by James Swain
“They’re all yours,” the floor manager said.
The floor manager left, and Marconi introduced himself, Davis, and Gerry. The man at the console removed his glasses and quizzed Gerry with a glance.
“You Tony Valentine’s son?”
“Sure am,” Gerry said.
“Your father taught me the ropes,” the man said. “We used to say your father could see a gnat’s ass and hear a mouse piss. How’s he doing?”
“Great,” Gerry said.
“Glad to hear it. My name’s Lou Preston. I hear you want to watch some tapes.”
Gerry explained the blackjack scam with the baseball cap to Lou Preston. When he was finished, Preston’s head was bobbing up and down.
“So you think there might have been more cheaters wearing these caps,” Preston said. “Can you give me an approximate time when this took place?”
“Around four o’clock this morning,” Marconi said.
“What exactly did the caps look like?” Preston asked.
Marconi took the cap off his head and gave it to Preston. Preston placed the cap beneath the reading light on his console, and spent a few moments examining it.
“Let’s see if we can find this cap in our digital library,” he said.
Preston began to type on the keyboard on his console. Like most large casinos, Bally’s used digital video recorders to continuously tape the action on the floor. It was a far cry from the old days, when the tapes in VCRs had to be switched every hour. Within seconds, four tapes appeared on a matrix on Preston’s computer screen. Each tape showed a different man in the casino wearing a baseball cap while playing blackjack.
“These four gentlemen were playing blackjack in our casino at four o’clock this morning,” Preston said. “Is one of them your guy?”
Marconi pointed at the guy in the right-hand corner of the matrix. “That’s him.”
Preston dragged the cursor over the picture and clicked on it. The picture enlarged to show a guy in his early fifties wearing a Yankees cap and smoking a cigar. He wore his shirt open, and hanging around his neck were several thick gold chains.
Preston did some more magic with his cursor, and the baseball cap became the only thing on the screen. He struck the ENTER key, then leaned back in his chair.
“In sixty seconds we’ll know if your hunch is correct,” he told Gerry.
The hard drive on Preston’s console made a whirring sound. Marconi and Davis looked confused, and Gerry guessed they weren’t up to speed on the latest technology being employed by casinos to track cheaters. Pointing at the baseball cap, he said, “Lou just burned an image of this cap into his computer. He’s asked the computer to take a look at all recent tapes, and see how many similar caps turn up. Within a minute we’ll know how many there were.”
“I thought that took hours,” Davis said.
“Used to take hours,” Preston corrected him. “We now use Kalatel DVRs to record digitally. It’s light years faster than before. We can search the tapes for anything we want.”
“Beats using a catwalk, huh?” Gerry said.
“Personally, I liked the catwalks,” Preston said.
“Gave me plenty of exercise. They did have their drawbacks, though. One time, I was on the catwalk with a camera with a zoom lens, trying to photograph a cheater switching dice. There was a two-way mirror in the ceiling, and as I tried to photograph the switch, the cheater stared straight up at me. I must have leaned on the mirror, because dust was falling down on his head. Needless to say, he ran like hell.”
The hard drive had stopped whirring, and Preston hit ENTER again.
“Bingo,” he said. “Four matches.”
They huddled behind his chair, and Preston pulled up each match the computer had made. Four men, all Italian, with ages ranging from late forties to late fifties, wearing jewelry around their necks or hands, and wearing Yankees baseball caps.
“Looks like a casting call for The Sopranos,” Marconi said.
Gerry felt a hand on his shoulder, and glanced at Davis.
“Good job,” Davis said.
Preston e-mailed copies of each man’s image to the Atlantic City Police Department to be checked against its database of known criminals. Then he escorted his guests through the surveillance control room to the door. As Marconi and Davis walked into the hall, Preston turned to Gerry.
“One thing’s bothering me,” Preston said. “Why me?”
Gerry didn’t understand the question.
“Let me rephrase that. Why my casino?” Preston said. “There are a dozen casinos on the island; why did these guys pick mine? It’s a question I always ask myself when we get ripped off. Is there a flaw in our system, or did a security person on the floor get paid to look the other way? Or is there another reason?”
“Such as?”
“Maybe your hunch is correct,” Preston said. “Maybe the scam is bigger than everyone thought. Makes sense, don’t you think?”
Gerry realized he was nodding. Talking to Lou Preston was like talking to his old man. Lou knew how cheaters thought, and had grift sense. “You think this gang might be hitting all the casinos on the island?” Gerry asked.
“I don’t see why not.”
“How can we check?”
“Easy,” Preston said. “Atlantic City’s casinos are connected through a system called SIN. Stands for Secure Internal Network. We use it primarily to alert each other about teams of card counters. I’ll use SIN to alert them about the Yankees caps, and ask the casinos to run the same check that I ran. Who knows? We might hit gold.”
Lou was smiling, and Gerry realized why. Lou knew the outcome of what that check would be. They were going to find mobsters with Yankees caps in other casinos.
“Just one second,” Gerry said.
Going into the hall, Gerry went to where Davis and Marconi waited by the elevators. They looked ready to call it a day, and Gerry put a hand on each of their shoulders.
“Sorry, guys, but we’re not done yet,” he said.
22
Within sixty seconds of Takarama being dragged out of Celebrity’s casino, the mess around the roulette table was cleaned up and the croupier was back spinning the little white ball while happily exhorting the crowd to “Place your bets! Place your bets!”
Flush with cash, Rufus Steele threw a fan of hundred-dollar bills on the layout. He had collected his winnings from the Greek and the other suckers who’d bet against him, and his pockets were overflowing with money. “Five thousand on the black,” he said.
The ball rolled around the wheel and dropped on a black number. A number of bystanders broke into wild applause and Rufus bowed to them.
“Is he always so lucky?” Gloria Curtis asked.
Valentine stood off to the side with Gloria and Zack.
He wanted to tell her that up until a few days ago, Rufus had been flat broke, but he bit his tongue. He had never liked hustlers, yet hanging around Rufus, his sense of fair play had become curiously elastic.
“He’s got the magic touch,” he said.
Rufus joined them and smiled at Gloria. “I owe you, Ms. Curtis,” he said.
“You do?” she asked.
“Moon balls.”
“How about an interview?” she asked.
“You know me,” Rufus said. “I love to talk.”
They walked out of the casino and across the lobby to the entrance of Celebrity’s poker room. A leader board had been erected by the front doors. Skip DeMarco was still in a commanding position, with everyone else far behind. Rufus read the board, then made a disparaging noise that originated deep in his throat.
Gloria’s cameraman did a sound check, then held his hand up in the air.
“Five…four…three…two…one. We’re rolling.”
“This is Gloria Curtis, coming to you from the World Poker Showdown in Las Vegas,” Gloria said into her mike. “Standing beside me is legendary gambler Rufus Steele, who just beat a former world champion Ping-Pong champ
ion in a winner-take-all match for half a million dollars. Rufus, you’ve beaten a race horse in the hundred-yard dash, and now you’ve beaten a world champion athlete. What’s next?”
“Once this tournament is over, Skip DeMarco and I are going to sit down and play poker for two million dollars, winner-take-all,” Rufus said.
“DeMarco is the tournament’s chip leader, and considers himself the best poker player in the world,” Gloria said. “How do you rate your chances against him?”
“Being the chip leader doesn’t mean much,” Rufus said. “Neither does playing in a tournament. People who play in tournaments for a living are what gamblers call fun players. When they’re not playing, they’re singing in the church choir or playing volleyball at the YMCA.”
“Are you saying that DeMarco is not the best player in the world?”
A smile spread across Rufus’s leathery face. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but every time that boy gets on television and says he’s the best, a few dozen guys around the country jump out of their chairs and run to the toilet before they ruin the rug.”
“How would you rate him?”
“I wouldn’t.”
“But he’s the tournament chip leader. Surely that means something.”
Rufus’s smile spread. “Afraid not.”
“Could you explain?”
“A tournament is several days long, and luck plays a big part in determining the winner. When DeMarco and I play, luck won’t have anything to do with the out come.”
“If DeMarco does win the tournament, will that change your opinion of him?”
The friendly expression vanished from Rufus’s face and he scowled at the camera. “Giving DeMarco a trophy and calling him the best player in the world is like putting whip cream on a hot dog. No, it wouldn’t change my opinion of him one bit.”
Beating Takarama at Ping-Pong had gotten Rufus’s competitive juices flowing, and once again he denounced DeMarco, as though the sheer volume of his angry words would expose the younger man as a fraud. It gave Valentine an idea, and he slipped inside the poker room.
The World Poker Showdown had started with over five thousand players, and probably just as many dreams. Less than a hundred remained, and they sat at a dozen felt tables in the room’s center, bathed in bright TV lights and surrounded by fans. At the feature table was DeMarco with seven other players.
Standing on his tiptoes, Valentine watched DeMarco play. He was a handsome kid, and seemed to be enjoying himself. Tournament poker was different from your friendly neighborhood game because of the elimination process. If you played a couple of bad hands in tournament poker, you were gone. As a result, most people played tight, and bet only when they had good cards.
But DeMarco didn’t play this way. Because of his blindness, he held his two cards up to his face, then placed them on the table, and did not look at them again. Instead, he focused his attention on his opponents’ bets and calls. When the bet came to him, he inevitably made the right decision, and either threw away a losing hand—which he flashed to the table—or stayed in with winning cards. The crowd was in his corner, and each decision was met with thunderous applause.
Backing away from the table, Valentine shook his head. The whole thing smelled like three-day-old fish. DeMarco wasn’t playing cards—he was acting like someone playing cards. Had he any common sense, he would have purposely lost a hand, just to keep things looking normal. Only he liked to showboat.
Valentine’s eyes scanned the room. DeMarco didn’t go anywhere without his handlers, and George Scalzo and his bodyguard stood by the bar, watching their boy. Nevada did not let mobsters into its casinos, and Valentine still did not understand how Scalzo had managed to be at the tournament and not get arrested. A cocktail waitress walked by, and he touched her arm.
“I need a favor,” Valentine said.
“I’m busy,” she said curtly.
He dug out his wallet and stuffed a twenty into the tip glass on her tray.
“Name it,” she said.
He borrowed her pen and a frilly cocktail napkin. On the napkin he wrote:
HEY GEORGIE, YOUR BOY IS GETTING TRASHED IN THE LOBBY
He handed it back to her. “See the guy that looks like Don Corleone?” He pointed across the room at Scalzo. “I want you to give him this.”
The waitress walked away with a bemused look on her face that made him think of his son’s crack about him playing cops and robbers. She delivered the note. Scalzo read it, then crumbled the napkin into a ball. He motioned to his bodyguard, and they marched out of the poker room.
It was the opportunity Valentine had been waiting for. He edged up to the feature table, and pushed his way through the crowd until he was in front. A new hand was about to begin, and he stared intently at the table. The tournament had gotten nailed several days ago for employing dealers with criminal records, and he watched the dealer at the table shuffle the cards. The shuffle looked fair, as did the cut that followed it, but something about the dealer’s body language wasn’t right. The dealer, who had a walrus moustache and a square jaw, looked apprehensive. It could have been the presence of the TV cameras, but Valentine’s gut told him otherwise.
Each player got two face-down cards, and the dealer sailed them around the table in a slow, deliberate manner. It was slower than any deal Valentine had ever seen, and he found himself staring at the dealer’s hands. The dealer’s right hand, his dealing hand, was completely stiff. That wasn’t normal.
Finished, the dealer placed the deck on the table. Dealers who used sleight-of-hand to cheat were always conscious of their manipulations. No matter how good they were, they knew that a trained observer could nail them. As a result, there was always a moment of truth after the cheating was done.
The dealer looked up. There was hesitation in his eyes. He glanced into the crowd of spectators and saw Valentine. He swallowed hard.
Gotcha, Valentine thought.
Valentine had always liked movies when the cavalry showed up to save the day, and felt an adrenaline rush seeing Pete Longo and three uniformed cops come barging into the poker room. They were moving fast, the uniforms having unsnapped the harness on their revolvers. He wondered if they were going to nail DeMarco, or the dealer, or both of them. It was about time.
The crowd was slow to get out of their way, and Longo flashed his silver detective’s badge to hurry them along. Valentine stared at the dealer, and saw a look of panic distorting his face.
Longo came up to the tournament director, and the two men had a talk. Part of the director’s job was to act as an MC, and announce when players had won hands. To do this, he used a hand-held microphone, which he now raised to his face. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to have a five-minute recess. Dealers, please stop your games and reshuffle. Thank you.”
Longo and the three uniforms had broken away from the tournament director, and were coming around the table. The dealer had pushed his chair back and placed both his hands palms down on the felt, a sure sign that he’d been arrested before. Longo walked past the dealer and directly toward Valentine while barking an order to the uniforms. Reaching into his jacket, Longo removed a pair of handcuffs from the clip on his belt.
“Tony, you’re under arrest,” Longo said.
“For what?” Valentine said incredulously.
“Two counts of second-degree murder.”
“You’re making a mistake,” Valentine said.
“Like hell I am. Lift your arms into the air.”
The crowd was giving the police plenty of room now, and Valentine felt their hostile stares. He’d arrested hundreds of people in his life, and had always wondered what it felt like. Now, he was going to find out.
He lifted his arms into the air, and a uniform frisked him. Then his wrists were handcuffed behind his back. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but that didn’t matter; he felt like he’d done something wrong, and his face was burning.
As Longo led him out of the poker room and into
the lobby, Gloria and Rufus stood off to the side, watching with horrified faces. Valentine wanted to tell them that he was innocent, but instead stared down at the ugly carpet as he walked past.
23
Skip DeMarco sat frozen in his chair. There were cops in the room—he could feel the tension in the air—but he couldn’t hear what was being said. Had they figured out the scam, and were they about to arrest him? He tried to act nonchalant, and shuffled a stack of chips with one hand. What was his uncle’s expression? Never run if you’re not being chased. The chips fell out of his hand and spilled across the table. He felt himself shudder uncontrollably.
“Here you go,” the dealer said, pushing the chips back.
“What’s going on?”
“The cops just arrested some guy in the crowd,” the dealer said.
The dealer’s voice was strained, like he was afraid of something. Although his uncle had not explained how the scam worked, DeMarco knew someone in the room was reading his opponents’ cards and signaling them to him. He’d ruled out the dealer, simply because the dealer had a job to do. But now he sensed the dealer was involved. DeMarco felt a hand on his shoulder, and nearly jumped out of his chair.
“Sorry to startle you,” the tournament director said. “We’re taking a break. You’re free to get up.”
DeMarco rose from the table. He waited for Guido and his uncle to appear. When they didn’t, he grew nervous. Where had they gone? And why hadn’t they told him they were leaving? The guy sitting next to him announced he was going to the bathroom. His name was Bruce Ballas, and when he wasn’t playing cards, he was strumming a guitar in a band. DeMarco asked if he could walk with him.
“Sure,” Ballas said.
They walked together to the lavatory. The joke of the tournament was that the men’s lavatory had a dozen stalls, the women’s only three. Ballas led DeMarco to an empty stall at the end of the row, and he locked himself in.
