Question of the Day - 16 June 2017

The question refers to a horrific incident at Resorts World Manila on the night of June 2, in which a lone gunman stormed the casino, set tables on fire with gasoline, stole boxes of casino cheques, and killed 37 players and employees. Many guests and staff who tried to hide from the gunfire rather than flee the building when the attack began suffocated in the thick smoke.

Initially, the Islamic Sate claimed responsibility for the attack, but all the evidence pointed to a botched attempt to steal casino chips. Earlier in the day, the attacker had been seized by two “casino financiers” (a lawyer and ex-police officer) whom he owed millions of pesos to (a Philippines peso is worth two cents); both of those men were shot to death.

The gunman killed himself in a hotel room after being shot and wounded by security officers.

It’s hard to say what he planned to do with the casino chips; a lot of variables are involved in episodes such as these.

An Asian casino expert said that casino chips are "usually tagged," though he didn't go into any detail about Resort World, different denominations, or radio-frequency (RFID) technology. Also, the attacker worked at the Department of Finance and was an experienced casino player: "He would absolutely know that these chips were worthless and that there was no point in taking them,” the expert explained.

Then why did he? Maybe the expert is mistaken and the chips, especially the small denominations, weren't tagged; those would be easy to cash. Perhaps, if he’d grabbed larger-denom cheques, he had a deal going with his creditors who had ways to launder them through Resorts World or other channels. Maybe he had a vendetta against the casino and wanted to create havoc. Maybe he was just on a rampage and did whatever came into his head in the moment. 

However, as recently as 2010, an incident at Bellagio might shed some light on some of these questions. In the wee hours of December 10th of that year, the Bellagio “Biker Bandit" obscured his face with a motorcycle helmet and held up a high-limit crap table at gunpoint, absconding with $1.5 million in casino chips. A million worth were cranberry-colored $25,000 cheques.

The thief, Tony Carleo, knew better than to try to cash those. Even though they weren't RFID'd, Bellagio has a list of all the gamblers who’ve played high enough to win even one of those cranberries. But anything less than that turned out to be easy to cash.

At first, Carleo was scared just to park his car in the casino's garage. But he also had walk through the joint and hand over a few chips at a time at the cage, all the while watched by casino surveillance. It turned out that he could do so with such impunity, time and time again, that he essentially lived at Bellagio, especially after a casino host started plying him with room and food comps, for weeks after the robbery. Even the $5,000 chips raised no red flags when he slipped a few here and there into his stack at the poker tables, after learning that the casino didn't track who won and who lost at poker.

Within a few weeks, he burned through all the smaller chips, the million dollars’ worth of  cranberries were burning a hole in his pocket, and he inevitably tripped himself up in lame attempts to launder them. In the end, he got snitched in by a poker dealer, then set up and knocked down by undercover Metro detectives.  

"Look,” Carleo told a reporter after being sentenced to nine years in prison. “I know I should have thrown those twenty-five-thousand-dollar chips away. But who can just throw away a million dollars?"