Bellagio Heist Pt II

Bellagio Las Vegas

Bellagio nixing $25,000 chip after casino heist

By OSKAR GARCIA, Associated Press

LAS VEGAS – Las Vegas casino bosses are serving notice to the bandit who made off with $1.5 million in chips from the Bellagio: Try to redeem those worth $25,000 soon or they'll become worthless.

Bellagio owner MGM Resorts International is giving public notice that it's discontinuing its standard chip valued at $25,000 and calling for all gamblers holding the chips to redeem them by April 22.

After that, gambling regulators say each red chip with a gray inlay won't be worth more than the plastic it's cast from.

"The bottom line is that they're not money," said David Salas, deputy enforcement chief for the Nevada Gaming Control Board.

MGM Resorts first posted notice of the redemption last week in the classifieds of the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper. That's one week after a robber wearing a motorcycle helmet held up a craps table at gunpoint and made off with a bag of chips of varying denominations.

Police and casino officials have been working since the Dec. 14 heist to try to locate the bandit and keep watch on anyone trying to cash in the chips, which ranged in denomination from $100 to $25,000.

A police spokeswoman said Wednesday there have been no significant developments in the case since then.

MGM Resorts spokesman Alan Feldman told The Associated Press the chips were switched out at the tables within an hour of the robbery, and the Bellagio immediately filed to discontinue the chips.

Feldman said the move was designed to avoid inconveniencing players using the high value chips. He said he did not know how many chips existed and were uncashed.

"Obviously, anyone walking with one of the old series is going to be subject to a certain amount of questioning as to how they obtained them — assuming it isn't someone we know," Feldman told the AP. "It's pretty unusual for someone we don't know to come strolling up with a handful of $25,000 chips."

Discontinuing chips — though done in this case because of the robbery — is not uncommon for Las Vegas casinos, even at high denominations, Salas said.

Commemorative chips to mark a noteworthy prizefight for example, often have a finite circulation. On Wednesday, the Silver Nugget Casino in North Las Vegas posted notice it planned to discontinue chips with the Mahoney's Silver Nugget logo.

State laws require casino operators to serve notice, file a plan with regulators and give gamblers a reasonable amount of time to cash in any chips they're holding — in this case four months.

The move may be moot given other casino safeguards designed to track patrons who cash high-value chips, but will help the casino by lessening the number of chips outside its possession.

"If they have people that they know are players redeem the ones that they know they have, pretty much it's process of elimination — you're left with people who aren't supposed to have the chips," said David Schwartz, a former casino security guard and director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

It's not immediately clear how many of the chips that were stolen were $25,000 chips, though it could be as many as 60.

Personal comment: The quicker the chips are worthless the better.

Lack of attention to detail

The Bellagio Hotel/Casino Resort

Bellagio bandit will have a hard time cashing in his chips
By Brett Michael Dykes
Wed Dec 15, 4:14 pm ET

By now you may have heard about a man in a motorcycle helmet who entered the famed Bellagio casino in Las Vegas -- the same gambling palace that a motley crew of criminals led by George Clooney knocked over in "Ocean's Eleven" -- early Tuesday morning and made off with at least $1.5 million at gunpoint.

But initial reports didn't mention that most of the enterprising bandit's take was in casino chips rather than hard cash. If he sets out to turn in those chips for actual money, he will be running a considerable risk -- especially if he turns up at the scene of the crime trying to cash out some of the $25,000 chips he made off with. Those chips rarely get circulated at the casino's cashier windows, and the bosses at places like the Bellagio tend to monitor pretty closely any transactions involving them. (In theory, of course, the bandit could recruit an accomplice to act as a front person in the money swap, presumably for a cut of the payout -- but the same scrutiny for anyone cashing in big-stakes chips would still apply in that scenario.)

Indeed, longtime observers of the casino business say that the bandit has constructed a rather elegant trap for himself, should he want to convert his winnings into a personal economic stimulus plan. David Schwartz, director of gaming research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he "can't think of any way" the robber could return to redeem the chips without being caught.

"It's not like they're currency that you can use anywhere, Schwartz told the paper. "If you steal so many chips, in such a big, dramatic way, there's going to be a lot of scrutiny at the casino, and that makes it very difficult to cash in."

While the casino industry is highly secretive about the security measures it takes, many experts believe it's likely that the chips used in big casinos like the Bellagio are embedded with tiny electronic devices so they can be tracked and identified.

And this is evidently not a wrongdoer who's likely to learn from past mistakes. Police believe the same robber made off with about $20,000 in chips from the Las Vegas Suncoast Casino a few days earlier. We imagine him sitting in a poorly lit apartment staring at the chips right now trying to figure out how to cash them in -- good luck with that, pal.

Nevertheless, the miscues of the Bellagio bandit, as self-defeating as they may be, still aren't really enough to distinguish him in the company of some of the most wayward legal offenders of the past yea.

There is, for instance, Calvin Hoover of Salem, Oregon, who last year repeatedly called 911 to report that someone had stolen an ounce of marijuana from his truck, an act of foolishness that turned him from victim to criminal in a matter of hours.

And then there was Sterling F. Wolfname, a murder suspect on the run from police in Billings, Montana, who was caught by police when they spotted a man who had "Wolfname" tattooed on the side of his head. That inattention to detail has already landed Wolfname on the list of the 21st century's 21 dumbest criminals.

Oh, and let's not forget Douglas Gardner of Vermont, who picked up his eighth DUI just days after spending 20 years in prison for killing a man in the course of committing his seventh DUI.
With apologies to McGruff the Crime Dog, these guys appear to be doing all they can to take the bright out of crime.

Personal comment: Here’s the news report before someone asks me about it. We don’t talk about casino security, so please don’t ask.