Indeed we do: Not only is Ron a former (following his release from prison) employee of Huntington Press but he's also a personal friend.
As to the story, which you pretty much nailed, it was well related in the "Slot Buster" episode of History Channel's "Breaking Vegas" series, back in 2005; for those who missed it, here's a synopsis.
Ron Harris is a Las Vegas native who grew up around the flashing lights and chinking coins of the casinos. These held little interest for him; Harris, rather, was one of those nerdy kids who got off on taking things apart, figuring out how they worked, and putting them back together, often better than they had been configured originally. As he grew up, Ron's fascination with electronics developed into a serious expertise that led him, at the age of 27, to be hired by the Nevada State Gaming Control Board as their computer wiz.
This was the era when slot and video poker machines were entering the electronic age, and Ron's job entailed checking computer chips to ensure that games were "fair," according to the state's definition, plus he was the go-to person in cheating cases.
What shifted Ron from one side of the fence to the other was the major slot scandal that preceded the one at which he would be at the center. The former was the case of American Coin, which we detailed in that recent Question of the Day the current questioner referenced.
You can read the full story in the QoD Archives but, in short, a Las Vegas-based slot machine company was suspected of rigging their machines to cheat players out of jackpots. Ron Harris was the chief investigator in charge of the case and, having discovered what the company was doing, he persuaded the key witness to testify against his employers. Before this could happen, however, the witness was gunned down on the driveway of his home and, without his testimony, the case fell apart.
Ron was deeply troubled by this whole episode on several levels. Not only was he shocked and guilt-ridden at the knowledge that his job had actually led to a man's cold-blooded murder, but he was also sickened that the real perpetrators got away with their cheating racket. The whole case had put him under a great deal of stress and, at some point, something just "clicked" in Harris' head: The gamekeeper, disillusioned by the lack of justice and apparent futility of being the "good guy," was about to turn poacher.
The Gaming Control Board's reaction to the American Coin scandal -- which, in a nutshell had meant that "gaffed" chips installed in some 93 bars around the Las Vegas valley had cheated players out of as much as $17 million in jackpots they should have won fair and square -- was to massively increase their levels of scrutiny. Ron Harris was put in charge of upping security checks, which included his developing a testing program that Gaming agents could plug into any slot or video poker machine on any casino floor and run in order to ensure that the chip being used was identically programmed as per the approved "master" chip they had on file for that game.
What Ron Harris did that the GCB did not know about at that time, however, was nothing short of brilliant. Not by any means "good" or "correct," as he'd be the first to admit, but genius, for sure, because when an agent in the field ran Ron's program in order to check if a game was kosher, the act of running the program actually changed the code being checked and rigged the slot machine to pay out when a certain sequence of coins was played. As an agent of the state regulatory board, it was illegal for Ron Harris to even play casino games, since this was considered (with some justification and foresight, as it turned out) to be a definite conflict of interest. So, he enlisted the help of a lifelong friend to act as his accomplice, and together the duo started winning jackpots, at first all over Nevada, and then further afield.
For no less than three years, the duo hit rigged payouts all over the state, to the tune of around $50,000. The jackpots weren't massive, which kept their activities under the radar, and neither let their "extra-curricular" income outwardly affect their lifestyle, so no red lights went off. However, Ron, who was now getting hooked on the winning, wanted to find a way of beating the casinos that couldn't be directly traced back to him. After many long nights, he eventually found that method by discovering that the Random Number Generators used to produce winning numbers in keno were, in fact, not generating entirely random numbers at all and were vulnerable to prediction. His discovery gave Ron a 3% chance of winning, which might not sound like much; however, he could multiply that chance by purchasing 10 tickets to any game -- now he had a 30 percent chance of winning.
Armed with this new knowledge, Harris and his buddy headed to Atlantic City with the sole goal of hitting a newly introduced $100,000 live-keno jackpot. They won, but the win was definitely an attention-grabber, plus they'd been sloppy in their personal security measures and hadn't finessed a solid exit strategy. The accomplice's nervous behavior set off additional alarm bells and, to cut a long story short, this proved to be the end of the road for the rogue Gaming Control agent, who was handed a seven-year sentence and placed in the notorious "Black Book" of mobsters and cheats who are not permitted to enter Nevada casinos.
We can confirm that Ron, who served two years, still lives in Vegas but earns his living by entirely different and legitimate means these days, far away from the flashing lights. He's still a computer geek, however, and is currently employing his tech skills in an attempt to help a friend's son locate some "misplaced" bitcoins. In this instance, there's only around $8,000 at stake, but over the course of last weekend we heard the sorry story of a guy in Wales who only realized that the "key" to his old bitcoins -- obtained when this new "virtual" currency was free, but now worth somewhere in the region of $8 million -- was located on an old laptop that he'd recently sent to the landfill and is now approximately six feet under, quite literally. Oops! We hope Ron has better luck locating his friend's kid's lost fortune.
