Greedy Bastards

In a previous piece I talked about how you can’t be too greedy with a play if your intention is to last, and how that might have been a factor in the FBI indictments connected to the NBA. If you win too fast and make in-game decisions that don’t map against proper strategy, you’re drawing a neon arrow over your head.

It’s different for “short money”, where you have a spot or a sucker that you won’t see again and you just don’t care about burning it up. In those games, as cheats would say, you can rip and tear. The classic example of this is the carnival operators who run “flat stores”, rigged to clip the suckers in small town seasonal fairs across America and Australia. You prey on naive locals, many of whom have had a beer or two and no self control. Then you pack up the County Fair or Showgrounds and move on to the next venue and the next smorgasbord of suckers.

This was the same mentality amongst professional crew hustlers, also known as road hustlers. As one old scuffler puts it in Thieving Bastards, “when you get a chance to gut somebody, you don’t know if you’re ever gonna come back. You gotta go.”

But for a cheat who works a defined geographic location, where he will see many of the same faces again across many venues, or a static play that might go on forever, you need to maintain a low profile to guarantee your longevity.

To make it work you need to keep in mind two overlapping operating principles: “don’t do anything stupid” and “don’t be greedy”.

“ALL THINGS IN MODERATION”

First, let’s talk about managing greed.

One of the people I interviewed talked about the owner of an underground gambling supply house who was counterfeiting chips on the side and washing them through casinos. He did this successfully for many years before factors he couldn’t control screwed things up. He was able to last so long because he was smart and methodical, and he was conservative with his earnings.

‘He was able to duplicate their chips to where they couldn’t tell and he was just very careful about it. He never got greedy. He always brought down, I think it was, about a thousand dollars worth of chips and he laundered them in and he cashed out and came home with the money. He did it in a way that he never ruffled any feathers. As long as I knew him he was doing that.’

Another thief I knew, a very highly skilled poker hustler who played a hidden machine in California in the early seventies, was one of the few who retired successfully after being “in the life”. He lasted and made it out because, like the guy dealing crooked checks, he was also conservative and cautious:

‘There were people who knew me that saw me, but they never caught me doing anything. You just don’t get caught with good timing, being careful and not being greedy. Not being greedy, especially. So if you play decently you’re virtually never gonna get caught.”

I’d try to not even get seen with these other thieves. Because, if you get seen with them in a coffee shop by any of these people that work in the casinos, you’re fucked.

So me and my partner steered away from them and I lasted down in the casinos there forever. Made some huge fucking scores. At Bell I ended up playing in some of the bigger games. There are times when I won thousands.’

A Kepplinger holdout machine used to steal and switch cards in a game. Image courtesy Jason England. (C)

“Horseshoes and hand grenades” — when greed makes you stupid

On the other side of the equation, you have plenty of professional thieves who are greedy. They aren’t happy unless they steal every last dime, and this can lead to some monumentally stupid decisions. I’ll leave you with one example.

This anecdote concerns chopping in a “cold deck”, or “cooler”. What that means is stacking a deck to give players interesting hands that don’t win, while the cheater’s partner gets the winning hand. The deck can be switched into the game in a variety of different ways. Decks have been put in hidden under the tray held by a cocktail waitress, or simply handed to cheaters pre-stacked by a floor manager who is taking a 25% cut of the action. The cheater who deals would then “false” shuffle the cards and beat the cut using sleight of hand or the help of a partner. Pretty bold but it works.

When the cheaters are “moving from the outside”, they need to get their hands on a deck that matches the house cards, set up the hands in the john or carpark, and then chop the deck in using sleight of hand.

Again, the cooler switches that have been devised range from high-skill methods through to plays involving shade or what magicians refer to as “misdirection”. The old wives tale is that they are called “coolers” because the deck that is coming in is colder than the deck leaving due to lack of handling.

You’ll meet the person telling this story in volume one.

‘There was a cold deck at the Rainbow Club that was done by two guys. One of them I know — a real piece of garbage. And these guys were not skilled. The story I got was, they got a little wind-up man, some kind of wind-up toy. They used it and it walked across the table and everybody’s laughing. That was their cover to put in this cold deck.

Then there was a cold deck put in at the Bell Club by two guys that I know them both. I also know the guy whose house the whole thing was planned at. But he didn’t participate.

What happened was they put in this cold deck where everybody got four of a kind and full houses.

I was like, “How could anybody do that? Nobody’s gonna believe that all these monster hands got beat and it wasn’t a cold deck.”

When I finally heard the story from this guy whose house it was where they planned the thing out, they were all high as a kite. They were gonna put in a cold deck and just decided, “Let’s see how far we can go.”

It was ridiculous and that’s why this guy didn’t participate. It was the kind of thing a crazy person would do — you can’t go quite that far. It didn’t matter how good you put it in or anything, it was gonna wake up people who had been dead for thousands of years.

They put in this “atomic bomb” where it was so bad that these same two guys a couple of days later, walked into this club at Gardena, like forty miles away, and they told them to get out.’

Thieving Bastards: True Confessions of the World’s Greatest Cheats

If you enjoyed this small glimpse into the world of professional gambling thieves, then you are in for a real treat. Thieving Bastards, the book I have been researching and writing for thirty years is being published in early 2026.

These historic interviews give you a ringside seat to the action, explaining in detail the motivations, the crooked techniques and the cold-blooded psychology that separate the professional cheater from the honest player.

For updates on publication dates and notifications on when you can order, be sure to sign up below to our mailing list. All material copyright.