The End -2

As old Benny Binion used to boast, you could bet any amount you wanted in his casino. Since the Horseshoe had ten-thousand-dollar chips, I envisioned hiding three of them under five one-dollar casino chips on a number at the bottom of the layout, and raking it all off when it lost. $30,000 straight up on a number paid $1,050,000. And the Horseshoe would have to pay it when it won, since it had no table limit you could exceed.

I eventually abandoned the idea because the odds on hitting any particular number were thirty-seven to one, which caused procedural problems. We'd have to keep placing the bet and raking off until it won, and to avoid any possibility of surveillance backtracking through their tapes and matching a rake-off to the big payoff, we could only place the bet once a week. Which meant that we could literally wait years for the number to come in, if unlucky. After discussing it at length, Pat and I decided it just wasn't worth it.

But another reason influenced my nixing of the Super Savannah even more. I was starting to think a lot of retirement as I reflected about my life. I had been ripping off the casinos for a quarter of a century. Not as long as the thirty-five years Joe had put in, but a hall of fame career just the same. I had enough money to live comfortably for the rest of my life. But more influential on my decision than that was fatigue. I was tiring. The constant traveling around the world might seem glamorous, but it really knocks you out. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Despite my balls of stone in casinos, I'm scared to death of airplanes. Always have been. I just managed to block it out while with my partners.

And, of course, there was Steven DeVisser. He'd been chasing me for nearly twenty years, just dying to bust my ass. I always knew in the back of my brain that if he ever got me, I'd end up getting sentenced to the max, which is ten years in a Nevada state prison. After bucking that a/l this time, I figured maybe I ought to heed an old gambler's proverb and quit while I was ahead.

In the spring of 2000, I packed it in-at least temporarily. Pat and I were in his apartment watching Geraldo Lif-'e when he said to me, "You know, Johnny, I bet Geraldo would love to see what we do and put it on his show. We ought to write a book about it or something. What do you think?"

I had once before thought of writing a book about the history of cheating casinos. Listening to Joe's stories about himself and his brother, about Mumbles and Wheels, I'd imagined that they would make interesting literary characters. My own experiences, I figured, were also worth writing about. But what really pushed me over the hump to recount my life inside the casinos was Savannah. I just could never get over how something so simple, so elementary, could repeatedly fool the world's casinos. Its simplicity had to have been the result of a four-decade-Iong evolution of human genius and dedication, which had started with Mumbles and Continued evolving along with Henry, Joe, and me, and will undoubtedly continue along the road to the next stroke of genius that enables enterprising cheaters to rip off casinos, regardless of how much money is spent on stateof-the-art surveillance systems to stop them.

When Pat first posed that question about writing a book on our experiences, I responded that it wasn't a bad idea, though I dOubted sincerely that Geraldo, or anyone else for that matter, would believe it. "We'd have to take Geraldo on a baccara tour," I told Pat. When I decided I really did want to write this book, and that I was putting myself into retirement to do so, Pat was flabbergasted.

"You're gonna give up all our moves in a book? What are you, crazy, Johnny?" He reminded me that if Miami Beach ever opened casinos we'd make a fortune.