by Adam Tanner
Ann began to feel self-conscious in public. Did others know about the videos? Did people in stores and on the street smile at her out of friendliness or because they had seen her naked? It was one thing to excite a remote unseen person. She found that arousing. But if neighbors, friends, or school colleagues were watching, that was creepy. Her husband, who worked in a professional services firm, also appeared in the videos but had hidden his face (other parts of his anatomy starred in the productions), so no one could recognize him. “I was naïve, and I thought nobody was going to notice. It became a bigger deal than I thought it would become, and I didn’t like it,” she says. “Back then, it still seemed like the Internet was kind of new. I’m a nobody—who thought it would spread?”
Within a few months, Ann and Tom decided to shut down their site. Eventually Ann got a job as a high school secretary, and her brief fling with explicit video faded from memory. Then over a lunch break during the late spring of 2011, a school guard saw an excited group of students huddled around a cell phone under a tree. She went over to see what was causing the stir and recognized Ann in a sex video. Word arrived first to Tom, and he called his wife.
Tom and Ann had devised a cover story in case their children ever learned about the explicit videos: the couple had sold a computer at a yard sale without erasing the hard drive. Someone had found the images and posted them online. In the principal’s office, Ann carefully recited the tale to the two school officials. It was not clear if they were buying the story, but the principal did not take a harsh tone. He paused for a moment and asked her how she was doing.
“I just feel embarrassed, really embarrassed that this came out,” Ann said.
“Don’t be embarrassed. I have the utmost respect for you and your husband and your family, there’s nothing for you to feel awkward about.”
She asked the school to minimize the publicity. But it was already too late. Word about the videos spread like wildfire. She typically dressed fairly conservatively, but once students heard about her wild side, they wanted a second look. Boys, ignited by the fantasy of the sexually adventurous school secretary, peeked into her office, stared at her, turned, and left.
Ann felt so uncomfortable that she quit after the semester ended and transferred to another job. She became paranoid. It seemed that everyone knew about her past effort to lead a double life. Eventually she quit working entirely. “Back before, ten years ago, when you put pictures up on the Internet, there was total anonymity. But it’s not like that anymore,” Tom says. “You can see now you put a picture up on the Internet and you get a guy from Harvard calling you up on your cell phone.”
More than a year after I first called them, Ann and Tom separated after twenty-four years together. She said their flirtation with an Internet double life was one of the reasons for the split.
Also many months after finding Tom and Ann, I received a telephone call from a Las Vegas–area number. The woman introduced herself as a former Instant Checkmate call center worker in Las Vegas. We had spoken months before when I called to ask the company to comment on my research. She had said nothing at the time. But she had kept my number and could speak openly now that she had been dismissed. She said call center workers routinely do not give their real last names.4 “Any emails you’ve ever received from them, they are from employees, of course, but it’s not their actual names,” she said. “That’s just the way they have it designed, it’s always that way.”
What about the name I had spent so much time hunting down? “There is no Kristen Bright,” she confirmed.5
Kris Kibak, the founder of Instant Checkmate, later admitted the same. He said a third-party contractor helping his company with search engine optimization created the identities for Kristen Bright and Michael Smith, who was also quoted as speaking on behalf of the company. And he said call center workers did not give their real surnames. “As you can appreciate, some people aren’t keen on having information about them—for example, an arrest record—available online and can get upset,” Kibak says. “Because of this, I understand that the contractor used pseudonyms rather than actual employee names for reasons related to employee safety.”
He said his company did not create or instruct anyone to create the Yelp page, and he said he had not known about Ann’s photo being used without her permission.6
The hunt for the woman who was not Kristen Bright highlighted that in the Internet age, we all leave clues about ourselves—even when attempting to hide our real identities. You may not post photos of yourself in the buff as Ann did, but we all reveal details about ourselves by leaving naked data on the Internet and in public records. It took a while to find her using a mix of old-style detective work and technology. In the future, identifying people through photos or video images will be easier and faster. Casinos will be among the businesses pushing for more intelligent “eyes in the sky,” and a lot of money is at stake.
11
Thousands of Eyes
Inside the Surveillance Room
It’s a typical Friday evening inside the surveillance room of the ARIA Resort and Casino. The nerve center of an $18 million security system at a five-star facility, the room evokes a high-tech, sophisticated look. As at all casinos, the cameras record vast amounts of activity every day, but actually spotting suspicious activity falls to human surveillance and security officers. At a big casino hotel, three to six people per shift watch what is happening across the thousands of cameras.
They look for certain patterns of behavior suggesting a thief or a con, and rely on internal and external databases about people. They see all the joy, the foibles, the antics of hundreds of thousands of people coming through a typical large casino on the Las Vegas Strip every week. The overwhelming majority of these people are law-abiding, but a few regularly try to cheat or steal from the casino and its patrons. At the ARIA’s surveillance room, two rows of large-screen televisions line a long back wall, and a third row continues along a bank of desks where three officials monitor the screens. A supervisor watches from a central desk at the back of the room.
A burly surveillance officer with a shaved head starts studying an incident brought to his attention by a casino staffer. A slot machine player sitting next to his wife asked a cocktail waitress to bring him a bottle of mineral water. The refreshment came free of charge, a regular perk for gamblers. He handed the waitress a bill and asked for change to give her a tip. When she returned with $20 in smaller bills, he complained that he had given her $100. The officer skips back the digital video. He follows the path of the waitress from the moment the gambler hands her the money. He sees her walk to the side of the room and place the bill into a change machine. It turns out the client is not always right. The surveillance officer could make out that the waitress had put a $20 bill into the machine. The staff tell the gambler what they had seen. He responds that he must have made a mistake. They take him at his word. They have captured his name from his loyalty card in the slot machine and they log the incident, in case he makes trouble in the future.
Another incident unfolds on a different bank of surveillance monitors. Again, it is not the fast action Hollywood viewers might expect from a movie such as Ocean’s Eleven. It shows the day-to-day reality of what happens in a casino. A young man without a shirt or shoes reclines on the floor next to one of the slot machines near the lobby entrance. A slot attendant approaches; the man stumbles to his feet. The shirtless dude had clearly been taking advantage of Vegas’s reputation for indulgence of alcohol. Several security guards try to escort him off the property. But the disoriented man does not comply. He throws up in front of one of the slot machines. Eventually, guards sit him in a wheelchair and roll him out the door. As a cleaning woman arrives to erase the unfortunate mess, the surveillance officer retraces the man’s steps to see where he had come from. He suspects the man had been at the hotel’s pool. The video shows he had wandered in shirtless from the street on a day when the temperature was above ninety degrees. The staff also logs
the incident, cognizant that sometimes criminals plan such episodes as diversions for crimes elsewhere in the casino.
The security team quickly identified the first man from his loyalty card in a machine. In this case, they do not know if the drunk is a hotel guest—thus requiring a bit more delicate treatment—or an outsider who should quickly be shown the door. Finally they ask the drunk man’s companion, who appears far more sober—at least he’s steady on his feet—for a driver’s license.
Security officer at work in a surveillance room at the ARIA Hotel in Las Vegas. Source: Author photo.
The List
At casinos, surveillance starts from the moment one drives into or arrives at the property. On each level of the Caesars Palace parking lot cameras watch the passing vehicles, allowing license recognition technology to see if one has been reported stolen or is owned by somebody of interest.1 Another camera behind a black dome of glass atop a pole shaped like an upside-down letter J looms above as people step out of their vehicles on the top floor. As they walk down several flights of stairs, yet another camera greets them at the bottom of every stairwell.
Toward the hotel’s back entrance across another large open lot, a camera atop the building records arrivals. As people enter the elevator, digital video records the scene. Above the well-lit ground-floor hallway, another camera captures the moment. Finally, at the turn into the actual casino, an especially large dome observes.
Surveillance camera overlooking the Caesars Palace parking lot. Source: Author photo.
An estimated three thousand cameras peer down on the action in a typical large casino,2 more than in any other place in the United States.3 They record the handbag left beside a slot machine and the smart phone misplaced on a bar counter after a flirtatious encounter. Tiny pinhole cameras mounted inside bars of the cashier’s cage see who is redeeming chips. Bathrooms and guest rooms are free of surveillance, but floor and elevator cameras see who is coming and going. Electronic key readers record the exact time someone enters or exits a room and elevator cameras see arrivals on each floor. Cameras above gaming tables show enough detail to make out individual cards or a suspicious signal from players engaged in a con.
Public surveillance cameras have never appeared as omnipresent as they are today.4 Although casinos pack in an especially concentrated number into their establishments, ever more sophisticated and affordable cameras watch us at every turn. Private businesses and government entities in the United States and abroad deploy them in growing numbers.
Cameras can record thousands of cars pulling into the lot every day and eighty thousand or so people milling around a casino. But without details on what they are seeing, such a vast amount of visual information is not tremendously useful. Security teams hope to link all these aspects of personal data together—so that they can use photo recognition technology to identify someone and then match him to a specific file of information.
Whatever device the security staff use, they need good information to ferret out cheats and swindlers. Before the days of sophisticated electronics, Las Vegas casinos relied on old-fashioned face books with profiles of potential troublemakers. The staff would page through a binder or folder stacked with the faces of individuals who might be a little dodgy. The most famous of these folders is the “black list,” officially known as the Excluded Person List of the Nevada Gaming Control Board.5 This document lists people so undesirable that they should not be allowed even to set foot inside a casino, let alone gamble there. They are barred completely. Today, the list excludes thirty-three men and one woman for life from Nevada casinos. Some are former mobsters; others are habitual cheaters. Most are in their golden years.
In 1967 Robert Griffin, a former Las Vegas police officer, and his wife, Beverly, started assembling a separate roster of slot machine cheaters, swindlers, thieves, and other undesirables casinos might want to exclude. Some on the Griffin list had not committed a crime but drew attention because of borderline illegal activities such as card counting, a skill that may prompt a casino to “trespass” or eject its practitioners. So-called advantage players became an ever bigger problem in the 1970s and 1980s. Griffin also offered casinos detective services to investigate such incidents.
Over the years the list grew into an essential reference book, and then a series of books with thousands of names. The Griffin Book included police mug shots, employee photographs, and any other images Robert and Beverly could obtain, plus basic characteristics of the people, such as height and weight and their suspected scam or talent that could put a casino at risk. The Griffin volumes achieved mythic status.
The Griffin Book. Source: Beverly Griffin (reprinted with permission).
William Hinkley worked his way up the ranks in casino security from a plainclothes investigator in the mid-1980s to top security official at a succession of popular hotels. He now oversees security at the Las Vegas Hooters Casino Hotel. For much of his career, the Griffin Book was important to his work. “Some people in the day interpreted Griffin as God,” he says. “In the 1980s if you were in the Griffin Book, it was almost like the black book.”
Griffin Investigations, the company Robert and Beverly founded in 1967, achieved its greatest success after its information helped uncover a group of blackjack card counters from MIT who had made millions in the 1990s, including from Caesars Palace. Their story later inspired the 2008 movie 21, starring Kevin Spacey. Things came together in the case after Griffin Investigations received a key tip. One of the card counters had a spat with the others and telephoned one of the Griffin investigators. The source revealed some of the blackjack counters were coming to town and alerted the investigator to the disguises they would wear. Those clues were enough to break the case. The MIT group had operated for so long because they represented a new kind of threat: brain power applied to card counting. “A lot of them were brilliant minds to whom this was a simple thing to do,” Griffin said. “And they differed from the old gamblers in that they were young Asians and young college students who had not before been a force in Las Vegas or other gaming areas.”
The publicity from the MIT case made Griffin a well-known adversary for card counters and cheats. How-to books and websites on card counting regularly referred to the Griffin Book, and memoirs by gamblers boasted of how they avoided ending up on the list or how they bested the company’s scrutiny. Richard Marcus tells the world on his website that he is the “World’s #1 Casino and Poker Cheating Expert.”6 He portrays Griffin as a key adversary: “I myself was often under Griffin surveillance and spotted his agents staking out my Las Vegas house several times. Griffin and his detective agency were a major pain in my ass!”
Bob Nersesian, an attorney who defends gamblers accused of wrongdoing, also wrote about Griffin Investigations in his 2006 book Beat the Players: Casinos, Cops and the Game Inside the Game: “Amongst advantage and professional gamblers, few persons or companies are more vilified than Griffin Investigations. Simply, they are the bad guys. Griffin Investigations makes the lives of advantage gamblers miserable.” Beverly Griffin disagrees. She says she only gives casinos information. It’s up to the casino to decide the gambler’s fate.
In recent years Griffin’s business has struggled. First of all, it ran into legal and financial troubles. Two gamblers detained at Caesars Palace and at the Imperial Palace based on information in the Griffin Book successfully sued in 2001.7 Beverly Griffin remains bitter that her company ended up in court and was compelled to pay $300,000 in legal fees. Griffin filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2005, the same year Harrah’s bought Caesars Palace. She owed more than $100,000 to her lawyer and more than $100,000 to those who sued her, according to court papers.
The other challenge to the dominance of the Griffin Book has come from the explosion of information in the Internet age. Technology allows casinos to identify undesirables more easily than in the past. Many rely on their own databases rather than the Griffin Book. Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts—which together own a
large chunk of the Las Vegas Strip—no longer subscribe, although some other casinos do.8 Griffin says she still has many clients among casinos worldwide because it is harder for regional establishments to recognize cheaters and advantage players from Las Vegas or elsewhere. The worst may have passed for Beverly Griffin. Now divorced, she runs the business without her retired husband. She says she has paid off her debts after five years. Her service has moved to the Internet, and on the advice of her attorney, she has revamped its database to sharpen its accuracy. The problem in the past, she says, was that the Griffin Book might deem someone a cheater even if he had never been convicted of a crime. Today, her seven thousand listings are more cautious in terms of what they allege.
The threat of litigation has made security teams across the industry more cautious. In the days of mob influence in Las Vegas, security officials might have taken a suspected cheater or card counter to a back room to mete out a warning on the spot. It seems obligatory for films about Las Vegas to re-create such scenes. Griffin says such frontier justice ended in the 1970s. Nowadays, multimillion-dollar casinos would not risk losing their license to beat up a card counter.
With corporations trying to maintain a good public image, security officials do all they can to avoid lawsuits. They do not even like to accuse someone of counting cards. Likewise, security and surveillance officials are more reserved about swapping information with other casinos. They don’t want to face lawsuits because of information they shared about a gambler. So even if there is more information readily available than in the past, the threat of litigation has tempered its distribution.
