'Let me tell you a little bit about skims. There is no casino, in this country at least, that is capable of defending itself against a skim. There are no safeties. You can't prevent a skim if a guy knows what he's doing.' So warned Frank 'Lefty' Rosenthal, the former boss of the Stardust casino in Las Vegas, where officials in the 1970s and '80s exposed one of the city's largest mafia skims.
The revelation that Macau may have lost more than HK$100 billion in casino winnings and HK$40 billion in tax revenue over the past five years due to side betting is reminiscent of Las Vegas before it became an American conventioneer's paradise dominated by billion-dollar resorts. The Nevada gambling hub was for decades the target of large-scale, systematic casino skimming operations ultimately directed by the country's top mafia bosses.
From the 1946 opening of notorious gangster Benjamin 'Bugsy' Siegel's Flamingo casino to the '80s, when Mr Rosenthal's reign at the Stardust ended with Nevada authorities adding him to a blacklist, the mafia skimmed millions of unreported, untraced and untaxed dollars out of casinos in Las Vegas.
In the Stardust operation, documented in the book Casino by journalist Nicholas Pileggi and turned into the 1995 film of the same name with Robert De Niro playing Mr Rosenthal, the key was infiltrating the casino's supposedly secure money-counting room. Complicit staff underweighed coin winnings from slot machines and set aside bricks of paper money for mafia couriers, who simply walked it out the door.
'Even when you know what can happen, it's almost impossible to keep a casino from leaking cash,' former Stardust casino manager Murray Ehrenberg, who previously worked at Steve Wynn's Golden Nugget casino, told Pileggi.
'The systems for skimming casinos are as varied as the genius of the men doing the skimming,' Pileggi wrote.