Every so often when I started dealing, we'd be warned about how to spot a phony bill…hundred dollar bills with so many things missing; little things that would only be spotted by people in certain businesses that deal with many large bills. The guy at the 7-11 doesn't get a class on spotting phony $20s, but in the casino business we get the latest copies of con jobs and we're taught how to feel the paper. This is the first tell. Then, with the watermarks and other ways of telling counterfeit bills, none can get by the dealers that spend a second or two and check them. Other dealers just figure it's not their problem; let the cage catch it in their counting machines, which identify any counterfeit bills.

But we're not in a bank or other place like that, which deals with large amounts of bills. Many of the banks have markers that can detect a phony bill without even looking at any of the "tells" they make on real bills or phony bills. These markers are available to anyone, so who did they do all the changes in the new bills for? It seems that Las Vegas takes in more money over the tables and through the machines on a busy weekend than most cities do in a week. If anyone was going to try to pass a number of phony bills off (called "cleaning your money", as opposed to laundering, which is people exchanging their possibly marked bills for good bills, also a Las Vegas favorite for years and years.)

But Vegas has another problem that we're solving as I write this column and that's the counterfeiting of casino chips, not just the regular gaming chips but things like Roulette chips and tickets from sports books and the new ticket in and out machines are being counterfeited. And Las Vegas is worried, very worried. Our casino and all of the MGM properties are being given classes on all these problems. As a Roulette dealer, I took the class on phony roulette chips as well as phony checks over the table. The cost of training all of us is worth just one day of a team of counterfeiters hitting Vegas over a weekend, making multiple hits in multiple casinos.

How serious is all of this? I swear this is a true story that happened to me back in the early 80's at the Tropicana Hotel. I was married and living in Long Beach, California where my wife was raised and we decided to take a year or two and see if we could make it there. I was in the jewelry business and had my own business on the side of a particular way of making pearl bracelets that nobody else was making, so I made some trips to Las Vegas to do business and get away for a couple of days. One night I was playing the dollar video poker machines. They were fascinating to play and they were much looser then. I hit a four of a kind, won $125 and placed the first bucket under the drop and just listened as I watched the meter count up to 125. But somewhere along the way something didn't sound right. I let it pay me out. I kept playing until a change girl asked if I needed change I handed her the bucket and asked if she'd cash them out for me while I played the handful of dollar coins I had left. When she returned it wasn't with a handful of cash but two security guards that grabbed me under my armpits and lifted me off the chair and "asked" me to accompany them to the back room. This immediately scared the shit out of me. I had no idea what was going on, but once down the hallway I was handcuffed and told they were just doing it for their protection. I'm 5'5" and 140lbs. and these two guys were ex-army MP's and they had to handcuff me to keep themselves safe.

"Where'd ya get these?" he held up some really bad slugs. He threw them on the table and took the handcuffs off. I picked one up. "You gotta be kidding, you're telling me somebody put this thing in your machines and they pass right through?"

"Of course, they're the same size, same weight; how many of these did you put in?"

"You're telling me you think I'd try to put cheap lead slugs in a machine and take the chance of going to jail? Look on your surveillance tapes and see if you think I did this, then I want my $125 and you find out who put these in." I was scared but innocent. I picked up the slug, twirled it in my fingers and smirked. I don't think he appreciated the smirk.

"No nothing like that, but let me tell you a few things," I said.

He sat down, took out two cigarettes, we both lit up like he was happy that I was about to confess so I could go to jail, he'd be happy they caught the cheats and knew what to took for, but what he was about to hear was going to rock his world. "You know my name but you don't know anything else about me, you see, I'm a jeweler by trade since 1977 My specialty was copying pieces that needed refurbishing, setting stones, fixing watches and especially, I did most of the casting ."

"Nope," I replied, "that's not my style, but if you want to see a real copy I'll show you how it's done and done right. I'll show you how you couldn't tell the difference between the real one and the one I make until I show you how it's done."

"What are you telling me?" he asked. "You're telling me you can make a copy of my dollar coins that look real?"

"That's what I'm telling you, you give me two days and I'll show you." He was a little confused but interested like the FBI would want a forger to show them how it's done, then lock him up or hire him.(No it's not true that casinos hire cheats to watch their surveillance like some people are trying to tell you, no casino is going to hire a successful wolf to watch their sheep.) He took my I.D., checked out my car to see if there was any evidence of the crime but of course found nothing and we made an appointment for two days later.

"I'll have the cops at your door if you're an hour late." But he did do me one favor and didn't call my boss to put doubt in his mind, which might cause me to lose my job. I came in on Saturday as planned an hour early and threw two dollar tokens on his desk.

"Now you tell me which one's which."

He picked up both coins, fingered them, looked close and felt the weight. "Both coins are mine and you're trying to pull a fast one on me aren't you?"

"Take them both out and put them in a dollar machine and I'll show you how it's done," I replied.

We walked to the casino, he put each coin in separately and they both worked just fine.

I took a square piece of rubber out of my pocket when we got back to his office.

"Open that up" I told him.

He spread the rubber apart and there in the middle was a perfect copy of his coin in wax.

"How'd you make this?" He asked.

"Simple. You take a real coin, put it in a rubber mold, cover it with wax, put it in a warm oven for an hour or two, take it out, wait for the rubber to cool, cut it through the middle and there's your coin in wax. Then you take the wax, cover it in a cement-type mixture and heat it until the wax melts off through a hole and inside the cement (the same mixture the dentist uses to make an impression of your teeth after they make the rubber mold) is another mold of the coin. You melt the metal you use, in this case you want to use a white metal but something cheap so it doesn't cost more than the dollar, (I used a little silver and mostly nickel) and after pouring the metal into the hot cement mold, you crack the cement and there's your coin in the rough. Then you put it in a rock tumbler with a bunch of small pieces of stainless steel for a day and when it comes out, it's bright and polished, after which you file the rim clean and brush off any spurs. Once you have a good copy you can use the rubber mold over and over and the cost, hell, I could make you a hundred of these in a couple of days for $25 and that's probably over estimating the cost."

The look on his face was priceless. He called a floor person and asked them to open the machine he put the two coins in and in 20 minutes a guy walked in with a bag of coins. "You can tell me which one's yours?"

"Can you?" I asked.

"Just show me," he said.

I took a couple handfuls of coins and picked one out and handed it to him.

"I still can't see what you're looking at," he said in a confused way.

"The size," I replied;" my coins are just a hair smaller, when you make the mold everything shrinks just a little, but if I took some time I could make them the perfect size just by making the mold a little larger. See how clean they both look; I took your coin and put it in the tumbler too, so they look new and shiny, and that's why I didn't do it. I'd be too easy a suspect and you can call my employer in Chicago I worked for, he taught me how to cast jewelry, and he taught me respect for the business and the faith people put in me that I won't cheat them or steal from them, and you're just as important as any of my customers, especially since you could lock me up if you really think I made a cheap lead slug like that one."

He looked at the slugs that came out of my machine, cheap and easy to identify; my copy could be played at the tables and the dealers would never know, these slugs could only be played in machines, and if I were you I'd check my machines and see why they accept this crap."

"Can I keep your copy?" he asked.

"Sure, here's the mold, show your people how easy it can be done."

A short time later the machines at the Tropicana were worked over so they were more sensitive to the weight; that was all they could do. Now it's different. They still make slugs but they don't pass the machine test anymore. Now they're trying it with chips. They didn't realize how hard it is to copy a chip so they didn't mess with anything but the $100s and up. After some were caught in a house just behind the Flamingo a few years ago with almost $200,000 in phony casino checks, the casinos started dealing with them technologically. They put computer chips in the checks. When you come to the cage with $100 checks, they have to pass the "chip test" before they're cashed. Most of the time the cage calls the floor to be sure it's the right person that won them. If it's a $500 check or higher you'd never get past the cage.

So what's next? Who can tell? You can't copy the money - even a laser printer can't duplicate the new bills - the feel's all wrong, the paper's never going to be right, since real money is made using fibers from, believe it or not, Levis jeans. They use old denim chopped and washed and mixed in with the paper process to make the special paper that doesn't feel like anything else.

So simply said, just keep it honest. Win or lose, those lawyers are expensive, jail time is assured, the food ain't so good and nobody looks good in an orange jump suit; trust me. No one in the men's prison, anyway.

-Ken Pearlman