It was beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are.
‘THE OCTOPUS MAROONED’ BY O. HENRY
‘John, steal whatever you want, but don’t rob the man who saved your life.’
When Ray Ryan walked out of the rigged game on 20 December 1963, the foundations of John Aspinall’s life and aspirations were shakier than they had ever been. To clear up this nasty affair he would have to pay back Ryan in full. And very quickly. He had no idea what Ryan’s reaction, on reflection, would be. He must have felt himself in a vacuum.
There was just so much he could take out of the Clermont: he’d tried and tried to skim off more, but his was now a limited company – and there were limits. Which is why he’d had to borrow so much from Ryan in the first place. He was like a cornered tiger. With his psychological make-up, all he could do was attack. For Aspinall, regarded by so many as the fun-loving, eccentric ‘Aspers’, was an almighty rogue. He created an image of himself, that he won and lost fortunes, that he gambled. He never gambled: he played games of chance. And he almost always hedged his bets.
John Burke had no early warning of Aspinall’s plan to cheat Ray Ryan. He was told only a short time before, when arrangements were made for the upstairs game in the Salle Privée. When Aspinall explained that ‘needs must’, Burke understood just how panicked the owner of the Clermont Club had become. And he went along with it.
Mr Money witnessed all the events of that December evening knowing exactly who would be intrigued, delighted, to hear of them. The next morning at Moscow Road he eagerly divulged all his information to Billy Hill, who now became fully aware of Aspinall’s desperation and of his failed scheme to avoid paying back Ryan.
That afternoon, Billy Hill and had a talk at Moscow Road. Hill was quiet, but adamant that his number two should contact John Burke. Aspinall, he said, was now ready for the ‘Big Edge’. was still not certain about John Burke’s reaction, but he could tell how serious Hill was about getting into the Clermont. He wasn’t going to sit still.
‘Billy had simply bided his time,’ said . ‘From the moment Mr Money gave us the word about the Ryan fuck-up, he knew Aspinall would go for it. He’d have probably gone for it anyway, he was a greedy bastard.’
Still, did not think John Burke would agree. Billy Hill asked him to arrange a meeting, and Bobby argued that his friend would not go for it, or recommend it to Aspinall. Billy just said, ‘Do it anyway.’
There was no chance that would not follow Billy Hill’s instruction. The two Irishmen met at the Star, where John Burke had often sat in a corner having a drink while Billy Hill sipped his tea. The taciturn and careful McKew said only that he had ‘some business’ with Billy Hill and that he thought John should have a meeting with the crime boss. It would be of mutual benefit, he promised. It was a shock to John Burke, who knew that Bobby and Billy were friends but wisely had never inquired further: ‘I found out for the first time that my old friend not only worked for Billy Hill, but that he was a key figure in the proposed scam. It was important, because I trusted Bobby.’
Of course, for John Burke it was one thing to have a drink with the gangster; quite another to go into business with him. Burke was living in an elegant Mayfair town house, 4 Aldford Street, that had been the London pied-à-terre of the Aga Khan. His son Prince Aly Khan during his romantic excursions had entertained his conquests there (he said of society Englishmen: ‘They call me a nigger and I sleep with their wives.’) There was a secret panel where Aly Khan hid his drinks when his parents visited.
Tempted as he was to have a drink, John Burke wanted to keep a cool head for his visitor. He did not know what to think, or, indeed, what to say, to Hill. had made him somewhat aware of the deal, but it sounded full of risks and dangers. Going bankrupt at the Clermont was one thing; going crooked a much more frightening prospect.
Billy Hill arrived dressed in a smart blue suit. He had a smile on his face as he handed John Burke his hat. Tea, he said, would be very pleasant. John Burke made a pot and brought it into the drawing room of his small but elegant house. The two men sat back in their armchairs. They could have been about to discuss the football results. They had a gossip, but the pleasantries ended quite quickly.
The conversation moved on to Ray Ryan. What a mess. Billy Hill did not think much of Signor Biondi as a card sharp. Indeed, he had arranged for to drive one of his lads, Bobby Warren, over to Chelsea Reach to have a quiet word with him. Biondi, he said, would now leave the country.
The Italian had been a worrying embarrassment, but his most serious mistake had been not to ask Hill’s permission for his misdeeds. Hill had interests in several casinos and did not want attention drawn to his activities. Indeed, if Aspinall wanted to make money, he was going about it all the wrong way. Hill got to the point: ‘You are very foolish. If you want a job done properly, I’ll do it for you.’
John Burke explained that he could not speak for his boss on this issue. He would tell Aspinall of their conversation, and, if necessary, arrange another meeting. There was cautious delight in Aspinall’s eyes when he heard of Hill’s approach. But he thought about it long and hard before making a move. If it went wrong, he’d be ruined. His business and social life would end. Howletts would have to be closed down. Yet if he didn’t get more money quickly, his hopes and ambitions would be quashed.
Finally he agreed to go to John Burke’s home for a meeting with Billy Hill and . Again John Burke made tea for Hill, and opened his drinks cabinet. The discussion didn’t take long; about half an hour. The conversation was amicable and did not dwell on the technicalities. Hill and would deal with those. Aspinall simply had to go along with their plans and make himself lots and lots of money.
Desperate as he was, Aspinall was still circumspect before finalizing an arrangement with a powerful man renowned for violence and for keeping everything under his control. Aspinall contacted Sydney Summers, who, as we know, had been of great assistance in the past to him and John Burke. Aspinall, a dreadful snob who would never have entertained Sydney at his own home, respected his intelligence and his contacts, especially those in the police hierarchy.
They had a conversation about the Billy Hill proposal, somewhat absurd in a way, but which was to have dramatic financial consequences for many of the rich and famous. Yes, said Sydney Summers, Billy Hill was a scary man of violence, a tough character, possibly one of the most dangerous men around. But the wonderful paradox was that he was straight in his own particular way, even in his errant dealings. Everybody liked Billy, even some of the people he murdered.
‘Is it something that will work for me, Sydney?’ asked an increasingly anxious Aspinall.
Summers peered through milk-bottle lenses and nodded wisely. In his thick accent, he gave Billy Hill a glowing reference, ‘Oh, yes. If he says he will do it and makes a deal, he will stick with it. Billy Hill is an honest crook.’
‘After that,’ said , ‘Aspinall grabbed at it with both hands; he was dishonest to his roots, so there was no trouble with his conscience.’
Or with his business expertise. He was no rollover on the percentages; everywhere else the deal with Billy Hill was 50-50, but Aspinall persuaded his new associate that with the amounts of money involved it should be 60–40 in Aspinall’s favour. He was the one supplying the big golden pigeons. Billy Hill accepted this: 40 per cent of the riches was far better than nothing at all. It was agreed on a handshake at 4 Aldford Street.
The ‘Big Edge’ was brilliantly designed. John Burke regards it as ‘psychologically and mathematically brilliant’, and says in some wonder: ‘Einstein would have been proud of it.’
Aspinall, no stranger to wagering with advantages, was in for one of gambling’s most secret and sensational scams. He wanted the profit, but also wanted to minimize his personal risk, to distance himself from it, as John Burke explained: ‘I put John and Hill together because I didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of the bloody thing. John had said: “Burkie, I want you to deal with Hill, and here are my conditions . . .” I argued that I could do no such thing; how could I make deals if Hill responded with his conditions?
‘John was the boss, and for many years I had always done what he’d asked. For the first time I didn’t do exactly what he wanted; I didn’t want to be in between two such dangerous men. John didn’t like that at all.
‘But in time, of course, I was the link. John never wanted to meet Hill if he could possibly avoid it, so I used to go and see him. I was the intermediary. There was never any problem. We’d have a chat. It was happily easy for me to deal with him, but rumour had it that he was not always so polite.
‘I don’t altogether blame John Aspinall when he had been for years spending money like water, because money was coming in like water. It’s hard to curtail. So when John did eventually decide to do business with Billy Hill, I acquiesced with these decisions. It would be hypocritical to say that I didn’t.
‘Obviously, morally, I should have taken a stand and perhaps even resigned. I saw that it meant financing John Aspinall’s lifestyle through cheating rather than through stealing money from the Clermont – money that belonged to the shareholders and the taxman – in order to pay his bills. A choice between Scylla and Charybdis.
‘Enough time has gone by to tell the truth. It is the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Clearly, when Billy Hill was alive and when Gypsy was still around, this would not have been a sensible enterprise. I got on well with Billy Hill at our meetings and I wouldn’t have wanted to embarrass him with murder, especially my own. Seriously, it would have been a life and death matter. Now, I believe it is a part of history that should be shared. So, here goes.’
And a nightingale sang about Berkeley Square.
‘I’m not suggesting I’ve grown a halo. I do this with no malice, but just to correct so many, many errors that have been put forward over the years. Not because people wanted to mislead, but because they did not have access to the true facts.
‘They had John’s stories, but that’s what they were –stories. This is how it was. He was a very curious character, neither a saint nor a demon. In his own mind, he was entitled to rob in order to have the funds to do what was important in the world. That was what he believed.
‘The Clermont, the glittering jewel of clubs, magnet for all the big names in the gambling world, took for a ride just about everybody who was unlucky enough to walk through its doors on the evenings when the financial outcome of the gambling was not determined by luck. It was grand larceny. But very clever.’
As the Christmas and New Year holidays ended in 1963–1964, preparations went forward to introduce the ‘Big Edge’ to the Clermont Club. There were clubs where the ‘Big Edge’ could operate every night, but the Clermont had a tight circle, an exclusive membership watched over by the careful ‘Porchy’ Carnarvon. Aspinall was intelligent and knew the risks involved. He allowed Billy Hill’s boys to ‘perform’ once a week, at the most. He would brief them before every evening of cheating the Clermont members.
‘It was so simple it was brilliant,’ said , who still shakes his head at the wonder of it. ‘No one ever had an inkling.’
Aspinall had always been subtly manipulative about soaking, like a vampire, the wealth of all those he lured into his gambling dens. John Burke said, ‘Aspers didn’t care whose money he took. The psychology behind the cheating was twisting all the rules of fraud – you couldn’t see the swindle for looking at it, hearing it almost. It was advertised, but all these aristocrats and tycoons, powerful men and women, would not believe what was happening. It was like stealing a wallet, snatching a handbag, but it was as though Fagin was in charge – they didn’t feel a thing.’
The details of the method by which players were cheated have remained an underworld and gambling secret until now.
The normal method of cheating at chemmy was for the proprietor to employ a clever croupier like Louis the Rat who could do things with the cards, like arranging for a big winning bank to arrive at a fixed place, when the cards had been shuffled between each shoe. This was the simplest part of his legerdemain; a house player would win four, five, six, eight, ten coups the first time he got the bank.
Sometimes the cards were pre-prepared, known as ‘the sandwich’, and they were just inserted by sleight of hand into the pack and either the proprietor or one of his house players had a long bank and won a nice bit of money. That had problems, as John Burke explained: ‘The main snag about that is that if it happens regularly, and people at the table are not complete idiots, the players want to know what’s going on. They get suspicious.
‘If it was going to work, which it did, it had to be smarter. And then the psychology was brought in. In brains versus greed there is no contest. All true gamblers, and even non-gamblers with a modicum of self-confidence, believe that a slightly uphill struggle as exemplified by fractional odds against can, by means of skill or even a little luck, be transformed into slight odds-on. And given the opportunity to bet at even money on a proposition that is mathematically odds-on, surely no proper man with red blood – or blue – in his veins would refuse to have a go.
‘Betting with the odds in your favour is technically known as “value”. I have always supported the idea that value ought to be taught as a separate school subject, or, at least, as a recognized brand of mathematics.The laws of probability and chance have a much stronger bearing on our affairs than any algebraic equation.
‘Value is an essential component of risk assessment, which plays a vital role in our everyday life. The obvious examples of businesses that are dependent on understanding risk assessment and using it intelligently are insurance and book-making.
‘But what if you take away most of the risk? What I am going to explain has never been described before. It is unique. It is a system of cheating that is technically ingenious and extremely clever, both psychologically and mathematically.
‘In gambling there are two types of people – winners and losers. An easy example – bookmaking. People backing horses. The bookmakers are risk assessors and make odds accordingly, in such a way that there is a percentage in their favour; assuming the money they take in is evenly distributed, for every £110 they take in they pay out £100. The bookmakers, who often have a bigger edge, win, and the punters lose.
‘Poker is a good example. There are two kinds of players at poker. The player who plays to the odds; careful, tight play. He only risks his money when he thinks his hand is worth it. Then there’s the open player who likes to play at every hand and bet freely, and comes in all the time even with a pair of twos, and might even play and draw four to an ace in old-fashioned draw poker. Of course, such a player, provided he pays his debts, is always extremely welcome. He’s the guy you want in the game. He may have a lucky night, but on balance he’s going to be a loser.
‘At chemmy you have the same thing. This is universal to gambling. In chemmy it’s not quite so obvious to see it, but it is very much there. I should know. I have been somewhat involved in the game. Each coup, each hand, is a contest between two parties. The bank, who has a shoe and deals the cards, and the person who goes banco and plays the hand against the bank. It’s a straightforward contest.
‘The bank has a built-in advantage. And that’s official. After a long evening at Annabel’s in 1963 with Basil de Ferranti, who headed his family’s huge wireless and electronics company, I had the game analysed and computer-programmed by Professor Nigel Foster at the London School of Economics.
‘Basil de Ferranti put the results through his company computers and they concluded that in chemmy, the bank’s built-in advantage is roughly 1.78 per cent. Call it 1.8 per cent – the person calling banco has that shade of odds against him.
‘The bank has that advantage because when the player who called banco asks for a third card, it is dealt face up. Depending on his hand, that gives the bank a small or big advantage because the bank now knows, mathematically, whether to rest or draw a card himself. During a playing session, this translates into 1.8 per cent in the bank’s favour.
‘The cagnotte, of course, has no effect on the mathematical odds of each coup. However, it means that because 5 per cent of the profit is deducted when the bank wins a coup, financially speaking, the bank is no longer a winner – all players now contribute to the house.
‘However, with the cagnotte gone, the bank was always going have the edge.
‘Or was it? There’s always been a feeling among chemmy players that the person who just ran his bank and did nothing else was a mean player and was rather despised, whereas the open player who called banco all the time and bet freely, the Lord Derby figure, was the hero. He was the man every careful player and gambling promoter wanted in the game.
‘The psychology behind the cheating was inspired. When the law changed and a table charge was substituted for the cagnotte, it meant everyone sat down and paid a certain amount for the privilege of playing a shoe of chemmy; the table charge was the same for all players. Whether you did nothing but wait for your bank and run your bank, or whether you bet freely, it cost the same amount to play in the shoe. This accentuated the difference between the careful player and the betting player. And, forcefully, the advantage of the bank.
‘Mathematically speaking, the optimum procedure would be to sit quietly and when your bank came to you, run your bank and then sit quietly until it came around the next time. Like waiting for a train, chemin defer, going around the railway: deadly boring but mathematically correct. It’s like someone today playing poker on computer against an anonymous somebody in Australia; it’s not much fun. People who followed this rule, of course, were very unpopular and considered mean. Especially in the Clermont sort of games, where confident, outgoing people are there for fun, at a table chatting and drinking and trying to impress each other.
‘The cavalier gambler’s flourishes encouraged other people to bet freely. And the constant banco and suivi were music to the ear. The punter could have been shouting “lose” and “lose”, because the statistical chance was that he would.
‘As I said, prior to the “Big Edge” there was basically one form of cheating at chemmy: that was to give a good winning bank to somebody representing the house, the proprietor or one of the house players – the artificial banks known as a “sandwich” or a “sausage”. Strange, then, if the proprietor or his friend or a house player had a winning bank every time. Even idiots would think there was something fishy about this. And the croupier was in on the cheating, and they had to trust the croupier not to talk, and it also lent itself to suspicio. Both were disadvantages.
‘Is there a way of getting around it? Well, there is one way, but it sounds impossible.
‘Could the winning be done by the person who goes banco? What if you turned the odds around? What if you could make the person calling banco odds-on? Apparently, the guy who is betting against the odds? Could he be created the winner by any manner of means?
‘Eventually some genius, it must have been a genius, came up with a scheme to do it. That was the scam. That was the “Big Edge”. A genius worked out a method whereby it wasn’t the bank who won the money, it was the punter. It was the lunatic punter who everyone dreamed of having in the game and who was sure to lose; he was the person who won. That was the genius of the psychological end of it, and the mathematics of it are equally fascinating. God knows, whoever invented it had a special forte, something like the man who broke the Enigma code. It has never been discovered although thousands of people sat down at the tables and played with these cards for tens of thousands of hours. Nobody saw because it was so extremely subtle and so cleverly done.
‘Now, the technicalities: in chemmy the cards are put in a wooden container known as a shoe, and they fit in exactly. The shoe is sloped and the cards come out through a brass mesh at the end, and behind the cards there is a heavy weight.
‘The cards are held in tightly, with the heavy weight behind them and the brass mesh in front of them which they are pulled through one at a time; you can only get one card at a time. The effect of pulling cards through like this puts a slight curvature on the card.
‘If you look at a pack of cards when people are playing bridge or poker, normally the cards are absolutely flat. Some people do have a habit of shuffling in such a way that the cards acquire a curvature. Yet there is no design to it. It is happenstance, what happens to the cards. But in chemmy a slight curvature is normal. You don’t expect the cards to be absolutely flat, because they are not. That helps to explain how this whole thing can be done. Think of it like pulling a file from a rigidly packed filing cabinet. There will be a very, very slight bend to the file. Has to be.
‘Our mastermind worked out a system whereby the cards could be distinguished. He discovered that there were only three possible changes in the cards. One, is that they came out exactly as normal, with that slight curvature from the shoe.
‘Two, is that there is a slight adjustment made to the two diagonally opposite corners, right and left.
‘Three, there is a slight adjustment made to the two diagonally opposite corners, left and right.
‘That way you had three slightly different-shaped cards. When I say slightly, I mean extremely slight. So slight that none of the people playing the game for hundreds and thousands of hours would spot it.
‘Except for the “readers”, Billy Hill’s people, who had perfect eyesight and were trained, practised for hours and hours at the cards coming out of the shoe. Instantly, and I saw them do it often enough, they could “read” the cards. They couldn’t “read” the exact card and call the king of hearts or something, but they knew enough to have the edge. They could pick up the differences. They could put each card into one of three categories.
‘What cards should you put in each category? There are ten values of cards, thirteen cards with four of them having a value of zero. King, queen, jack and ten are each a value of zero. The other nine are between one and nine. What way should they be apportioned into three? The answer they came up with, and somebody must have spent a lot of time working it out, was very clever.
If we say A, B and C. A was a high card – nine, eight, seven. B were the lower cards – six, five, four, three, two. C were the zero cards and the ace.
‘You have two cards, each of which has three possible clarifications – and, therefore, six possible combinations. In order of merit:
1: A and C, the best possible.
2: B and B, the second best.
3: A and A, third best.
4: B and C, fourth best.
5: A and B, fifth best.
6: C and C, worst.
‘Clearly, an A and a C was the best hand, if the closest to nine is the winner. But an A and an A was not, as one might think, the second-best hand. The maximum would be an eight: two nines, eighteen, counted as eight happening one time in nine.
‘Better off with a B and a B, which gives you twenty-five combinations, nine of which give you a nine or an eight. There are four chances at a nine, five at an eight. The odds are 16–9 against getting a “natural”.
‘The bank’s hand and the punter’s hand are classified in exactly the same way. What is important to know now is which is the better hand. Which is, mathematically, the best combination to hold in order to win the coup from the bancoing point of view. It’s not difficult to work out that the best is a high card with a zero. So an A and a C is obviously the best hand. The “reader” knows the combination – it’s like Eddie Chapman and the combination to a safe. If he gets it right, he’s in the money.
‘The well-trained “reader” reads each of the two pairs of cards as they come out of the shoe. He now knows who has the better chance of winning the coup – bank or caller – and therefore he can adopt the mathematically optimum strategy, either calling a bet or keeping quiet. Statistically, the bank will have the better hand five times out of twelve, likewise his opponent, while in one coup in six their cards will have the same rank. There would be situations when a canny reader might call banco with the inferior hand, hoping to lose for appearance’s sake.
‘The “reader” did not need to see the cards dealt on the table – he could “read” them as they came out of the shoe. That meant that if the banco was on his right, he had the option of going “banco prime”, (taking the bank first) or, indeed, if the banco was on his left and likely to win, he could say in a friendly way to the caller, “a hundred with you for luck”.
‘Yet, and here is the brilliance of it, the “reader” knows which hand is more likely to win; he does not know which hand will win. If he did, it could be very suspicious. That’s why it’s so clever. The “reader” backs plenty of losers because things don’t always work out, but he is betting with the odds in his favour.
‘If the odds are in the favour of the banco he would go banco. If the odds were in favour of the bank he would keep quiet. In the course of a game of one hundred bets he will win, say, 60–40. That’s profit. Perhaps he might win sixty-five and lose thirty-five. Maybe only win fifty-seven and lose forty-three. He would always have the edge.
‘A simple way to look at it, as a non-gambler? There are two possibilities. One is mathematically more probable than the other, and you can back either of them at even money – so which one do you back?
‘To put it another way, if you like, if it is mathematically 6:4 on (4–6) that a certain event will happen as opposed to not happening, and you can back it happening at even money, you would want to have a bet, wouldn’t you?
‘Now the character crying banco, the mad player, the lunatic if you like, is the winner. At the end of the game, of course, it needn’t be obvious how much he’s winning, because he doesn’t win any big amount in one go and he can always put some of his chips in his pocket. He is the winner and anyone thinking about it would say: “Lucky bugger. Next time he plays he’ll lose twice as much.”
‘There were ways of handling this situation intelligently. If it was spotted that somebody was winning consistently, a losing night or nights might be arranged. Someone else would do the winning, so that neither the house nor Billy Hill lost.
‘It was the psychology of it that was so good. Punters wanted the daft guy going banco and suivi all the time to win. They knew he’d get his comeuppance, but it was great to see him win big coups. It was exciting, it turned them on. And that was good for business too.
‘It was a superb concept, and Billy Hill was not just in at the Clermont, he was in many other clubs. That’s the beauty of this thing. Billy Hill’s man maybe has a hundred bets. Loses forty and wins sixty. It’s so much better that way.
‘By God, the inventor of this scam had a clear brain when it came to cheating the punters and gamblers who knew the system, pumped it like a money well. Psychologically, mathematically brilliant – can’t say that enough times. They made millions.
‘Mr Money, who acted as the money go-between for Billy Hill and Aspinall, took huge sums of money to Switzerland and turned them into numbered accounts at the Banca del Gottardo in Lugano.
‘Millions.’