I've never heard of a cattle prod. There are stories of back, rooms without cameras where guys get roughed up a little bit. Nowadays, we don't need to do that. Hello, everybody. My name's Brian Stanton. I'm a casino executive in Las, Vegas for Station Casinos. I have 20 years in the, table-games business watching and looking at game security. Today, we're going to be looking at casino-heist movie scenes. and judge how real they are. Whoo! You are a winner! Inside jobs, collusion is. a thing that we worry about and a thing that we look into. There's been numerous stories of dealers setting up bets that aren't there or paying bets that aren't there, because they're in. collusion with a player. Things they're doing stand out. So, when I'm walking the floor, if I see dealers turning their head and looking where I'm at or. where their supervisor's at, they want to know where we're at because something's going on. Security measures. When the system senses a threat,. it shuts down and reboots. Well, for how long? Man: Three minutes and 20 seconds. I've been in a few older properties where something will happen with a power transformer. Power goes out in the city. If we lose surveillance coverage, we stop playing. If we have no camera, coverage to the games, we just pull the lids up, lock. the games, and wait it out. We wouldn't deal the games or operate without surveillance coverage. The system's in lockdown. All calls in and out of, this room are secure. Again, sir, it's in lockdown. It's a very Hollywood scene that is completely unrealistic, for a multitude of reasons. First of all, their surveillance room looks like an NSA SCIF. It's the nicest room I've ever seen, and no surveillance room. I've been in is that nice. They're not controlled by computers, where you could be locked out and couldn't make a phone call. I don't think there's a scenario where we would be stuck in a room. I would hope that there's, some government agency like OSHA who would protect us from being locked in a room. As a business practice, we would have a hard-line, phone in every office, and surveillance would. always be able to use that. Obviously, if power went. out, that may go out with it, and then we'd have to, use the old-fashioned find the person and tell, them what's going on. Whoa! Bringing in dice has happened. I haven't seen it in my career, but I've heard stories in that. time frame of it happening. And they wouldn't be magnetic. They would be loaded, where, you would add some weight to one side or another, or you would shave some corners. This is very Hollywood. The whole lighter and seeing it flip so slowly from one side to another. I would hope my supervisors, would catch that right away if it was possible. And they wouldn't get away. with a whole lot of money, because it's pretty obvious. Getting that amount of. bets for the numbers that they kind of had over everybody's heads, apparently there's no table, maximum on any of these games, which is unrealistic as well. I think I saw a $100,000, bet on a snake eyes, which, I think $500's. about the most I've seen as a limit for that. Every bet on every table. has a maximum-amount bet. All very, very unlikely and comical. For accuracy of casinos, I rate it about a 2. I would love to know if. a mathematician out there ever looked at any of. those equations on there and figured out if it was anything. Card counting is not some extravagant trigonometry problem. It's just basic counting. Second of all, you really can't learn card counting in one day, reading a book. The general public knowing about it has probably been a boon for us, because people think they. can come out and do it, and they really can't. If you're going to count cards, you probably wouldn't attract that much attention to yourself. You have the character in the background flipping off the cameras, creating a lot of energy around and drawing attention to themselves. Splitting fives. Noticing that they're doing things, again. He did split fives, which you would never do, even if you were a card counter. You would have to maybe, know what the next three or four cards coming out of the shoe were to make that make sense. He can't lose! He can't lose! The floor supervisor and the pit boss talking to each other. We wouldn't need to cover. our mouths with a clipboard. They're not going to read our lips. It would be, "Hey, something's going on over there. We're watching it on camera. Let's make a plan for what, we're going to do about it." Doing a distraction to escape doesn't make any sense, 'cause they still have, to cash the chips out. Counting cards is not illegal, unless you're using some device to give yourself an advantage. Smartwatch or a computer in, your shoe or on your thigh, that would make it cheating a game. But keeping track in your head and knowing how many big, cards versus little cards are, you can gain an advantage,, and so it's frowned upon. If somebody's card-counting in a Las Vegas casino, we simply say, "Hey, you're not welcome to play blackjack anymore. Your action's too good for us." This scene, not very. realistic in that regard. 1 for accuracy of how, we do things in a casino or representing how card counters would act. Ace: Cash flows from. the tables to our boxes, through the cage, and into the most sacred room in the casino, the count room. It's not realistic to a modern casino as far as how you would enter it, how it's laid out, or how the actions are, actually taking place. You see the keep-out sign,, and then they walk in. We wouldn't allow anybody to walk in with a briefcase nowadays. The workers that walk in are walking in with clear purses, if at all. The count room is the most, secure room in the building. There are procedures in place for who can go in, how they can go in, what they can do when they're there. Probably in part because, these things did happen when they were run by individuals or by the mob, versus now, publicly traded companies. Nicky: They're counting, money. Who wants to bother? And the best part was that.

upstairs, the board of directors didn't know what the f--- was going on. I mean, to them, everything. looked on the up and up. But when you're paying out at the cage, we would count by hand. And they did a good job of. how their hand motions were and how they laid the bills out. Every table, there's a paddle. to the right of the dealer, and they take the cash, and, they drop it into a slot, and it goes into what's called a drop box. And those are collected daily, and they're double-lock-secured. And security would come around and remove them, take them into the count room, where it's unlocked and the money is just dropped out onto a clear table. And then the money is counted and sorted and assigned to that table. Nicky: The guys inside the counting room were all slipped in there. to skim the joint dry. They'd do short counts,, they'd lose fill slips, they'd even take cash right out of the drop boxes. It's in a time period, back in the day, where you hear stories, about these things going on. A fill slip is just an order form when a table game needs more chips. Throughout the day, as. people get up and walk away and cash out, we have to. replenish those chips. And you order a fill from the cage to bring more chips to the table. And that's how you figure out how much a table wins, or loses in a given day. Nicky: And it was up to. this guy, right here, standing in front of about $2 million, to skim the cash off the top without anybody getting. wise, the IRS or anybody. The skim was apparently a real thing that the mob was doing to the casinos. Casinos are big business, so, it takes a lot of employees to factor in the cash that comes through and the accounting paperwork that goes along with that. So it is a very busy room, there's a lot of people working, but not busy enough, that we wouldn't notice somebody walking in with a briefcase and walking out with the cash. It takes key access, and there's also cameras everywhere nowadays. Ace: You can spot these a--holes by watching the way they bet. Like this guy. He's betting lavender chips at $500 each with only one little problem. He's always guessed right. When things stand out, you, take a closer look at it. So they did a great job of, how the dealers are moving, how they're paying, how, they're putting cards on the tables, to how the. supervisors stand in the pit, to even how De Niro's character walked in and started to observe things. Ace: I saw that the dealer was weak, but he wasn't in on it. He just wasn't protecting his hand. He was lifting his hole card way too high. The first thing he noticed was that the guy always guesses right. Kind of bends down to tie his shoe so he can get a look at what's going on and where those angles are coming from and figures out that there's. a cheater on the other side. Ace: Signaling his buddy. They cruise from casino to casino looking for weak dealers the way lions look for weak antelope. Using a device to cheat, at, least in the state of Nevada, is a crime, so you don't see that nearly as often. Things like that used to happen as computer technology took hold. If it wasn't for the device, they wouldn't really be doing anything wrong, just taking advantage of a weak dealer. Those were the way we used, to check the hole card, was for them to cover it up and look for it. Nowadays we have a thing called a peeker device, which is a two-way mirror that they slide the cards right into so that there's no risk of exposing that card anymore. Ace: Turns out this guy. and his f---ing pals, they were knocking this place dead for years. I've heard a lot of stories. I've never heard of a cattle prod. There are stories of back. rooms without cameras where guys get roughed up a little bit. Nowadays, we don't need to do that. We have the Nevada Gaming Control Board, we have security, where we would just notify and do everything through a legal process. It's once they brought, that device into play. And we'd notify the gaming commission, say, "Hey, we have somebody, that we suspect of cheating." And we would hand it right off to them. I think the movie was done incredibly well from a technical standpoint. Everything outside of the cattle prod. That knocks the clip down to about a 7½. Charlene: Oh, my God, I can feel a kick! Shelly: F---ing amateurs. This is a more realistic thing that could happen and has happened. It's switching out dice. Fake dice, incredibly uncommon. Alec Baldwin's character coming up as the casino boss, somebody with the experience to be able to see, hey, the way he's cupping his hand when he picks them up, or the way he's releasing them where fingers are bent up, to try and hide something. We have policies for that too. When a shooter shoots, the supervisor's looking for their hand to be open to make sure they're not hiding dice in there. Cheating on dice can be common because there's a lot going on. There's a lot of players,, there's a lot of distraction. The biggest cheating scam that happens is what's called dice sliding, where you would set one dice to a number, and then when you go to throw them, instead of the dice tumbling. and becoming a random result, they can control one or both of the dice and know what the outcome is and either bet with it or against it. It takes a crew of people., Someone to distract the dealer, someone to throw it, another, one to make a big bet. So a couple times a year. you hear of a casino getting hit with a dice-sliding team. Again, we have policies and procedures in place that protect us from that. They always have serial numbers on them. We make sure that they match. and that they're our dice. There is some security built into it. Yeah, he's up $18,000 since. I stepped up to the table. Sorry, Shelly. I'm kind of hit or miss these days. In the scene, we see William, Macy acting as a cooler, somebody who has such bad luck that they put him at the table, then his bad luck hopefully rubs off on everybody else. Unfortunately, it is a thing. I haven't seen it in a long, long time. Managers throwing salt under a table or pennies under a table, because somehow that was equated to bad luck. Modern casinos, I think, have, all gotten away from that and just realized it's all about the math. Let's get it, let's get it! Aw. Guys, I thank you, my. pregnant wife thanks you. When he sensed that he, was going to get caught, he said, all right, the gig's up, and he switched back to the original dice and happened to seven out. Using your pregnant wife as a distraction, this is a much more realistic version of cheating than the "Ocean's Eleven" scene with the magnetic dice. Them switching out dice, I, think this is very accurate. I'd rate it an 8. I feel like you should, have somebody from the CIA or FBI in here to evaluate, this, more than me, because it doesn't pass, the smell test for me on how casinos work or anything that would happen in a casino. I think they say in the movie.

it connects three casinos that in reality are a mile apart. There's no secret bunker. anywhere with elevator in. And then the two security guards just happen to be facing. away from the only elevator, facing a door for no reason. Rusty: As your manager's, probably reporting to you now, you have a little over $160, million in your vault tonight. You may notice we're only. packing up about half that. It would depend on how often. deposits are made to the bank or whatever, but we are required to be able to cover any winners and losers. Now, does that mean we have. to give it to them in cash? No. We just write them a check for it. Modern casinos, we've become increasingly a cashless society, and we have credit markers, and bank wire transfers. Yen? In previous clips, we saw, where the count room was. And then once the money's counted, it's put into a secure location. You can call it a vault if you want to. But it being this far out, of the way, this protected, like it's holding the nuclear codes. Benedict: Cue up the tape to the robbery. Installed on Tuesday. The images we saw of those. men robbing us was a tape. Walsh: What? I feel safe to say that nobody has a vault quite like this one, or would we spend the money to inlay the marble, or, terrazzo, or whatever that was with the name of the casino in the vault. That seems like we could spend that money better somewhere else. I've worked at some, extravagant, opulent places, but that's even a little bit over the top. Our directors of security,. our security managers all either were former law enforcement or know them, so they would know when these guys walked in. The likelihood of an. entire team of criminals pretending to be Las Vegas Metro or SWAT or whoever and walking out with money, I had a hard time watching this movie when I watched it the first time. And I'm like, wow, I really have to suspend reality to enjoy this. A 1 on how things in a real casino look or act or are run. Cameras generally aren't at eye level where you could spray-paint them. They're usually up in the ceiling. First thought is, that's probably the most unsecure count room and vault in any casino anywhere. Those look like regular office doors and the locks that are on, my garage or back door, as opposed to the locks that we would use. How the casino's laid out,, it's not very realistic. The count room is generally. pretty far back of house, where it would take a couple of layers, couple of access points, for someone to get to. There wouldn't necessarily need to be a security guard in or, in front of that door. There are security everywhere at the access points to, the back of the house that would take to get to that. hallway, to get to that door. I'm only going to say this once, OK? Who's listening? I am, yeah. What we would wear in the count room is overalls with no pockets,, so that there was no ability for anybody to hide, cash, chips, or anything. You would wear that uniform into the room and not bring bags or anything with you, so that you couldn't take. anything out of the room. Main booth, scramble security. Call Vegas PD. We need backup. While surveillance did notice. them after a few seconds in the count room, they, would've noticed them in the back of house, on. their way to the count room, before that ever happened. Somebody's always watching. Obviously, once they did notice them, they said notify metro, which. is exactly what we would do. Freeze! Hold it right there! I would tell the security team, and I think they would say the same, we wouldn't engage on the casino. floor and risk a shoot-out. Not a wise idea. Let them get away with the, money, and we'll use our cameras, and we'll use metro, and. we'll track them down. We usually can see the getaway. car, see the license plate. There has been some large thefts throughout history of cages. And they are very usually. low-tech smash-and-grab hold-ups. And I've yet to hear of. anybody getting away with it. Armed robbery, that's more, realistic to what I've seen. But overall, I'd say it rates about a 5. Professionals always place. their bets through the croupier. Croupier: Two, six, 13.. Man: Two, six, 13. Croupier is a term we, don't use in the states. It's a European term for a dealer. He's obviously dealing European or French roulette, based on some of the bets that were made. No more bets, thank you. 34 red. No, I'm sorry, sir, that's a late bet. How the player cheated is a normal move. It's called past posting. The dealer catches the past post, but it's interesting how he caught it, because he was staring into the wheel head, which is what we train them not to do. They should be watching the. layout for those past posts and listening for the ball to, drop, and then glancing in. He would've had to have memorized every bet on the table to notice that that was a late bet. Is there a problem? Yes, this croupier's. accusing me of cheating! I want to be paid! Pay the gentleman. In full. When he does notice, the, supervisor comes over and gets involved and, asks what's going on. The gentleman acts aggressively. We probably wouldn't pay that bet. We would use surveillance to. see that there was a late bet. Let's just get this guy, away from the table. Let's go ahead and pay him knowing we still have to cash him out, so we still have the ability. to recoup those funds. It's fairly realistic, from. the terminology they use to the motions of the dealer, to how the dealer's dressed. I rate this about an 8. My favorite casino-heist, movie is definitely "Casino." I think, by far and away, "Casino"'s the most realistic interpretation of what was done at that time and how we've evolved to the modern time. If you enjoyed this. video, click for another..

Vegas Casino Boss Rates 7 Casino Heists In Movies And TV | How Real Is It? | Insider