It has been said that the 315,000-candlepower pencil of light shooting photons into space from the apex of the Luxor pyramid is one of the few works of man that could theoretically be discerned with the naked eye by a person standing on the moon. This hypothesis has never been tested. In 1972, the last time our satellite was visited by humans, the Luxor was but a scribble upon the back of a napkin, a gleam in the eye of architect Veldon Simpson.
In that year of Apollo 17, the closest candidate for celestial visibility would have been the midnight-sun spectacular of downtown Las Vegas, five miles to the north.
Concentrated mainly in just four city blocks on Fremont Street, uncounted millions of candlepower blazed relentlessly, creating concentrated sunlight twenty-four hours a day. Miles of garish neon tubing buzzed and hummed while myriad colored bulbs pulsated and flashed in rainbow rivalry, enticing bedazzled and bewildered visitors into this or that palace of pleasure. The Golden Nugget. The Four Queens. Binion’s Horseshoe. Diamond Lil’s.
Unfortunately for our lunar observer, the radiance of downtown Vegas has largely been obscured by the recent construction of the Fremont Street Experience, a multimillion-dollar light canopy that effectively screens most of the street’s glare from overhead viewing. The Experience soars ninety feet into the air, roofing the neon jungle from Main to Fourth Streets with a gigantic awning studded with 2.1 million bulbs, which come to life each night, creating a massive video screen four and a half football fields in length. In this unsubtle attempt to lure America back to the heart of Vegas, away from the megaresorts of the Strip, more than two hundred speakers blast out half a million watts of sound, combining with the video to produce
a spectacular light-and-sound show every hour on the hour from dusk to midnight.
Between the casinos, the air on that early-spring evening was unnaturally warm, even for southern Nevada. The tightly packed buildings and acres of pavement had acted as a massive heat sink, absorbing the fierce desert sun all day long and only now releasing its stored energy. It was almost sinfully pleasurable to be greeted by the refreshing curtains of cool air at the doorless casino entrances.
But bright lights and cool air were not uppermost in the mind of one Mr. Dan Shiller, professional casino cheat. Stepping inside the Golden Nugget, fresh from two successful implementations of the roulette scam, Shiller’s thoughts as always were focused on his next score. He was the archetypal con man, the consummate scoundrel for whom concepts such as honesty and rectitude were simply the purview of suckers. In Mr. Shiller’s private code of ethics, cheating was synonymous with success, deception with winning, thievery with prosperity. Anyone who stood in his way was quite simply dispensable.
His appearance belied his profession. In fact, Dan Shiller’s carefully cultivated image constituted his most important attribute. Prematurely gray hair complemented by a prosperous tan lent him a distinguished air. His clear blue eyes exuded trustworthiness, his well shaped eyebrows bespoke sincerity, his firm chin suggested integrity.
To round out the package, Shiller always dressed immaculately. On this warm evening he had selected a lightweight beige Armani sports jacket, crisply pressed gray slacks, and brown Gucci loafers. A Hathaway sports shirt, open at the collar to reveal a tasteful gold chain, completed Dan’s ensemble. He was the very model of a Fortune 500 CEO, a successful banker, a lawyer, a stockbroker. Had he actually chosen any of these legitimate career paths, Shiller would no doubt have risen to the top, as he had in his current profession.
But his success was empty. He lived well, he traveled in style, he had endured relatively little jail time. However, there was always the big problem, the problem of what happens next month, next year, next decade. In the grifting game, you couldn’t stay ahead of the posse forever—you got older, you got sloppier, and your concentration slipped. He’d seen it happen to the best in the business. Unfortunately, Dan Shiller couldn’t afford to
quit. Despite his best intentions, he had never quite managed to amass a nest egg sizable enough to retire on in the style he fancied. In reality, he could no more hold on to his ill-gotten gains than he could grasp a fistful of water. A taste for the good life inevitably caused his fortunes to ebb as fast as they flowed.
As the years wore on, this problem weighed increasingly on his mind. Shiller was not getting younger; he was closer to fifty than forty. What he needed was the one substantial score, the one elusive hit that would set him up for life. Not for Dan Shiller the tedious 5 percent solution at the savings and loan; no way did his patience extend to the hypopraxia of the mutual fund. He fantasized about a luxurious retirement on some Caribbean island, preferably one of the more remote ones, but at this very moment could hardly afford a month of it, let alone a lifetime.
But that was a problem for later. This was now, and Dan was very much a man of the moment. Constantly attuned to opportunity’s knock, he did not restrict his clandestine practices to cheating at casino games. He would seize upon any chance for larceny as a matter of course. As long as the risk was commensurate with the reward, Dan Shiller was compelled to take that risk. The practicality of a scam was his only consideration, the morality or immorality of a deed never entering the equation. Dan was purely and simply amoral.
Fine dining was one of Shiller’s passions, but the trickster saw no reason to pay for it, especially in hotel-casino restaurants. Dan wisely avoided drawing attention to himself by never asking pit bosses for complimentary meals—instead, he took the liberty of arranging his own comps via an ingenious swindle he had personally developed and perfected over the years. Generally it took less than five minutes to set up, well worth the substantial fiscal saving in restaurant checks and virtually risk-free.
Shiller looked at his watch, surveyed the hotel directory and decided on Stefano’s for dinner. The fact that he had never been seen in the restaurant before was a prerequisite to the success of the operation.
He walked purposefully to a bank of house phones in the lobby of the Nugget and picked up the handset.
“Operator. May I help you?” said a tinny female voice.
“Please connect me with Mr. Johnson’s room.” Nine times out of ten he hit the jackpot immediately with Johnson, Smith, or Brown.
“One moment, please.” Pause. “I have two Johnsons listed, sir. Lawrence or Arthur?”
“Lawrence.”
“Thank you. I’ll connect you now.”
After a few seconds, Dan heard a phone ring. A sleepy voice answered, “Hello?”
A bull’s-eye on the first try! “Hello,” said Shiller in his modulated baritone. “Bill?”
“There’s no Bill here. You’ve got the wrong room.”
“Isn’t this seventeen forty-two?”
“Not even close. It’s thirty-eight eleven.”
“Sorry.” The con man smiled to himself, hung up, and jotted the room number on a scrap of paper.
Dinner in Stefano’s was superb. After lubricating his palette with a double dry martini, Shiller started with the Fiori di Carciofi. He followed it with a magnificent veal Marsala, and capped the dining experience with a perfectly frozen spumoni. The meal was accompanied by a splendid (and very expensive) 1998 Querciabella Orvieto.
“Will this be a room charge, sir?” asked the waiter as Dan Shiller helped himself to an after-dinner mint.
“Yes.”
“May I have your name and room number?”
“Lawrence Johnson. Thirty-eight eleven. Oh, and bring me an Italian cigar when you come back.”
“Yes, sir.” The waiter bustled away to confirm the validity of his customer’s name and room number. He returned in a few minutes, satisfied that a Mr. Lawrence Johnson actually did occupy thirty-eight eleven, with a hand-rolled Toscani cigar on a silver tray accompanied by a computer-printed bill for a shade over three hundred dollars. “If you’ll just sign here, sir … .”
Shiller ignored the proffered Bic and extracted a gold Cross pen from the inside pocket of his Armani jacket. He scribbled Lawrence Johnson’s name rapidly on the bill and replaced it on the tray, slipping the cigar into his breast pocket.
“Thank you, sir,” said the waiter, noting the generous tip his customer had added to the total before signing the check. “I hope we’ll see you again before you leave the hotel, Mr. Johnson.”
“I’m sure you will.” In your dreams, asshole.
Dan knew that the cost of his meal would probably come out of the waiter’s pocket, but that wasn’t his concern.
He had other business to take care of.
The roulette scam had pretty well exhausted its potential for a while in this town. Having successfully perpetrated it at the Starlight with the help of the old bags from Kansas and at the Four Queens with the assistance of an attractive but flat-broke honeymoon couple, he had a feeling that it would be tempting fate to play it any further. Shiller knew that the casinos, while competing fiercely among themselves for players, shared information freely about flimflam men like himself.
Fortunately, he was a resourceful man who had other swindles to fall back on, including the fine art of hand mucking at blackjack. A hand mucker is a card sharp, a sleight-of-hand artist who specializes in “holding out” cards—cleverly concealing them and reintroducing them into the game at an opportune moment. Shiller might hold out an ace, wait for a tenvalue card to be dealt to him, and combine the two to produce a natural twenty-one or “blackjack,” which was an unbeatable hand.
The deceit could not be perpetrated when blackjack was dealt faceup from a shoe; in this type of game, players were not allowed to touch their cards. However, in many casinos, particularly in downtown Las Vegas, blackjack is hand dealt from a single or double deck and the player’s first two cards are delivered facedown, requiring him or her to pick them up in order to see them and complete the hand. Additional cards, if the player needs any, are dealt faceup.
Through countless hours of practice, Dan Shiller had perfected the technique of holding out cards in hand-dealt games. The casinos, of course, attempted to protect themselves from this type of chicanery by establishing certain rules—for example, the cards could be picked up with one hand only, and the player was required to keep them over the table at all times—but these rules were no deterrent to a highly skilled hand mucker. The fact that exactly two cards were dealt to the player—and hence exactly two cards had to be returned to the game—presented no problem for Shiller. He would simply wait until he was dealt a standing hand made up of four or five cards, then distract the dealer with some question or comment while he leaned forward to block the overhead camera’s view and surreptitiously palmed a card from among the pile in front of him. The value of this purloined card did not matter; once he had three cards to work with—the two he was dealt each time plus the extra one—he would simply mix and match them to suit his purposes.
It was a dangerous game, especially in some of the smaller establishments
around Nevada where security harbored no compunction about administering severe beatings to exposed cheats. One of Dan’s colleagues, an older man well beyond his best game, had suffered the misfortune of having been caught hand mucking in Tahoe, and his captors had broken every finger on his right hand. For the hundredth time, the grifter thought, One day that’ll be me. I need to get out of this racket before they get me, too.
Maybe it was time to concentrate seriously on his retirement plan.
He’d been working on this scheme for years but, despite a growing sense of urgency about his career, had yet to actually implement it.
The original inspiration for Shiller’s plan had been the Chicago Tylenol poisonings—the grandfather of all the product-tampering cases. “What kind of human being could conceive such a scheme, carefully open the capsules and pour in cyanide, then see to it that the product was placed among rows of similar medicine on the shelves of drugstores?” asked a newspaper editorial.
“An idiot,” answered Dan Shiller, scornfully noting that the poisoner had never asked for anything by way of extortion, never squeezed a cent from the manufacturers of Tylenol—even though the death toll in the case finally reached seven. In Dan’s world, the only logical motive for such actions was money. Revenge, power, a flaunting of intellectual superiority—these were not reasons to run such schemes. Despite his contempt for the poisoner, however, Shiller could not help but admire the simplicity and relative safety of the operation. With the inclusion of a payoff, it would have been perfect.
But perhaps that was the fly in the Tylenol poisoner’s ointment. Maybe he could conceive no foolproof payoff plan, no way to actually pick up the extortion money without risking capture. Dan mulled over this aspect of such crimes for some time before what he believed to be a practical solution—simple and relatively safe—came to him one day while he was glancing through the financial section of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The months and years passed, and Shiller continued to ply his trade, practicing his black art at the gaming tables of Nevada and anywhere else he could promote a dishonest dollar. Life was good for the swindler. He owned a BMW 760Li sedan for which he’d paid cash. He lived well in a series of small hotels, furnished apartments, and boardinghouses, registering under assumed names and moving frequently. He had a small but expensive
wardrobe and the resources to freely indulge his tastes for fancy women and recreational drugs.
Like many of his kind, Dan Shiller was simply continuing a tradition. His father had been a tin man—a swindler who sold nonexistent aluminum siding and shoddy repairs to unsuspecting homeowners. One of his brothers ran a telemarketing scam; the other was an accomplished stock swindler. Even Dan’s mother had been involved in the family business: she specialized in bad checks.
But nobody in the Shiller family shared; there was no family fortune to fall back on when the clandestine skills deteriorated and the concentration began to slip, as Shiller knew they would in time. So he spent much of his free time thinking about the plan. As the scheme grew in magnitude and complexity, the con man realized that it would be extremely difficult to organize and execute by himself. For one thing, it involved violence—a level of violence far beyond a “mere” poisoning. Dan Shiller was not himself a violent man, although he had absolutely no reservations about using others for that purpose. For another thing, it required at least two accomplices, and he had yet to come across the right people. For this kind of work you couldn’t just run an ad in the classified section of the local paper.
Consequently, Dan Shiller’s plan remained on hold.
So far in his career, Shiller had been relatively lucky. Apart from a couple of arrests over twenty years ago, he had managed to avoid capture, no small accomplishment in his line of work. Dan’s constant watchfulness usually enabled him to sense casino heat and slip away before it turned into trouble. He was keenly attuned to the danger signals: whispered consultations among the floorpeople, with furtive glances in his direction; hostility on the part of the dealer, who might start flinging the cards at his knuckles rather than dealing them flat on the table; the sudden materialization of one, or worse, several security guards for no apparent reason. Whenever he felt the slightest heat, Dan would get up and leave the casino immediately, not even stopping to cash in his chips. He knew he could always return later, during another shift, and exchange them with impunity.
Dan Shiller was not a blackjack card counter, but he had adopted some of the guiding principles of that profession. In particular, he utilized the “paper route” technique, never lingering more than a short period of time in any one casino during any one shift and rotating his visits over several days
or even weeks. It was the reason he had never become known to casino personnel—his was just another anonymous face among the thousands who thronged the tables.
Checking his watch, the swindler casually stood up to leave the blackjack game at the Golden Nugget. He had managed to take them for a few hundred without attracting the slightest suspicion. He decided to hit one more joint before calling it a night. Maybe the Fremont, maybe Diamond Lil’s.
There were plenty of casinos to be fleeced, and Shiller believed in spreading his business around.