No, this isn't a story about a stanky old Vegas hooker, this is serious. This is the story I researched from a story a friend of mine reminded me about when a famous Las Vegas Hotel Mogul had his daughter kidnapped from his hotel, then was later rescued at McCarran Airport from the trunk of a car. The reason I'm telling you this story is to remind you that gambling and scamming go hand in hand, and gambling isn't a simple cure-all. (Names are changed to protect the innocent…me.)

Aaron Cook came to Las Vegas from Albuquerque, N.M. and learned how to scam people for his living. He was a first-class slot snatch. His forte was to walk around with an empty money bucket and see someone with their tray full of coins, then drop a few coins on the floor next to them and tell the person he dropped some money and when they'd reach down to pick up the couple of dollars, he was busy emptying their trays. Often people conveniently put their winnings in the buckets in the trays to make it even easier for him to just stand up while you're picking up the loose change and take off with your bucket of coins. He later graduated to stealing off of crap tables. Equally as good at that as he was at the slots, he would buddy up to a winner with a small stack of checks and by the end of a few rolls would have a couple hundred snatched from the player that was winning next to him. He even stooped so low as to drop change next to some old lady sitting at a poker machine and when she'd lean over to pick it up, he'd just take her whole fucking purse. When they searched his apartment there were several videos of surveillance tapes thanks to such generous contributors as the Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel as well.

Early in the casino business, dealers would be shown surveillance tapes of different shots that might be directed at them. One would involve two or more players switching cards, players snatching other players' checks, dealers being distracted while players did all kinds of dirty deeds like stealing cards or even stealing checks right out of the rack. I've even seen one guy switch an entire six-deck shoe with the help of the dealer, right out of the discard rack and the dealer just took the six stacked decks and didn't even bother to shuffle, just put them right in the shoe and started dealing. Although you couldn't hear the video, you could tell just when the phone from surveillance must have rung by the way the dealer keeps looking around just before three security guards showed up to arrest both of them. But the casinos soon quit this practice because it was giving the dealers ideas of where exactly the cameras were watching them and how to get around them, and believe me, they tried.

But after reading how he had taken months to practice his moves, I was almost surprised that he was so careless one day. He walked into a strip casino to take his share of everyone else's money and spotted one old guy that was particularly lucky at the $5 poker machine. He had stacked his $5 coins into the buckets and had two full and another one half full when Aaron walked over and dropped a few one dollar coins on the floor. He pointed them out to the old guy at the machine but he wasn't going for it. "I'm only playing $5 coins, so those couldn't be mine, must be someone else's." Getting irate, he lunged at the guy and pushed him off the seat onto the casino floor, grabbed the three buckets of $5 coins and ran towards the door. The coins were heavy, so he couldn't hold them and dropped one of the buckets on the floor, scattering the $5 coins everywhere. The ruckus alerted security which took off after him, radioed ahead and they caught him coming off the moving walkway in front of the casino. He was arrested for grand theft and when the casino owner was asked to press charges, he had the best lawyers on the D.A.'s staff prosecute him. Cook did a year and a half in Clark County detention, but this just cemented his resolve to get back at the casino and, in particular, the owner.

He did his homework while in the joint and pretty much knew how he wanted to pull off the snatch. While in lock-up, he was an ideal prisoner, gaining good-time to get his sentence reduced from the three years to only 16 months. When he got out, he took a job on a cleaning crew on graveyard shift for a local tavern chain and during the days staked out the casino. Once he identified the casino owner's car, he was able to follow him back out later in the day and follow him back to his home. He spent days just sitting down the street until one night when he saw what he wanted.

Why take the casino owner, after all, who do you call for the money? He would take his daughter instead and call him for the money. The home he lived in was huge; everyone knew him and knew he was loaded. He set his eyes on the daughter who was only 21 but at that age, loved the bars. She would be at different bars at least four or five days a week and in Las Vegas it isn't hard to hit a different bar every night and never see the same place twice. She wasn't well known to the public, because dad did a great job in keeping his family out of the spotlight that plagued him constantly. But one thing was certain: on Saturday night she would be at one of three or four bars and, by Sunday morning, at each one at least once that night. So he did the easiest thing and just waited until she came home that morning.

She drove up the street to the house around 4 a.m. He had put a spiked strip on the street before her house, knowing she would just get out of the car and walk to the house rather than call for help. Sure enough, she ran over the spikes and when her tires flattened, she exited the car and he snatched her into the trunk of his car. What happened after that is hearsay, but he evidently called the casino owner's office in the morning, demanding millions for her return. Within hours the casino owner had certain leads that he forwarded to the crew of Metro detectives that were working on the case, but it was his own team of private detectives he had on hand that tracked her down. They knew this guy was someone that had been prosecuted by the casino and must have recently gotten out of jail, and there was only one name returned on the computer search, Aaron Cook. They got his DMV records, found his license plates and car and home address after release. But after waiting for him for two days, he never showed up, but he had the owner bring him the money to, of all places, McCarran Airport. When he drove into the parking garage, they were waiting for him. When he got out of the car to make the final call, they put the cuffs on and that was the end of it. His daughter was hungry and a little pissed off, but safe in the trunk of the car.

So as he's sitting in Carson City for the rest of his life, he has to admit, it was the easy money that was the lure, not the casino or the casino owner. It was so easy for him to walk into a casino and just "pick up money". Whether the ideas came from the hours of surveillance tapes that showed him where others had gone wrong, thanks to the Discovery Channel that loves to show hour-long programs on "how to" cheat Las Vegas by showing you where others had screwed up, or just plain greed, I don't know.

The TV shows may be entertaining, but they don't show what it's like day-to-day sitting in jail for a few bucks. I can't imagine trading my freedom for three hots and a cot in a 9x6 jail cell for the rest of my life just for a little snatch.

-Ken Pearlman