by Adam Tanner
Video Recognition
In recent years, some casinos and other businesses have begun linking video recognition technology to their surveillance systems. Sure, a good surveillance officer can spot patterns of suspicious behavior and known troublemakers. Some remember faces from months or even years before. Yet with newcomers showing up every day, they cannot know the background of the overwhelming majority of the people on the casino floor. In the future, technologists hope, photo recognition will easily and accurately connect faces engaged in suspicious behavior with the names and files of those who have committed previous offenses.
Some security veterans look with awe at how such software has the potential to make their jobs ever easier. Yet in truth, the technology is still far from an all-knowing Big Brother. One leading company that sells photo recognition and security management software to casinos is called iView Systems. James Moore, the Canadian company’s vice president, says facial identification correctly identifies 60–80 percent of people of interest to casino security teams. The problem remains a high rate of false positives—instances when the system thinks it recognizes a suspicious person but is, in fact, mistaken.
Using the iView Systems software, a typical large Las Vegas casino gets fifty to sixty genuine alerts a day. When such notifications produce a correct match in a database of people of interest, the security staff must decide what to do. The final decision is always made by someone who confirms the match. The computer also generates two hundred to five hundred false alerts per day, Moore says. That means for every ten alerts, only one may be of real concern. Part of the problem remains the quality of old photos scanned into the system. If a casino has only grainy images of people who have done something in the past, the system may not be able to recognize them.
Sometimes the technology is stunningly far off. Tom Flynn, head of security and surveillance at Caesars Palace, said he has seen photo recognition suggest a black woman as a match when he was searching for a white man. Such instances have turned some old-time security pros into skeptics. Dave Shepherd moved to Las Vegas thirty-five years ago to work for the FBI. He still maintains a no-nonsense manner befitting an official who once worked on cases against mob figures such as Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal. After leaving the FBI, Shepherd took a job heading up security at the Venetian Resort Hotel and Casino; he now works as a private security consultant. He is characteristically blunt when it comes to assessing photo recognition technology: “It doesn’t work,” he says. “Cameras can’t recognize a typical person. The best way is still people on the ground.”
Things may change, of course. Many companies are trying to develop more efficient systems. Some executives also believe photo and video recognition abilities could help improve service. If cameras could recognize the license plate number of a big roller driving up, the casino could promptly dispatch a favorite host. Such technology could alert department stores to the arrival of regular shoppers so that their favorite salespeople can be available to greet them. Stores are increasingly tracking shoppers electronically as they peruse the aisles. As with a lot of personal data, some people will welcome the attention while others will not. Many now accept that, whether we like it or not, giving away personal data in visual form is part of living in a modern society. Yet for others, the thought of being tracked by cameras, perhaps augmented by signals from a cell phone, is downright creepy.
A well-oiled customer service machine recognizing people in real time would require considerably more sophistication than is presently available. Not just a database with mug shots and detailed reports on tens of thousands of people of interest, a client-greeting system would have to incorporate millions of files. Also, it would need far fewer false positives to make sure the red carpet is rolled out for the right people.
Gary Loveman says it is useful to know when his best customers are at Caesars, and that they like to be recognized. But he does not see photo recognition playing a role for customer service. “I can’t imagine in the foreseeable future that that would be better for us than lots of other things that we would want to do,” he says. In any case, a casino usually knows when its best customers are arriving. Frequently the management has flown them into town for free, or sent a limo to pick them up.9 At other times, high rollers announce themselves at the host office, or just hand in their elite-status loyalty card.
Ted Whiting, director of surveillance at the ARIA, says the dream of an all-knowing photo recognition system is still over the horizon, but it will come. “It’s not as sexy as everybody thinks,” he says. But he believes that as camera resolution improves over the next few years, security staff will be able to routinely recognize who’s who on the casino floor. Then no one will be able to hide from the eyes in the casino skies.
Photo recognition technology could work best initially to identify staffers, who are well photographed and documented in advance. In addition to watching their clients, casino security teams devote a great deal of effort toward monitoring and nabbing their own staff members. In fact, casinos typically point more cameras on employees than on guests. Temptations surround workers at every turn: piles of cash and chips, mounds of expensive food, bars stocked with high-end liquor. A staffer may hope that no one notices when a few chips have been squirreled away or steaks stored in the freezer. Bartenders seek to boost their own tips by not so inadvertently forgetting to charge for drinks. The count room makes for some of the most monotonous watching, as staffers pile bills, and then more bills, and then ever more bills, into automated counters to determine how much cash is on hand. However dull the video may appear, the scene draws continuous monitoring, as does the cage where gamblers exchange chips for cash.
Mike Pfahler is director of corporate security and surveillance at Fifth Street Gaming. A former chief of police in a Pennsylvania town of three thousand, he has just 150 cameras in his small casino, the Silver Nugget. Located on the far north end of the Strip, beyond where tourists venture, it’s a world apart from Caesars Palace, Wynn, Bellagio, and the other big hotels. The terrain up there looks more like a rugged desert landscape, and things can turn a bit rough. Over the years Pfahler has seen murders, drug deals, thefts, and other incidents at various casinos.10 Crime also extends to the casino staff. On days when nothing else is happening, he goes into his surveillance room and watches staff members for suspicious behavior. “Nothing happens here that I don’t see,” he says.
Operating the eyes in the sky does not make Pfahler a popular guy, and his casino is small enough that everyone knows who he is. By 2014, the advance of connected technology made it possible for him to monitor all four of his company’s casinos from his Silver Nugget office, receiving video images from three hundred cameras on his laptop or smart phone.11 Even if he is further from some of the action than he once was, he still takes precautions. He carries a gun at all times, and worries that the widespread availability of personal information could put someone in his position at risk. He says it makes him sick to think that people can Google his name and locate his house. Some have threatened to kill him. “My kids often say to me, ‘Dad, why don’t you have any friends?’ I get people fired, I get people arrested,” he tells them.
But in the future, patrons and staff caught in the act of wrongdoing will probably have fewer people to blame when they are caught. Instead, they will curse the technology that leads to their downfall.
A Facebook Clue
Because cheats, thieves, and card counters often work in groups to outsmart casino operations, security officials have also embraced social networks to discern clues about suspects and their possible associates.
One day at the New York-New York casino in Las Vegas, a player at a slot machine caught the attention of a floor supervisor. The man placed his loyalty card into the slot machine. The card holder turned green, and the man entered in a PIN code. He selected the word “Freeplay” and used bonus points provided by the casino as an incentive to customers. After a while, he cashed out his winnings, then removed the
card. He inserted another card and repeated the process, over and over again.
The supervisor stepped up to the machine. “Sir, let me see what you are doing,” he said.
The man held a cigarette pack stuffed with twenty-two loyalty cards, each holding bonus credits allowing him to bet without paying any money. Because each player receives only one card, he could have no justification for possessing so many. The casino official led the man to a hotel detention room. Las Vegas police arrived and arrested him for theft.
The case puzzled casino officials at MGM Resorts International, which owns New York-New York, the ARIA, and many other casinos in Las Vegas. Searching a database of known troublemakers, they found nothing about the arrested man. The ruse involved considerable sophistication. The player had gained access to accounts with genuine Freeplay points. Betting the casino’s bonus currency, he won real money. When another man bailed the player out of jail, a background search of that person still did not generate any red flags. Then security officials looked at the Facebook page of the man who had posted the bail money. One detail stood out in particular. Among several hundred Facebook friends appeared the name of Tony Ahn, an MGM database manager. Ahn had worked in the department overseeing Freeplay points for the company’s customers.
Looking at Ahn’s Facebook page, investigators discovered several friends who seemed familiar from the investigation. It turned out they were involved in the scheme. After police arrested someone in his team in 2010, Ahn told two others to go into the desert and bury a card encoder, counterfeit loyalty cards, and other evidence. The effort, almost a crime cliché in a city surrounded by desert, failed.
Police pieced together what had happened. Starting in 2009, Ahn had gained access to the Freeplay points a few weeks before they were to expire (like many airline miles and other reward credits, the points had a limited period of validity). He hoped that thousands of real owners of the points would not return to claim them. He allocated the points to blank cards he placed in the encoding machine and distributed the cards to his accomplices: twenty-two cards fitted into a cigarette pack.12 The former MGM Resorts official was indicted in early 2011; the following year a judge sentenced Ahn, then twenty-nine, to fifty-seven months in prison and ordered him to pay $863,895 in restitution.13 He is scheduled for release from federal prison at the end of 2016.
A lot of good old-fashioned police work went into solving the case. But the social network postings gave investigators the essential clue that exposed the conspiracy. “Without Facebook we probably would have never caught him,” says Whiting, the surveillance director at the ARIA.14 Tony Ahn learned the hard way that social network sites contain important clues about people and their behavior. Even innocent postings on Facebook can reveal surprising insights about a person, just as Harry Lewis had predicted when his student Mark Zuckerberg experimented with his first social network.
Surveillance cameras, photo recognition technology, social networks—all these things have given security teams new tools to discover people’s identities and associations. Yet some old techniques remain a staple of their arsenal. For decades, casino security and surveillance staffs have kept mug shots of known criminals on hand—whether from the Griffin Book or police—to alert them to potential trouble. Police and security officials rely on them to recognize repeat offenders and process documentation. Today, mug shots also fuel a darker corner behind the data curtain. Entrepreneurs make money by publicizing the arrest records of millions of Americans. It’s a shadowy world where the website owners do not reveal themselves to the public, fearing for their own safety. Yet one mug shot king was willing to share the often surprising behind-the-scenes story of his business.
12
Mugged
Mob Museum
After years of planning, in 2012 Las Vegas opened its Mob Museum, which chronicles the desert city’s rich criminal past. Visitors start their tour in the mug shot/lineup room, where they are invited to step behind a one-way mirror. As they hold up faux police placards inscribed with numbers, friends and family members on the other side of the glass take photos. A sign above the lineup reads: “How did it come to this?”
Tourists find the whole spectacle highly entertaining. It’s a joke they willingly engage in. But it’s no joke when your mug shot is publicized for real.
The widespread availability of your personal data today means that others can find out not just about some of the happiest days of your life, such as when you got married or bought your house, but also the moments you would like to be allowed to forget. This latter kind of data has become more common as websites gathering and displaying mug shots have proliferated. In the realm of personal data, mug shots are especially powerful and damaging because they record what may be the lowest point of a person’s life. Once upon a time, only the famous or the infamous would expect to see their mug shot turn up in public. Now entrepreneurs have found a way to make money from the arrest photos of ordinary people.
Police started taking mug shots as photography developed in the mid-nineteenth century. Since then, notorious criminals, as well as the rich and famous, have faced the constable’s camera, including Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, Frank Sinatra, Barry Bonds, Hugh Grant, Mel Gibson, and Martin Luther King Jr. On my last visit to Las Vegas, O. J. Simpson posed anew ahead of his latest courtroom appearances. Yet the vast bulk of mug shots one encounters on the Internet show ordinary people, many of whom have never actually been convicted of a crime.
Tourists line up for mug shots at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas.
Source: Author photo.
How did it come to this?
Dispute Over $3.68 on a Restaurant Bill
One summer Saturday afternoon in 2007, Paola Roy and a friend joined a third woman for a late lunch at the House of India restaurant in Coral Gables, Florida. Roy had already eaten but wanted to keep her friend company, so she ordered a small $5.95 portion of spicy black lentils and naan bread. At the end of the meal she asked for a doggie bag. When the bill came the restaurant had charged her $9.95 for the larger portion of lentils. She refused to pay the higher amount and left $22 in cash on the table—$3.68 short of what the owner thought she should pay. He called the police.
The women left the restaurant and headed toward their cars in a garage. As she arrived, Roy saw a police officer on a bicycle dressed in spandex shorts. He signaled that she should approach him. Her heart pounded and she froze, prompting the officer to rush up a parking ramp toward her.
“I hear you skipped out on a check,” he said.
“Well, someone lied to you,” she replied.
She held a Styrofoam container with the extra lentils in her left hand as she explained the dispute. Several police cars arrived on the scene. One officer went over to interview the restaurant owner. Eventually the officer who had arrived by bike asked, “Are you going to pay the bill in full?”
“No.”
“You are going to have to pay the $3.68 difference or I am going to arrest you.”
“It was the restaurant owner’s mistake. I don’t feel I owe him the money, and I am not going to pay him. There is no reason for me to pay this bill.”
He took out his handcuffs and grabbed her left wrist. Roy’s friend yelled out that she would pay the difference. But Roy, angry about the way she was being treated, looked over at the officer’s identification tag and read aloud his name.
“I want to see who is arresting me for three dollars and sixty-eight cents.”
“Oh yeah? That’s it, I’m taking you in.”
He cuffed Roy’s right hand and led her down the parking ramp, then into the backseat of a patrol car. She had never gotten in trouble with the law other than a few traffic tickets. As they drove to the station, Roy felt a moment of regret, then anger and defiance, as she replayed what had just happened to her. Police booked her and announced they would take her mug shot. She had come to the restaurant from the beach, so she had pulled back her hair and did not wear any lipstick or jewelry.
The officer told her to remove her glasses and snapped the photo. She felt grateful that she might look a bit better in the image without glasses.
Some time later, officers removed her from the cell and drove her to a jail downtown, charged with “defrauding innkeeper.” She arrived at 6:45 p.m., hours after her lunch, but the sun had yet to set. In the arrival area she saw a van of inmates arriving, many of the men unshaven and dirty, some with tattoos and holes in their clothes as though they had been fighting. She spent hours in a holding cell with other women who expressed amazement upon hearing how she came to be arrested. She was released from jail on bail at 5 a.m. the following morning. Prosecutors ended up dropping the charges soon afterward, and the matter seemed forgotten.
Starting a Mug Shot Business
The following year in Austin, Texas, Kyle Prall started a job as a financial analyst at Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which operates the electric grid for much of the state. He had gone through a lot of trouble as a teenager and young man, but those days were behind him now. He landed the position just before the financial crisis hit, costing millions of American workers their jobs. Las Vegas casinos were hit particularly hard; thousands of workers were fired as gamblers stayed home and saved their pennies.
Despite his relative good fortune in tough times, however, Prall remained restless. He found his finance work mind-numbing and meaningless. Around that time a friend told him about a Florida newspaper that published pictures of sex offenders. “That makes a lot of sense,” he thought. “This is something I can do in my spare time.” Prall’s true calling was coming into focus.
