Faces of Gaming: George Joseph, Owner, Worldwide Casino Consulting – Everything old is new again

George Joseph’s long tenure in gaming protection started as an obsession with magic.

He left his native Detroit to work in Las Vegas in the 1970s as a magician and lounge singer.

“I describe myself as The Luckiest Guy in Gaming. I moved to Las Vegas from Detroit in 1974. Within a few months, my picture was in the Show Biz magazines, and my name was up in lights on a marquee on the Las Vegas Strip.

Along the way, his particular card and dice skills gained recognition with the right people. Through family connections, he began working in surveillance for some of the most iconic casinos of ‘70s Las Vegas.

“I have been in the industry and particularly in casino cheating & game protection since the 1970s. I’ve worked for the owners of the Aladdin Hotel, the owner of the Dunes Hotel, and the Chairman of the Board of Bally’s Casinos, the owner of Treasure Island, and two years with the Canadian government,” he said.

For the last 35 years, Joseph has been the owner of Worldwide Casino Consulting. Today, Joseph is court-qualified as one of the casino industry’s leading experts in surveillance and casino cheating. He has testified and demonstrated scam methods in major casino cheating cases worldwide. He regularly lectures and consults police agencies as well as gaming regulators, both in the States and on foreign shores.

He has been the Director of Surveillance at major Las Vegas casinos and was on the Board of Directors and Ethics Committee of the Nevada Polygraph Association. Joseph is the 2015 recipient of the World Game Protection Lifetime Achievement Award and has the Chairman’s Leadership Award from the National Indian Gaming Association.

Television
Joseph has also appeared on the Learning Channel in “Secrets of Las Vegas”, ”Cheating Las Vegas,” and “Inside Las Vegas”. He was featured in Fox Television’s “America’s Most Wanted,” Discovery Channel’s “History of Las Vegas”, Criss Angel’s “Mind Freak”, CBS News 48 Hours
“Cracking the Con”, CNBC, MSNBC, and ABC.

Joseph has also written several books on gaming, cheating and game protection, and a book dedicated to his hero and father-in-law, boxing champion Joe Louis, titled “Joe Louis, An Accidental Contact with Greatness.”

Everything old is new again
In over 50 years of working with casinos to stop cheating and theft, Joseph feels that history often repeats itself. “I remark in training classes, “It’s amazing how casino cheating has changed in 50 years but stayed exactly the same.”

Obsession
“I’ve had a lifelong obsession with magic; because, when we were kids in a big Lebanese family in Detroit, everybody would gather on Sunday after church for Arabic food. After dinner, the uncles would show the kids magic tricks, but I figured them out.

“I didn’t tell anybody except my dad, and just the look of approval in his eyes was what spiked a lifelong obsession with magic. I started going to libraries and reading books on magic. I visited magic shops and met with many magicians.

“And then one day, at age13, I met this old magician Jimmy Martin, who had worked vaudeville and shared the same stage at times with Harry Houdini. He did a  sleight of hand where he made a playing card disappear and reappear in his hands, and I thought this is the guy, he knows the real secrets.”

When he couldn’t make a living doing magic, Martin used to cheat at cards and dice. “I had him show me how to deal off the bottom of the deck and stack the cards and switch cards and switch dice and so on and so forth.”

“I joke that when I was in college, I wanted to be a pediatric cancer surgeon, but my mother insisted that I learned how to cheat at cards and dice and meet the wise guys and move to Las Vegas. So that’s what I did,” Joseph said.

Singing surveillance director
“There were a lot of Detroit people involved in the old Aladdin Hotel and I wanted to go out there and be an entertainer and singer. And they wanted me to see if anybody was stealing their money – so, I ended up doing both.

“I was the director of surveillance. I sang in the lounges. I did close up magic in the gourmet rooms, and I was assistant junket director, learning about the gambling business.

“Initially we had no cameras, and so you had to go up in the catwalks and either lay down on these boards or hang onto the railings and look down through one-way mirrors at the games. You had to get there early because if you made too much movement up there, dust would settle down through the lights, and people would know there was somebody over the game.

“I mean, that’s the way it was. Then we put the first 100 cameras in at the Aladdin. That sounds like a lot of cameras, but we could only record two of them. The reason was that the VCR had not been invented yet. Joints today have 2,000 to 3,000 cameras.

“Knowing and working for the owners of the of the casino, you would watch to see if there was a particular dealer that they were concerned with, or particular dice game or crew that they were concerned with, but that was really grunt work.

“You had to be up there for hours, and you had to be lucky to catch it because even if you wanted to record it, you had to bring up an eight-millimeter Super 8 camera to try to record through the one-way mirror.  Most of the time it just ended up being your word against the word of the person on the floor, and luckily for me, my word counted because I was working for the owners,” he said.

Change drastically
“When I say cheating has changed drastically but stayed the same; the terminal objective of cheating obviously is to steal our money, so let’s take two simple examples.

“One is card counting, which works only because the high value playing cards favor the customers.

“Initially, card counters had four toe switches, and with those four switches, you could enter any value of card that was played. Then you had a microprocessor about the size of a cell phone in your sock, and you had these pads that attached to your thighs, and they would vibrate to tell you when to bet big and when to bet little.

“Move forward a few years, and they came up with a car key fob that you could press the door open button for little cards, door close button for big cards and pressing the trunk button would vibrate to let you know to bet big.

“Now they have Google glasses (AR Augmented Reality) that can watch the game and it does the card count for you. That spans 50 years of card counting, but the terminal objective is you want to know when there’s big cards and when there’s little cards, and so the outcome is the same. If you do card counting in your head, which a lot of great card counters do, it’s perfectly legal. As soon as you use a device it becomes illegal,” Joseph said.

Frankenstein shoes
Joseph recalled that devices tracking the roulette wheel looked like Frankenstein shoes. “To determine the speed of the ball going one way, the speed of the wheel going the opposite way, and then give you a logical fall-off point. Where is the ball going to fall, and what section or half of the wheel would be underneath it when it did. And now they’re doing the same thing with cell phones or now they have the smart glasses to do it.

”You can pick virtually any cheating technique – marked cards, for instance has not changed since bending cards. That hasn’t changed in 1,000 years, since there’s been playing cards. But putting chemicals on the cards and daubing is a term that simply means to apply a substance during play. In some cases, like a graphite powder, in other cases, it’s like a hardened clay that just shades the back of the playing card so you can recognize it in future play.

“They experimented years ago with infrared technology, simply because you can’t see it with the naked eye. Somebody would be all wired up with a hidden camera in their sleeve, and the cards would be marked, and you-you couldn’t see them with the naked eye, but then they would use this hidden device to take a picture of the cards and transmit it off property.

“Somebody would determine the value of the card and then call you back in your earpiece. They used to have a little thing called a German beam that’s an earpiece so small that you have to insert it and take it out with magnets.

“So, you can look at almost any cheating technique that was done in the old days and update it, but it still accomplishes the same thing.”

Joe Louis
Joseph went on to tell me about meeting champion boxer Joe Louis.

“I had the real pleasure and honor to know the greatest heavyweight boxer of all times, a true American hero and icon. Joe Louis. I had the even greater honor and pleasure to marry his daughter, Candice. We’ve been together for 47 years.”

Joseph wrote a book on Louis titled “Joe Louis: An Accidental Contact with Greatness.” He went on to tell me about Joe Louis’s amazing life. ”Joe Louis lost four years of his prime because he joined the armed forces during World War II. He holds the title for the longest reign of heavyweight champ, 12 years, the most title defenses of any weight division, 25, the most knockouts, 22.  He holds every record in the sport of boxing, in spite of that layoff, and that’s just what he did in the boxing ring.”

In his book, he quotes Joe Louis discussing his decision to halt his boxing career during World War II: “I’m only doing what any red-blooded American would do. There’s a lot of things wrong with this country…but Hitler ain’t gonna fix ‘em.”

“He put his heavyweight title on the line twice and donated every penny of the purse to the Navy & Army Relief funds – didn’t take one cent for himself, and he got criticized for fighting for nothing. And he said, “I’m not fighting for nothing, I’m fighting for my country,” Joseph quoted Louis.

“I first met him at Caesar’s Palace. I was friends with a fellow named Ash Resnick, and Ash was a casino host and a big boxing promoter. He introduced me to Joe, and you know, I’ll tell you the difference when you meet Muhammad Ali; it was exciting, you shook hands, and you wanted to see what crazy thing he was going to say because he was so much bigger than life.

“When you shook hands with Joe Louis, just this feeling came over your body. You were shaking hands with a with a god,” he said.

Joseph explains the incredible life of Joe Louis in his book as “The greatest heavyweight champion of all time, a savior of his race, a hero to the free world during World War II, helped desegregate the military and baseball. And Joe Louis broke the color barrier in golf, being the first black man to play in a PGA sanctioned event. Joe Louis was given a hero’s burial at Arlington National Cemetery, and he was the grandson of slaves.”

The most beautiful woman
But the biggest thing to come out of his meeting Joe Louis was meeting and marrying Joe Louis’s daughter, Candice.

“I’m working at the Aladdin Hotel and I’m walking through the casino, and I see this girl working in the pit as a pit clerk. And I said, ‘This is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life.’ And I asked somebody, ‘Who the hell is that?’ And they said, ‘Well, that’s Joe Louis’s daughter.’ I said, ‘Oh, bullshit.’ Well, anyway, so I find out that it is. Now I make up every excuse to go into the pit. I made up every story I could just to get to know her. I even hired her as my secretary, and we’ve been together 47 years,” he said.

Candice led an amazing life before meeting her future husband.

“Her mother was the first black female attorney in the state of California, the first black female who started a law firm. Her mother, Martha Malone Jefferson Louis, Joe’s third wife, was also the attorney for Jimmy Hoffa. Imagine coming home as a child and you’d see Muhammad Ali there. You’d see Jimmy Hoffa. You’d see Willie Mays. You’d see all the big sports stars. Candice is the least starstruck person I’ve ever met. And I am the most starstruck. At any rate, we’ve been together 47 years, which means I haven’t won a fight in 47 years.”

Dunes
“At the end of my stay at the Aladdin, they were using polygraph tests because they were legal back then. They sent me to polygraph school. I did polygraphs at the Aladdin for the last year or two, and for the entire six years I was at the Dunes. I worked for the owner of the Dunes, a fellow named Morris Shenker, who coincidentally was at times an attorney for half the mob guys in St. Louis, Kansas City and New York, and for Jimmy Hoffa as well.

“A friend at the Metro Police Department mentioned to Morris that the owners of Aladdin were being let go, so I was being let go as well. I did a little interview with him and his son, and they decided to put me on, and we put in their first camera system, 100 cameras again, and we had to use these big tape recorders that came from television studios. Back then, the Dunes was kind of like the wild, wild west. We caught all kinds of crazy stuff going on at the Dunes,” he said.

Bally’s Corporation
After the Dunes, Joseph went on to become the Corporate Director of Surveillance for the Bally’s Corporation overseeing surveillance for 10 casino properties. He met the Chairman of the Board, who was contemplating purchasing MGM and wanted to know how Joseph dealt with removing wise guys from the casino.

“So back in the ’70s, everybody knew everybody. I was with the Detroit guys, and I was with Morris. If you remember the movie Casino, I knew Frank Rosenthal. I knew Tony Spilotro. I knew those fellas, and they gave me the time of day because they knew who I was with.

“The movie Casino was about as close as you could come to what Vegas was at the time and how it operated. I’ve had instances over the years, especially at the Dunes, where I would have to fire dealers or be involved in firing dealers whose relatives were wise guys. A lot of the guys on the floor were afraid to fire them because of their relatives, and so the owner would give it to me to do.

“I’d get a call from somebody’s father saying, ‘Why did you fire my son?’ I would say ‘I didn’t really fire your son, I think I saved him.’ I said, ‘When he got caught, they wanted to call the police. They wanted to call the gaming commission, pull his work cards so he can’t work anywhere.’

“And I said, ‘Whoa, you know who his dad is? Let’s just let this guy go. Let them find that maybe it was just a mistake.’ So that’s how I handled those fellas, and I let the cops and the security get rid of the real bad guys.”

Fascinating stories
Over the years, Joseph witnessed some of wildest cheating schemes in the casino industry, and they made fascinating stories.

Like the guy sitting in a wheelchair that hid powerful magnets. His partner would distract the dealer and switch out the dice and the guy in the wheelchair would trigger the electromagnets to control the switched dice.

“They’re getting away with this thing with the wheelchair, and somehow the batteries in the wheelchair start to overheat, and they start to burn this guy’s legs and his butt. So instead of just falling out of the chair as if  batteries were burning him, the poor ‘handicapped guy,’ got up and ran out of the casino, and that’s how it was uncovered.”

Rocket scientist
“In the 1980s, a retired rocket scientist Leo Weeks reverse engineered the algorithm of an IGT Fortune video poker machine. “When we had him on video, he always had his hand up under his armpit, kind of like he was scratching his boob or something; but he was entering the five cards that he saw played on the screen.

“He developed the program that would search into the algorithm and see how far away a five-card royal flush would be. Not in exact order, but any order. If it was three hours away, he wouldn’t play. If it was 10 minutes or 20 minutes away, he would play,” Joseph recalled.

Russians and mega computers
“In 2017, the Russian teams hacked our slot machines, and that sounds almost impossible when you say, ‘How could you hack a slot machine or hack the slot machine decisions?’ How the machine goes from one decision to the next is not random. It’s pseudo random. They have hidden states, complicated math. But what I point out is, some human beings wrote that program.

“The Russians would take pictures of 20 to 30 outcomes and feed it into a mega computer offsite, possibly in St. Petersburg, Russia.

“The Russians hid a cell phone on their body to record the outcomes. That computer would take those 20 outcomes or 30 outcomes, insert it into their program, and all of a sudden, they would just link up.

“Now, it could not make a large jackpot occur, but it knew how far away bigger payoffs would happen. And a quarter of a second before the larger payout occurred, you’d get a text message, a little vibration on your cell phone. You’d be sitting on it or in your pocket or whatever and you could feel it, and you had a quarter of a second to press the button.

“Interestingly, they didn’t get caught because surveillance was on the job or slot people caught them – they got caught because of diagnostics. Reports showed slot machines with excessive Coin-Out but little Coin-In. Those machines were investigated.

”But now, on a couple of the machines, surveillance sees these fellas poised over the deal button, and then poking at it really quick, and poking at it just didn’t look right,” he said.

“Okay, so today’s gaming world with AI, these quantum computers are going to be running a million times faster, not 100,000 times faster. They’re solving math problems in split seconds that would take a mega computer months to determine. I think that’s where the next big threat is coming.  AI is going to come into the slot area, determining slot outcome,” Joseph related.

Worldwide Casino Consulting
In 2000, George Joseph founded Worldwide Casino Consulting, a leading firm in training and consultation in surveillance and casino cheating.

Worldwide Casino Consulting has been operating for over 25 years with over 150 clients. The firm focuses on Game Protection Training, Casino Integrity Reviews, New Games Training and Expert Witness Testimony.

Worldwide Casino Consulting offers on-site training and virtual offerings such as a Training Room, Training Videos, and Virtual Practice Drills.

Biggest amount of cheating
Based on his long experience in surveillance and countering casino cheating schemes, I asked Joseph what he thought the future looked like.

“What I’m seeing around the industry, and I’ve been asked to speak on it a number of times, is the biggest amount of cheating, stealing, and leakage is happening in slot free play, player club fraud, and slot advantage play.

“That’s what I think has changed more drastically. As I said, the same schemes: marked cards, false shuffles, hidden cameras and card counting; they all accomplish the same outcome, and it’s noticeable. It’s noticeable because it’s on camera, and we’ve got a dealer, we’ve got a floor person, and you’re doing it in real time. Because slot revenue is so big and brings in so much, it’s easy to hide those free play frauds and player club anomalies inside of that monster revenue. AI is going to enter into the slot world first,” Joseph remarked.

Emerging surveillance technology
“I’ve been looking at some technology that’s going to emerge in the surveillance world. Not a new idea, but a new technology. There’s a standalone server that connects to your surveillance system, and it reads the playing cards. It has playing card and bet recognition, and if the dealer has a winning hand but pays a losing bet it alerts surveillance.

“Now you may have a casino, say the size of MGM. They have 100 tables.  They have 2,500 slots. They don’t have 2,500 people watching. So, with analytics, it’s going to start alerting surveillance and management of these anomalies that occur on a game.

“You will now have a technology that is watching every game all the time. The eye in the sky is always watching. Well, they’re always recording, but they’re not always watching. They can’t. So, I think that’s going to be the newest technology,” he said.

Success secrets
I asked Joseph what he thought was the secret to his success in surveillance over his long career.

“I was lucky to start at the top. I think I have a unique background being with the owners of casinos. You know, who comes off the streets and starts off working for the owners and works for the next owner and then works for the Chairman of the Board?

“I tell owners, ‘Let’s look at a process where we can eliminate or identify cheating.’ That should be relatively simple, so that involves your day-to-day reporting processes. Then we look at advantage play, and then we look at anomalies. When I do an analysis, because I involve all three of those parameters, I think that’s part of what helps my success, and part is just my background.

“And you know, others can tell you about the chip cup scam where they stole $3 million in South Africa; but I was there. They could tell you about the camera up the sleeve, the guy with the microwave plate on his back and a truck in the parking lot with a 48-inch microwave dish, but I was there  for the arrest. So that part of my background makes it interesting for people to listen to my stories,” Joseph concluded.