Famous Slot Game Cheaters
A lot of crime is money motivated and where there are large sums of money involved, such as in casinos then you can also expect to find attempts at criminal activity - check out Piggy Riches. Admittedly, this is slowly becoming a thing of the past, as the gambling industry used to have more than its fair share of criminal gangs linked to it, especially in the early days of Las Vegas. During the boom era, organized criminals moved in for a piece of the casino action and this rapidly got out of hand. At one point in the history of Las Vegas, much of the gambling entertainment was owned and operated by mobsters. This inevitably created an environment of violence and it wasn’t until the mid 1980s, when the FBI finally managed to put major crime bosses behind bars and clean up the tarnished image of the city.
Since mob rule ended, there have been individuals who have tried to cheat their way to large casino wins, something that may not have been attempted when mobsters ran casinos. Some techniques were primitive whilst others were so sophisticated, that it took a lot of planning before the cheating method was put into action. Some methods were quickly discovered and ended, whilst other slot game cheating was so meticulous, that it took years for casinos to discover it and act to stop and prevent it from occurring again.
Tommy Glen Carmichael
Tommy Glenn Carmichael may not be a household name but he has become a casino cheating legend over time. He spent the best part of four decades cheating Las Vegas casinos by rigging their slot games. This television repairman had experience with intricate machinery and manipulating the very workings of slot machines came naturally to him. You may be wondering why a television repairman even needed to rig slot machines in the first place? Tommy Carmichael was on his third divorce and was still doing community service for drug possession at the time. All of this was causing his business to go under and he needed cash to survive and prevent himself from going into complete meltdown.
Carmichael studied slots in great detail before he developed ways to manipulate them. His first cheating method was the Top-Bottom Joint and this helped him accumulate $10,000 in one weekend. He spent the next few years winning continuously and amassed millions of dollars until casinos finally updated their machines and used Random Number Generators or RNGs to determine each spin. Tommy spent time at casinos that had not updated their slots, but he was tailed by police whilst doing so and eventually arrested and jailed for 5 years. In prison he met Michael Balsamo who was serving time for similar offences and together they studied ways of how to cheat the RNG slot machines. They came up with a gadget called the Monkey Paw and this wire contraption was placed up the payout chute and caused the slots to release coins. Tommy also invented the Light Wand that worked in a similar way. He was eventually arrested and jailed again for a second time. Other famous casino cheaters include Louis Colavecchio and Ronald Dale Harris who both suffered similar fates to Tommy.