Legendary director Martin Scorcese’s classic gambling movie Casino turns 30 this year.
With a stellar cast of Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone and Joe Pesci and set in Las Vegas, it tells the story of two best friends – a casino executive and a Mafia enforcer – who compete for a gambling empire and the heart of a seductive socialite.
But no one knows the intoxicating world of the high roller better than Richard Marcus who, by his own admission, was once one of the industry’s biggest conmen.
For 25 years, the gifted chancer cheated his way around the world – conning casinos out of millions of pounds. And, he claims, despite being tailed by the FBI, he never got caught.
Always one roll of the dice ahead, he says it was thanks to him inventing a genius move that relied on psychology and sleight of hand. Through this, he says, he tricked casino dealers into handing over some $30 million (£26.4million).
But this master of cunning has turned the tables – the gambling tables that is – and at 68, those very same casinos are paying Richard to shore up their defences against people just like him.
Speaking in association with OLBG Casino Sites , he tells The Mirror: “I actually get some fulfilment in teaching people how to protect themselves from terrible people like me.”
But, the native New Yorker says, even for a seasoned international swindler, the gaming tables of London were the hardest to crack.
He says: “London had and still has the hardest casinos to cheat successfully, because their personnel are so good.
“I think the Brits are naturally duplicitous! That’s how they won the Second World War, by duping the Nazis in Operation Overlord.”
Now paid by casinos to speak at conferences and train up their staff in spotting cheats, his career as a swindler began at 17, when he fell out with his New York-based family and moved to Las Vegas – falling in with a bunch of mobsters who helped him to bet, despite him still being underage.
And when he was old enough, he started working as a dealer in one of the smaller, downtown casinos, where a man called Joe Classon asked if he’d like to be cut in on a money-making scheme with some pals.
“He said, ‘I’m a professional casino cheat and I’ve been watching you deal for a couple of days. I like the way you handle the cards, you’re a good-looking guy’ – I was at the time – ‘And you probably would be perfect,’” says Richard.
“I said, ‘well, what exactly is it that you want me to do?’ His response was the most profound moment of my life. It’s what made me go on to become the greatest casino cheat in history.
“He looked at me and shook his head. ‘No, you tell me what you’re going to do,’ he said.”
Accepting the challenge, he devised a simple but effective ruse that would stack the cards of a baccarat game in favour of Joe’s team.
In baccarat, eight decks of cards are loaded into the ‘shoe’, or box, that are then dealt out by the dealer.
Knowing in which order the cards will come out gives the player a huge advantage, as it means they can tell which side – bank or player – is going to win.
“I couldn’t fix up a whole eight-deck shoe, but I fixed up eight winning hands in a row for the player’s side,” says Richard.
He avoided suspicion by rigging the game during his working hours, then leaving the casino when his shift ended and Joe’s professional cheats came in.
Waiting anxiously for hours in his motel room, finally hearing the jubilant honking of a car horn outside, accompanied by yells and laughter, he says: “I open the door and they (Joe’s gang) each have a bottle of champagne, and someone is spraying theirs in the air like at Formula One. I hate to say it, but it was probably the best feeling I ever had in my life.”
Richard’s first dodgy game won him $10,000, which for a broke 21-year-old, estranged from his family, was a dream come true.
Hooked on the adrenaline rush, he quickly agreed to join Joe’s gang in more elaborate cheating schemes.
“At first, I thought it was an ingenious way to make money,” Richard says. “Then it became just so much fun. You’re one little person going up against this hundreds-of-million-dollar surveillance apparatus and they’re spending all these millions of dollars to try and catch you, and that gives you a big ego boost.”
Over the next few years, honing his swindling skills, Richard devised his own signature move, the Savannah, which he named after a stripper dancing in the bar where he had his eureka moment.
The incredibly simple move on the blackjack table involves distracting the dealer for a split second and replacing a stack of low-value chips on the winning number with a stack that had high-value chips hidden within it – so the casino would have to pay out thousands.
“For me it was an art,” he laughs. “Every cheating move was choreographed. Not too many people feel sorry for casinos for getting ripped off. I saw it as a victimless crime. And I’m the only one in history, who was operating at such a high level, to have never been caught.”
To avoid detection, Richard and his pals moved around the world, hitting up the gambling capitals and rinsing every casino they could.
“We would spend winters in the Caribbean, Bahamas, Puerto Rico – you name it. In the summer we would go to Europe,” he says.
But, with those running the gambling tables of England’s capital being the hardest to con, he says: “We would see London as a challenge … to beat them.”
Joe eventually retired, leaving Richard to form his own gang of cheats – at which point he is sure they were being tracked by the FBI, although there was never enough evidence against them to take action.
In 1995, the year Scorcese’s Casino movie was released, he got spooked while playing his Savannah move at the famous Golden Nugget casino in Vegas.
Having already made $4million in the city from his signature play, Richard was stopped at the blackjack table by a man he’d never met.
“He says, ‘Mr Marcus, I’m the president of the casino here and we’re not paying you.’ I say, ‘what do you mean you’re not paying me? You’ve got to, it’s a legitimate bet.’ He says, ‘you can take it up with the Nevada Gaming Control Board, but we’re not paying you.’
“I felt the heat and I decided after 25 years, as great as I was, I was even luckier not to end up in jail.”
Richard’s last night of cheating was on New Year’s Eve 1999, when he claims his gang won over $100,000 from one Vegas casino.
“It was 4 or 5am, the sun was just coming up and we ended up walking from one end of the strip to the other,” he remembers. “We were laughing and hugging each other, and crying a bit – because we knew this was it. It was a surreal feeling, because we knew it was over.”
Not quite ready to put his conman alter-ego to rest for good, Richard then wrote a series of books about his scams and misadventures.
Despite realising his good fortune in not being caught, he misses the adrenaline rush that came from cheating.
Now based in Lima, Peru, his only contact with casinos now is speaking on their behalf, for fear that getting too close to a gaming table would lure him back to a life of crime.
“I have to have juice – that’s what we call it – going through my veins at all times,” he says. “I get that from gambling on professional sports now.
“I wouldn’t trust myself playing poker, because if I lost $5 legitimately in a casino I’d get p***sed off, and I’d have to cheat to get it back!”