To Annie
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
1 The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo
2 Richard Marcus – The World’s Greatest Casino Cheat
3 The Flockton Grey Scandal
4 MIT Students Take On Vegas For Millions
5 The SkyBiz Multi-Million-Dollar Internet Scam
6 The Malaysian Football Betting Scam
7 The £1 Million Ritz Casino Scam
8 The £10 Million Halifax IOU Thief
9 The Stock Exchange Insider-Dealing Scams
10 The Betting Exchange Conspiracies
11 The Financial Advisor With The £2.3 Million Gambling Habit
12 Cheating At Poker
13 The Nigerian ‘419’ Advance Fee Scam
Glossary Of Gambling Terms
About the Author
Copyright
Gambling has been around for centuries and has encompassed all walks of life. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the aristocracy famously enjoyed their flutters and some went spectacularly broke trying to beat the odds. More recently, a couple of financial advisors have been jailed after losing millions of pounds of clients’ money backing outcomes unsuccessfully on the internet. And, while all this is going on, gambling cheats in all walks of life continue to conjure up new formulas to deprive their victims of their hard-earned cash.
The thing that strikes me about gambling is that it is all self-taught. If you want to learn languages, acting, singing, cooking or flower arranging, you’ll find a plethora of choices of ways to go about it in your local paper, from private tuition to night classes. But gambling? No. You pick it up as you go along. Learn by your mistakes. Which makes cheating at it even more spectacular, because first you have to learn the rules, and then you have to learn how to break them.
In this book there are 13 true stories about some of the more spectacular gambling scams that have occurred all over the world over the past century or so. There is also a comprehensive glossary of gambling terminology at the end.
Enjoy. If you gamble already, it may well change the way you play. And, if you don’t, it will put you on your guard before you do.
Bonne chance!
Nigel Goldman
Spain, 2007
The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo
Nice is magnificently situated on the Baie des Anges, surrounded by the foothills of the Maritime Alps, some 19 miles from the Italian border. It has a splendid old town, separated from the busy new town by the river Paillon. With its sheltered situation and mild climate, Nice is one of the oldest established winter resorts on the Côte d’Azur, and is also a very popular summer resort too. The old town of Nice is a maze of narrow streets and lanes, dotted with colourful cafes and restaurants. A flower market is held every day on Cours Saleya. The 17th-century cathedral has rich stucco decoration, fine choir stalls and beautiful wood panelling in the sacristy. This magnificent Baroque building was once the palace of the Counts of Castellar. It has a handsome entrance hall, an 18th-century pharmacy and ceiling paintings in the state apartments. The Jardin Albert 1er runs north-east from the sea front to the busy place Massena, the hub of the city’s traffic, which is where the Fountain Du Soleil is situated. And the Casino Municipale.
When Norman Leigh first walked into the Casino Municipale with his father in the 1950s, I doubt he could have imagined the incredible sequence of events that was to be played out in that grand building over the following decade. That first visit to the casino ignited a touchpaper and started a chain of events so incredible that Norman Leigh has gone down in the history books of gambling as a legend, the man who orchestrated an event held as impossible by all expert opinion: breaking the bank at roulette.
This incredible gambling story started after Mr Leigh Sr, on that first visit to the Casino Municipale in Nice accompanied by his son, embarked on a disastrous betting adventure on the French roulette tables that was to see him financially ruined. Mr Leigh had fallen for the oldest trick in the book – gambling on the theory that even-chance bets on the outside chances at roulette must eventually come good in one’s favour. A very dangerous philosophy. The hapless Mr Leigh threw good money after bad trying to break a sequence of a run on the roulette table. He kept doubling up his wagers, almost in a panic, in large old French Franc casino plaques, in an attempt to try to break the house’s run on an even chance coming up time and time again.
Betting systems are as old as the hills and fall into broad categories: betting the same after each decision (known as flat betting); raising wagers after wins (called positive progressions); and raising money after losses (called negative progressions). The negative progression was the system that Mr Leigh employed. ‘Labouchere’ or ‘Martingale’ are the correct names for this betting strategy of raising bets after losses, and, while this system can often be profitable in the short term, time and time again one streak of bad luck can completely wipe you out.
The origin of ‘Martingale’ dates back to the 18th century. It is named after Henry Martingale, an English casino owner who is reputed to have urged losing punters to ‘double ’em up’ with their wagers. ‘Martingale’ is one of the oldest betting systems using a negative progression, and the system is very simple. The player uses a betting series that is twice as large as the preceding one, as with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 etc. So long as you win a bet, you will continue to bet at the lowest level – in other words, a wager of one chip. If you lose a bet, you will move up to the next wager, doubling the amount of the previous wager. Use of this system ensures that, whenever your wager eventually wins, you will win the amount of the original wager, in this instance one chip. However, Martingale is extremely dangerous and risky, because occasionally long runs can occur against you on even-money chances, and by the time you get to your 11th and 12th wager you are up to 1,024 and 2,048 units to try and recoup your original one chip – as the unfortunate Mr Leigh found out, to his enormous cost, when he watched in horror as black came up 13 times in a row, while he was betting in ever-increasing sums on red.
Even if he had not wiped himself out financially at that stage, the casino had a trump card up their sleeve. They had a table maximum, which he would have reached on the very next spin anyway, to thwart his attack. A story is told in The Sealed Book of Roulette, which came out in 1924, that Arnold Rothschild once said to M. Blanc, manager of the casino in Monte Carlo, ‘Take off your maximum