James Swain: Super Con

Las Vegas was where people came to make bad decisions, the town carefully constructed to propel visitors toward disaster. Every year, forty million tourists made a variety of bad decisions, including sleeping with people they barely knew, getting drunk enough to pass out in public, and gambling away their hard-earned dough on games they had virtually no chance of winning. That was the town’s origins, and it wasn’t changing anytime soon.

Even the town’s wise guys made bad decisions. Billy Cunningham was such a person, and his bad decision was to return to Vegas knowing a Chinese gangster named Broken Tooth wanted him dead. Broken Tooth had already sent a hit man to kill him and might try it again.

Billy had decided to risk it. People who cheated for a living risked getting hurt. It came with the territory. Cheat in a poker game, and you risked getting your thumbs broken. Cheat a casino, and you risked being hauled into a back room and beaten up. And if you double-crossed your partner when fixing the Super Bowl, you ran the risk of having a contract put out on your life.

Caesars was jumping. The entrance resembled a parking lot, and Billy watched the cab’s meter run while waiting to be dropped off. Soon he was in the main lobby. While guests waited on line to register, there was a bust going down, courtesy of the gaming board. The busted cheat wore silver bracelets and stared dejectedly at the floor. The gaming agents were so focused on their suspect that they didn’t see Billy come in.

He circled around them. The busted cheat’s wardrobe screamed Russian. Run-down Nikes, a threadbare sports jacket, and a sheared haircut more befitting a war refugee. The casinos knew about the Russian gangs and had trained their surveillance teams to be on the lookout. Their scam was called whacking. A Russian cheat would stand next to a particular make of slot machine and record the machine’s play on a cell phone. The machine had a flawed random number generator chip that spit out predictable sequences every few hours. The Russian left and went to a motel, where the information was sent to a foreign server that calculated when the machine would pay a jackpot. Upon returning, the Russian would play the same machine and eventually win.

A great scam, unless you happened to get caught. Nevada had a law that forbade using an electronic device to beat its games, including cell phones. Cheats who got busted using devices went down hard.

“Coming through,” a voice said.

A uniformed bellman pushing a luggage cart bore down on him. His name tag said KENNETH/SAN DIEGO. As Billy moved to let him pass, the bellman stopped and drew a pocket-size Beretta from his pants. He jammed the barrel into Billy’s rib cage.

“Start walking toward the elevators,” the bellman said.

Billy’s eyes darted around the lobby. He counted five gaming agents, only they were too preoccupied with their bust to notice that something bad was going down.

“Let me guess. Your name isn’t Kenneth, and you’re not from San Diego,” he said.

“Hong Kong. Keep walking. I’ll shoot you right here if I have to,” the bellman said.

“With all this heat?”

“I’ll be gone before they know it.”

The elevators were at the far end of the lobby. He began walking, praying that an opportunity would present itself to alert the gaming agents. The bellman hung close to his side.

“You don’t look Chinese,” he said.

“Plastic surgery. It took three operations.”

“Your English is good, too. No accent.”

“Rosetta Stone.”

“I’ll double your fee if you let me go.”

The gun’s barrel was suddenly in his ass. It made him jump a little. They came to the bank of elevators, and the bellman summoned a car. Billy stole a glance at the mirrors that lined the wall. None of the gaming agents had followed them. Was this the end? It sure felt like it.

“How did you know I’d be here?” he asked.

“Broken Tooth said you’d come back to Caesars to talk to the football players, iron out the details. Broken Tooth is smart that way,” the bellman said.

“How long you been waiting?”

“Two days.”

“And the hotel didn’t notice?”

The bellman laughed under his breath. “I took a job. They’re shorthanded, so I agreed to work double shifts. It was only a matter of time before you came in, and I spotted you.”

“You got lucky, admit it.”

“Luck had nothing to do with it.”

An elevator car landed and its doors parted. The car was empty and they boarded. He spun around and watched the bellman slip the gun into his pocket, then draw a gilded knife with a pearl handle from a sheath hidden by his vest. The tip of the knife was dripping a substance the color of gold, and he guessed it was some kind of exotic poison. Elevators had surveillance cameras, only no one in the casino ever watched them. The doors began to close.

“Any final requests?” the bellman asked.

“Just don’t make me suffer,” he said.

Sunday, two weeks before the Super Bowl

Fremont Street was the armpit of Las Vegas, with more derelicts and hookers than you could shake a policeman’s nightstick at. It was also home to a dozen no-frills casinos with two-buck beers and penny slot machines.

Tonight’s target was the Golden Gate, the oldest joint in town. Billy’s crew was working the scam along with a crew called the Gypsies. Six members of Billy’s crew and six members of the Gypsy clan made a dozen cheats ripping off one poor casino. The Golden Gate didn’t have a prayer.

Billy had never worked a scam with another crew, but this was a special occasion. In two short weeks during Super Bowl weekend, the combined crews would pull a heist with a potential payday in the millions of dollars. It was called a super con and worth the extra effort.

Super cons were different from regular cons. A regular con could be pulled many times, a super con only once. Once a casino determined how it had been ripped off by a super con, the other joints in town were notified in order to stop it from happening again.

Before the super con went down, the two crews needed to get acquainted. As a test run, Billy had decided they should pull a scam called playing the lights on the Golden Gate, which required plenty of cooperation. If the crews could pull this off, the super con would be easy.

Billy was the captain of his crew. Because the casinos knew him, he wore disguises during jobs. Tonight’s getup consisted of a baseball cap, nonprescription glasses called zeros, and a rubber tire beneath his shirt. As another precaution, he entered a casino twenty minutes after his crew. To kill time now, he decided to try out the zip line on Fremont Street. It looked like a pure adrenaline rush, and right up his alley.

“Sure you don’t want to join me?” he asked.

Leon, his African American limo driver, shook his head. Billy had recently started giving Leon a cut from each job to ensure Leon’s silence if they got busted. Leon was living large and loving it.

“No thanks, boss. I’m afraid of heights.”

Billy’s cell phone rang. He was hoping the caller was an old flame named Maggie Flynn. He liked to think Mags still cared about him, but maybe he was kidding himself. When it came to love, he was a sucker, just like everyone else. He answered with a cheery “Hello.”

The caller was male and spoke with an Asian accent. “Cunningham? My name Wan Kuok-koi. People call me Broken Tooth. You know who I am?”

Some names rang bells. Others set off fire alarms. Broken Tooth was a Chinese gangster who ran a gang of Triads. Prostitution, loan-sharking, and contract killing paid the bills, but the big profits came from gambling. Billy wondered what had brought him to this side of the pond. “Sure do. I’m busy right now. Let’s talk some other time.”