Question of the Day - 06 November 2024

We can tell you a lot. Ron Harris is a former (following his release from prison) employee of Huntington Press.

A Las Vegas native, Ron grew up around the flashing lights and chinking coins of the casinos. These held little interest for him; Harris, rather, was a nerdy kids who got off on taking things apart, figuring out how they worked, and putting them back together, often better than they'd 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 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. In addition, he was the go-to employee in cheating cases.

What shifted Ron from one side of the fence to the other was the major slot scandal that preceded the one where he'd be at the center. The former was the case of American Coin, a long and bitter tale that you can read all about in our QoD that tells it. 

Here's the short version. This Las Vegas-based slot machine company was suspected of rigging their machines to cheat players out of jackpots. Ron was the chief investigator in charge of the case and discovered what the company was doing: Gaffed chips installed in some 93 bars around Las Vegas had cheated players out of as much as $17 million in jackpots they should have won fair and square.  Ron 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 any number of 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 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 was to massively increase their levels of scrutiny. Ron 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 he did that the GCB didn't know about at that time was, in our humble opinion, nothing short of brilliant. Not by any means "good" or "correct," as he'd be the first to admit, but genius, for sure. 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, then farther 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 extracurricular income outwardly affect their lifestyles, so no red lights went off.

However, Ron, who was now getting hooked on the winning and winnings, wanted to find a way to beat 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, but by purchasing 10 tickets to any game, he now had a 30% 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. Worse, 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, Ron was arrested in 1995, charged with various crimes, including fraud and manipulation of gaming devices, and handed a seven-year sentence.

He did two years at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center in Carson City before being paroled. But he was also placed in the notorious Black Book of mobsters and cheats who are not permitted to enter Nevada casinos.