On a recent July evening, gamblers at the Nooksack River Casino heard an odd thing: A casino employee begging for somebody to win.
Diane Fenster
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The game was "Whirlwind of Cash." It's a plastic tube filled with floating money that people are supposed to snatch out of the air. A raffle to determine who steps into the tube had been going on, unsuccessfully, for at least 15 minutes, but everyone who signed up seemed to have left. "Jim Thomas!" yelled the frustrated operator, adding, "I'd almost settle for somebody with those initials."
Next it's George, as in, "Is there any George?" A few more nonhits and gamblers were treated to this pathetic entreaty: "Please make some noise, somebody!"
The Sack (as some locals call it) is a bit of a drive out into the country, about 25 minutes from Bellingham down some gnarly tribal roads to the town of Deming. Lights shoot up from utter darkness like a crashed UFO in a B movie. Seeing as Deming had a population of 210 in the year 2000, according to the U.S. Census, there weren't many local players there that night. There weren't many players at all. The mini-baccarat table was shut down due to lack of interest. A dealer explained that it often operates during the day, when Canadians visit.
Slot machines occupy a majority of the floor space, and a few people were planted in front of them wearing the bemused mugs of terminal gambling addicts. They were monitored by a multiplicity of cameras and the ceiling-mounted sculptures of salmon. At the table-games area, mostly young dealers in salmon-colored uniforms slipped cards to mostly old, sometimes tattooed and leathery, players. The felt was worn and faded. A dealer accidentally knocked a chip into the hand of a player, who made a play at keeping it.
The Sack doesn't look like it could afford to lose $90,000. Yet according to federal indictments, that's what happened over four nights of play in October 2005, when the casino was descended on by the largest card-cheating ring ever prosecuted by the federal government—a megacorp of chicanery that, prosecutors say, employed more than two dozen people and stole as much as $20 million from nearly 20 gaming establishments targeted across North America. Among the cogs in this wheel of corruption, according to the government, was 26-year-old Jacob Nickels, son of Seattle's mayor. And the method of choice was one of the simplest tricks in existence: the false shuffle, aka the shank shuffle, aka the sky shuffle—or at any rate, a funny shuffle known to teenage magicians round the world.
Starting with a sleight of hand that netted $525 from the Sycuan Resort and Casino in Cajon, Calif., in 2002, erstwhile card dealer Phuong Quoc Truong built a coast-to-coast bilking business, according to indictments unsealed this past May (two in Washington and one in Southern California). Through the power of talk, money, and threats, Truong and his minions persuaded dealers from California to Connecticut to Canada to leave a substantial chunk of cards unmixed, the government charges. Based on previous games, the players could then predict the order of cards and raise their bets at the opportune moment.
Truong's ring, which prosecutors called the Tran Organization after one of its senior members, was inventive and relentless. In 2005, when the Resorts East Chicago Hotel and Casino in Indiana used automatic shuffling machines, cutting crooked dealers out of the action, one of them turned around and found a way to knock the machines out of commission, says Willy Allison, a 20-year casino-surveillance vet. "That's how cheeky these guys were," says Allison, who now runs the yearly Vegas-based World Game Protection conference and says he heard the story from a "confidential, reliable source." A spokesperson for Resorts East did not return repeated calls for comment.
That little trick at Resorts East appears to have allowed the cheaters to reap what the indictment says was $868,000 in 90 minutes—their biggest single-night haul in the States.
But as it grew, the Tran Organization developed striking vulnerabilities.
"Any of these scams can be successful short-term," says Jeff Murphy, who tracked the group as part of the Oregon Surveillance Network, a first-alert system for many casinos. "But if you try to make a living off of them, you're going to fall."
One of the organization's seminal blunders came in the summer of 2005, when some of Truong's underlings traveled to the tiny town of Deming to knock off the Sack. There, the cheaters allegedly befriended a pit boss who just happened to be the son of Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels. For a $5,000 bribe paid in three installments, a Washington indictment charges, Jacob Nickels, then 24, introduced the Tran operatives to two dealers who worked under him. One of the men, Levi Mayfield, has since pleaded guilty to conspiracy.
To raid the Sack, the Tran group allegedly used an individual named George Lee, who, according to a source involved in the investigation, was already suspected of helping execute a massive 2003 takedown of the Emerald Queen Casino, then located on a riverboat near Tacoma. Although authorities interviewed for this story wouldn't deviate much from the text of the indictments—which do not disclose how they caught up with the Tran group—it's very possible they recognized Lee at the Nooksack from videotapes at the Queen. "Mr. Lee was a person of interest," is all that J. Tate London, the federal prosecutor in charge of the case in Seattle, will say.
