🎤 Casino Surveillance Expert George Joseph Interview

Casino surveillance expert George Joseph discusses his journey from childhood magician to Las Vegas casino director, sharing insights on cheating techniques, celebrity gamblers, and evolving threats to casino security—including AI, magnetic dice, and smart glasses.

I learned magic at 7 and was cheating at cards by 13

Where it all began — a childhood spark in a magic shop leads to a life navigating cards, casinos, and the stage.

I started studying magic when I was 7. My dad and uncles used to show the kids tricks and I figured them out, but wouldn’t tell anyone except my dad. I would see that look in his eyes, and I wanted to have his approval.

So I started studying magic and when I was 13 I bumped into a magic shop run by a guy called Jimmy Martin. When he couldn’t make money in the depression years he would cheat on cards and dice, and he started teaching me these techniques.

So I started messing around with some high school and college games, and at the same time I was singing in lounges around Detroit and supper clubs.

Luckily for me I had cousins and uncles and friends involved in casinos in the 70s and I wanted to go out there and be in showbusiness, but they wanted me to tell them who was stealing their money. So I ended up doing both. I joke that when I was in college I wanted to study to be a pediatric cancer surgeon but my mother insisted I learn how to cheat at cards and dice and move to Las Vegas to meet all the mob guys, so that’s what I did.

I was singing and doing magic while also working as the Director of Surveillance

Las Vegas lounge life and old-school surveillance in the 1970s.

When I first moved to Las Vegas I had the honour and pleasure of meeting Joe Louis, and I had the even greater pleasure of marrying one of his daughters, Candance. We’ve been together 46 years.

I was lucky, I worked for the owners of the Aladdin Hotel in 1974. I was singing in the lounges, doing a magic act and I was also Director of Surveillance. Interestingly there were no cameras back then. So you had to go up in the ceiling and crawl on your belly on these walkways, look down through these one-way mirrors. When we put the first 100 cameras in, it sounded like a lot but now these joints have 2,000 to 3,000 cameras.

We could only record two of them, they didn’t even have a VCR yet. So the bad guys got away with a lot.

Then I was at Dunes Hotel, the chairman of the Board of Bally’s, two years as a consultant to the Canadian Government on gaming and Treasure Island Casino, training staff on surveillance.

My first casino was the Aladdin Hotel, it’s no longer there but where Planet Hollywood is now.

I knew threats did not mean people were going to kill me

The Gaming Commission in Nevada were sending young agents to me so I could show how cheating tricks worked: sleight of hand, stacking the deck, dealing false, overpaying and so on. I knew as long as these owners were there I was there and when they left they knew I was going to leave. So five years later, 1980, they left.

But a good friend of mine on the police force recommended me to the owner of Dunes who coincidentally was an attorney for several mob figures.

I met him through my wife’s mother, the first black female attorney in California. So I went there and was there for six years. I was with the owners so people did or didn’t like me, but couldn’t get rid of me until the owners left and when he did, I left. In 1987.

Then I got a small contract with Barley’s Casino in Atlantic City. I went out there to help them with training and met the chairman of the board. He asked what would you do if they were buying the MGM Grand in Las Vegas?

But they wanted to change the structure of how their dealers got their tips. The Vegas wise guys didn’t like it so started to threaten the fellas the valley people sent out. I had a meeting with him and he said, what do you do when they start threatening you?

I said the first thing you do is understand that if they threaten you, they’re not going to kill you. No one is going to put you on guard so you have your gun ready. So fire the loudest half a dozen guys and then wait two days and fire half a dozen more. Pretty soon people will understand they have to pay the rent and they’ll fall in line with your management style.

I didn’t make a lot of friends doing things that way but I ended up working for the Valley Corporate, I was in charge of 10 of their casino properties in the country.

Now I’ve been on my own since 2,000 with my company training law enforcement, gaming commissions and casinos.

One cheat had a magnetic wheelchair moving a magnetic dice… but the scam ended up burning his butt

The magnetic dice scam — when cheating at craps involved wheelchairs, hidden tech, and a quick escape.I was lucky to know a lot of the wise guys. I knew the guy who used to switch dice in craps. You might think they were switching dice for loaded dice, and you could, but there was also a famous scheme where they switched in magnetic dice. In a private game you could build your own table and have magnets in the table but in a casino setting they would put these electromagnets at two opposition walls so there was nothing to discover if you took the entire table apart.

They fitted this wheelchair with electromagnets and pushed this guy into the corner of the table, and he was able to turn the magnetic power on and throw a magnetic field from under the table, from the chair onto the table.

Then when the dice would land somebody would lean over to block the sight of the dealers helping this poor guy put his bets down, but the dice would snap to attention. It worked well for a long time until one night the batteries overheated and started burning the guy’s butt and his legs, and instead of just falling out and pretending it was the wheelchair batteries, he just got up and ran out.

I invented the dice stick to stop his magnetic method of cheating

Innovation at the table — George Joseph’s magnetic dice stick in action.

So I invented the dice stick way back when it was a magnet embedded in the front end of the stick so that any time the stick man touches the dice, if they are magnetised it’s going to stick to the stick.

Let’s suppose you had customers sliding the dice instead of throwing the dice. The dice are supposed to leave your hand in the air and bounce onto the table. Let’s suppose I set them certain numbers and instead of throwing them in the air, I come to the table and slide them down, spin them, it’s just practice. It’s like throwing a curveball.

So we had a real big problem with that, losing $10,000 to $15,000 at one of our Valley Properties. So I came up with this idea that we would just cut the bad layout on the backside and insert a little metal rod and sew it into place. So imagine two speed bumps on either side of the proposition bets on a bad table.

So if you tried to slide the dice the speed bumps would trip them. So whatever trick customers came up with, it was always a cat and mouse game.

For years we had one person putting chemicals on the back of the card and to read them discreetly he wore one red contact lens. So if the colour shifts in the chemical, you can see the ink. In casinos the discard racks where they put the cards away are made from red plastic, it helps our floor people see the same thing as the bad guys.

The mathematical rate of wind has not changed through history. By and large the house’s advantage has not changed. So in order to get more players to get more revenue, you have to get more players or keep raising the minimum amount.

So the house has a vested interest in being fair. There is this guy on YouTube telling people how casinos cheat. That’s ludicrous. Think about Caesars with 50 worldwide, MGM with 30 plus, are you going to risk cheating and losing a multi-billion dollar business over cheating? The house has a fixed advantage and it’s very simple.

I caught a rocket scientist cheating 30 years ago

The rocket scientist who cracked the code — tracking royal flushes one card at a time.

Yes, I caught a rocket scientist over 30 years ago. He reverse engineered the algorithm of a slot machine and he found a weakness. When you watch a poker machine deal you see one card at a time on the screen for entertainment purposes. What it’s actually doing is picking a group of five cards at one time. What he discovered was that if he put in five cards he saw and a while later put in five more, he could determine how far away a five card sequential royal flush was: a 10, Jack, Queen, King, ace of suit. Sometimes days away, sometimes hours.

He was always under his armpit but he had a keypad with five keys and entered plays of cards he saw on the screen. Then he would go to a payphone and transmit those sets of cards to partners who would then tell him how far away the royal was, what cards would precipitate then and when he should push the button.

So he got caught because they were greedy and stupid. You don’t keep winning big amounts on the same machine in the same days before someone realises what’s up. His device was turned over to the Nevada Gaming Control Board.

Gangs are using cell phones to cheat slot machines

Coordinated slot fraud — from payphones to smartphones.

There was another guy who checked in with a Nevada driving licence, and collected his jackpot with a Cayman Island passport. He wanted cash as well, so I said he’s trying to beat the government for tax. I said ‘Put him on the phone to me’. They said he had gone for a nap so I asked ‘What room is he in?’ I said ‘Just don’t pay him over the IDs and I will check if the chips come from the same states’. By the time I had done that, he locked the room and these two guys ran away. We found a laptop running with strange software and the TV set to a keynote channel.

That was around 30 years ago. Skip ahead 10 years and gangs are doing the same things to our slot machines but they’re using cell phones. Their scheme is brilliant. They use cell phones sometimes hidden and take a picture of 20 to 30 outcomes of a slot machine platform. They sent that data to a mega computer and said it’s in Saint Petersburg but I sensed it was closer.

They have a computer running a million times faster than our microprocessor. Slot machines don’t pick random, they pick pseudo random. They have to have a start point and a formula to go to the next one. So if you are told to point at a star in the sky and then point to another star as fast as you want, that’s random. I don’t know where you’re going to go. But if I told a computer to do that, it has to have a programme to do it, a lot of hidden states and maths involved.

Once you know the secret it’s not a secret any longer. A human wrote that programme. A mega computer can reengineer and reverse engineer the algorithm of that lot programme. So once they enter those 20 numbers they know what state the processor is in. They can’t make a jackpot occur but they know when the bigger payoffs are going to happen. They then send a text message. I saw a guy put his cell phone between his legs, when he felt a vibration he had a quarter of a second to press the play button on the slot machine.

Card recognition glasses more of a threat to casinos than AI

A player uses smart glasses and AI to analyse casino gameplay in real time

AI is only as good as the information that comes in. I’ve seen kids on YouTube trying to explain cheating methods and they’re wrong. Not even close to how it’s being done. But if that’s what you’re feeding into a computer, it’s going to be garbage.

That said, AI is in its infancy and I’m more concerned about slot machines than table games. There are glasses you can buy now, smart glasses that live stream video. They can have programmes attached that do playing card recognition. So you just have to look at the cards and it does the card count for you. No need to do it in your head. Whether you do in your head, a hidden device, a cell phone, hidden glasses, it’s still going to show up live on the table game.

In my day you would wear one red contact lens to read the markings on a card and then they came up with a device you had to wear on your body, a hidden camera, but infrared so no one could examine cards easily and find it. But then you had to send that image off the game and send it back, decode it, then send it back to the table.

Now they’re doing everything with cell phones on the game live. But it is live on the game. We don’t have a floor person watching, or a dealer watching every slot machine. We have to wait for the result. Next day they do the analysis and we see a lot of coins out, with very little coming in. When you lose money in a table game you know it’s happening right away.

Even if you knew the machine had a big hit at the time you have to have analytics ready to go back and see that something happened to it. So I’d be attacking machines much more than table games.

Michael Jordan, John Daly, Wayne Gretzky, Andrew Dice Clay and Michael Bolton were all in the gambling business

There was Michael Jordan, John Daly, Wayne Gretzky among others. You get to understand that athletes are gamblers. They gamble in their business.

A lot of celebrities are big time gamblers. A lot of entertainers have been big time gamblers. In our day a fellow named Andrew Dice Clay used to play at Bally's all the time. He won $90,000 one day, and went up, bought a Mercedes. The next day he came back and blew a hundred and a half.

Michael Bolton was a big gambler. There were tons of them back in the old days.

Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin would deal games themselves

Frank Sinatra would get on the table and deal the games himself. He and Dean Martin would pay everybody. It’s the best advertisement they could get.

People went crazy when they heard that and would swamp those joints.

Vegas was ‘a mountain of cocaine’ in the 70s and 80s

Vegas in the 70s and 80s was like a mountain of cocaine.

You would see people come out of bathrooms with powder on their nose. Part of my job at Dunes was lie detector testing on a new hire.

I told them if you have me ask people about drug use, we’re never going to hire anyone. On the other hand I’ll ask about buying and selling on the job.

The really dangerous criminals did not come to Las Vegas

If criminals were too well known they end up on excluded lists. You’re not even allowed on property of any casino. So back in my day if a convicted felon came to town you’d have to register with the police so they knew you were even here.

If you were convicted your card was pink. Most of those things have gone away but a lot snuck into town. If you ask me, who is it that makes Las Vegas, I say it’s the bookmakers. They knew all the gamblers in their area, they represented the wise guys, they would send players out to join us. That’s where all the gamblers came from.

The real wise guys, the really dangerous guys didn’t come to Las Vegas because if they did, intelligence would be on to them.

AI can target slot machines

From blackjack edges to slot algorithms — assessing evolving threats in casino gaming

When you talk about card counting, you can do it just as well in your head as you can with a computer. There’s a little more edge with a computer. But I’m looking at it from the view of slot machines and algorithms, knowing the cycles of a slot machine.

In black jack it’s the only game where the customers have the legal advantage over the house. If you’re counting cards you know you have the advantage, but everyone has the same advantage, they just don’t always know it. We don’t really assess the threat, we just put the games there and then we wait for the result.

If you want to talk to somebody about gambling threat, talk to a poker player. The game you’re in, the strength of customers around you, bluffing, seating and so on. Those things are more important in poker than black jack.

AI is in its infancy and I think the threat will be in the slot machine department. I think there was a kid in Canada who won money on the lottery two days in a row and they asked him about it. He said every time you turn the machine off at night, you start it in the morning and it starts from the same random seed number. He knew the number so could predict. In Nevada we didn’t encounter that as we never turned them off.

Once the industry finds out about a method, they come up with methods to overcome it.