“That’s okay,” the dealer said.

“No, it’s not. You’re allergic. I’ll get rid of it.”

Mags crushed the butt into the metal ashtray built into the table. Billy loved it. Mags had turned the dealer into a friend, always a smart play when scamming a game. Mags could not paint all the high cards without some help. On the next round, Billy pointed at the words printed in gold on the felt layout. “Excuse me, but what does it mean, ‘Dealer stands on soft seventeen’?”

The dealer explained the rule. When the dealer received an ace and a six, it was considered a “soft” total of seventeen, and he was required to stand pat and not take another card.

“Got it,” Billy said.

While this conversation took place, Mags painted two more cards.

And so it went. For the next half hour, Mags painted cards while Billy kept the dealer distracted. It went without a hitch and reminded him of that day in Providence when Mags had recruited him into helping her sell fake cashmere sweaters to a bunch of hard hats working a construction job. That event was a turning point, and it led to his becoming a grifter.

Mags had made it seem easy to separate suckers from their money. In reality, hustling was hard work, dangerous as well. Except with Mags, for whom stealing was absolute child’s play. Leaving Luxor, they rode an otherwise empty tram to their next target, the MGM Grand.

“You haven’t lost your touch,” he said.

“Old habits die hard,” she said.

“How many cards in the deck did you paint?”

“All the high ones. I counted.”

The admission blew him away. Because the game was single deck, Mags had memorized each card she’d painted and kept the information stored in her head.

“I’m not just another pretty face, you know,” she added.

The pit boss at the MGM Grand was a rookie, and Billy and Mags found a single-deck blackjack game and went to work. The hotel was hosting a convention, and there was plenty of action inside the casino. As a result, Billy had to distract the dealer only a handful of times.

“Give me some ten-dollar chips,” he said, throwing money on the felt.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” the dealer said politely.

“Why not?”

“The casino doesn’t have ten-dollar chips,” the dealer explained.

“That’s crazy. Every casino has ten-dollar chips. What’s wrong with this place?”

The dealer acted confused. No casino in the world had chips with a denomination of ten dollars. But that hadn’t stopped cheats from posing this question to dim-witted dealers and momentarily distracting them while their partners did the dirty work.

Painting the deck at the MGM went without a hitch. Thirty minutes later, they walked out the front door and down the sidewalk to the intersection of Tropicana and the Strip. Their next stop was the Mandalay Bay, another MGM property. It was two blocks away, and they decided to hike it.

“I want you to explain something to me,” Mags said. “The casinos have equipment that detects luminous paint on the backs of cards. How do you plan to get around that?”