Casino Surveillance Pro

Two Employees Charged with Armed Robbery at Their Own Casino Now in Federal Custody Cort Smith 3 days ago Two Mazatzal Casino workers in Arizona who moved in on the cage of their own employers on July 17 shortly after midnight, brandishing firearms and shooting multiple rounds, are now in federal custody. Miraculously, no one was hurt in the attack. The two men alleged to be involved were tracked down and arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Of the $650,000 taken, according to federal court records, some $480,000 has now been recovered, with no word on the status of the remaining dough. FBI agents arrested 31-year-old Ryan Pearson and 32-year old Armando Ochoa this week for their alleged roles in the robbery. Officials say the pair fired several rounds from their weapons as they tried to intimidate casino employees — their own co-workers — into handing over cash. Both men have been charged with Hobbs Act Robbery and Use of a Weapon in a Crime of Violence. “Hobb...

TMZ is reporting that Henry Nicholas III  -- the billionaire co-founder of tech giant Broadcom -- was arrested after cops say they found cases of hard drugs in his Las Vegas hotel room. Law enforcement sources told TMZ that Nicholas couldn't get into his room at the Encore Tuesday and when security assisted, they discovered his girlfirend,  Ashley Fargo , was unresponsive with a semi-deflated balloon in her mouth. Paramedics responded and revived Fargo, but security began questioning Nicholas about the balloon and canisters, which he admitted were nitrous oxide.  Sources also say security noticed 2 cases in the room which needed to be inspected per hotel rules ... because they looked like the kind used to carry weapons. Instead of weapons, Vegas PD found one case full of marijuana and another full of what appeared to be narcotics. The couple was arrested and booked for felony drug trafficking of multiple controlled substances ... including heroin, cocaine, meth and MD...

A few posts back, I talked about the best low-tech way to keep a cashier honest. This time we're going to talk about some higher-tech methods. First of all you have to understand that all surveillance systems these days record video digitally using computers, servers and network-attached storage arrays. (VCR's and videotapes haven't been manufactured in over 10 years, and I don't know any casino surveillance operation that is still using them, of course there may be a few I don't know of.) Most larger casino operations also use a networked point-of-sale system, instead of just a regular cash register, to ring up guest tickets and collect all payments. Depending on the type of software involved, the POS and CCTV systems can be integrated together through an application that runs on a web browser. This application allows a surveillance observer to watch what a cashier is ringing up and collecting for payment, both in real time and when doing a review. It will also...

This is a repost of a post I made about a year ago, but I feel like it bares s repeating. Enjoy. I got another good question last week, from a reader wanting to know what a surveillance room is like, how it is laid out and how it is staffed and run.  So here goes. I have worked in surveillance departments at six different casinos in the last 25 years. Some very small (300 slots, 6 blackjack tables) and some very big (3000 slots, 60-70 table games of all kinds). When I started in the early 90's it was all VCRs and not all cameras were recorded all the time. We used a lot of "multi-plexers" and "quad screens". A multi-plexer used one VCR to display and record up to 16 screens on one monitor. Since the VCR still records at 30 frames per second, that meant that if you did a review on any one of those 16 screens you would be looking at a "freeze frame" effect, where you only got 1.8 frames per second of the shot you were looking at. A quad would record ...

I played craps this week for the first time in probably 20 years. I left Reno in late 1997 to work for a tribal casino, then another casino , in the Pacific Northwest. Once I was working for the tribes, I felt like it was improper for me to gamble at those facilities, even the ones I wasn't working at. Not all of them offered craps anyways, so I just didn't play. So earlier this week, I found myself in the Cal Neva Casino in downtown Reno, with an extra hundred bucks in my pocket and an empty craps table staring me in the face. It worked out pretty good too, with me playing for about half an hour and walking away dead even. Having been bitten by the bug, I returned to the Cal Neva a couple days later and this time left about a hundred fifty ahead. So, let me tell you how I play craps. Rule number one: stay away from the goddamn proposition bets, including the field bet. Rule number two: reread rule number one. Hard ways, horn bets, C & E, they all have terrible payoffs ...

I went to a sales seminar recently, in conjunction with one of the jobs that I have. it wasn't a bad seminar, but it wasn't great one either. It got me thinking that I could probably do just as good a job. So I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Here is my thesis:  Everything in life is advertising or marking. Let me tell you what I mean. From the very first time a pre-teen or teenager discovers that they get more attention from the opposite sex by looking pretty or muscular, or batting their eyes at the right time, or being on the football team, they become an expert marketeer. Later in life it will become virtue signaling when, at a job or a bar or in graduate school or at an interview wherever, they will discover the day can attract potential mates and or friends or an employer, simply by espousing the right causes, the right beliefs or the right motives. Whether it be a Super Bowl ad or a job interview almost every thing in life is marking. Wether  you're ma...

I had another great question submit it to me by email. This reader wanted to know what, if anything, I knew about loss prevention. I assume that he meant at local retail stores, although most large hotel casinos will have gift shops and other retail or point-of-sale locations, where surveillance may perform loss prevention duties in conjunction with security. It turns out I know quite a bit about the loss prevention landscape out there, having work for a large retailer doing loss prevention in the 90s. I won't say the exact name of this retailer, but their name rhymes with small heart. You figure it out. What I learned from them, and what I have learned subsequently to that, is that while surveillance and loss prevention may be necessary to the operation of a large retail store, just as they are in a casino, they are not something that management or ownership wants to spend any money on. All gaming jurisdictions require casinos to have a certain level of surveillance, by law. Th...

Welcome to my blog, all about how the "eye in the sky" does its thing. Sponsored by Zoom Benefits. They really offer some great discounts,  Click  here  to learn more. I had a great question submitted by a reader recently. He was interested in knowing what the percentage is of time spent by surveillance Observers watching the public, versus watching employees. Well things are quite different than they were back in the good old days of the 80s and 90s. Today almost every point-of-sale terminal or cashier station has a camera over it and a link to a computer interface that shows exactly what the cashier has one up on the register, or what ticket they have just scanned and are about to pay. We didn't have those things in the good old days, in fact you were lucky to get a detail tape if you wanted to look at what the cashier had been doing. So now we have all those tools, so it's really easy to go through an audit a cashier, especially if they're over or short, and...

Check out our new sponsor, Zoom benefits. Click here to learn more. In case you didn't know, my main job is as a uber and Lyft driver in the City of Reno Nevada. It's kind of out of necessity, not choice, that I do this thing. I would still be working in Casino surveillance if I hadn't got leukemia last year, but we can talk about that later. Anyway, I was driving two people in my car this evening and they were discussing their jobs and what they were going to do and where they were going to go on their upcoming vacation. From the things that he said, I could tell one of the two persons was a bartender at a casino. I even figured out which casino it was, but I'm not going to mention it here. I don't want to get anyone in trouble. At one point this bartender stated To His companion that he never made less than $100 a shift "extra".  And I could tell by the way he said it and the context in which it was said that he wasn't referring to his tips. Th...