Let’s face it: many of us love a good heist movie.
Whether it’s a bank robbery or a stick-em-up of a casino, as is the case in Ocean’s Eleven and the bizarre 3,000 Miles to Graceland (featuring Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell dressed as gun-toting Elvis impersonators), we can’t get enough of high risk, high octane action.
So when life imitates art, it’s no surprise that heists and robberies involving casinos become worldwide news – there’s that part of us that wants to know the thieves’ plan and whether or not they got away with it.
They say that the truth is stranger than fiction, and even the best Hollywood scriptwriters might struggle to come up with storylines as compelling as these real-life casino heists and robberies.
The Circus Circus Heist (1993)
Every good heist needs a fool-proof plan….failing that, an act of brazen criminal spontaneity can also do the trick.
Heather Tallchief was just 21-years-old when she began dating 48-year-old Roberto Solis, a convicted murderer who was released from prison early because – and here comes the ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ part – he released a book of award-winning poems while inside.
Solis, it turns out, wasn’t as rehabilitated as the authorities in America thought he was, and privately he had been working on a plan to rob a casino – Circus Circus, which has been a fixture on the Las Vegas strip for more than five decades.
Knowing that he needed an ‘in’, Solis managed to persuade Tallchief to get a job with the security company Loomis, a firm used by many casinos to transport cash onto and out of the premises.
After watching hours of videotapes of the Loomis armoured vehicles doing their drop offs, Solis revealed his plan to Tallchief and made her memorise a map of the roads that she could escape on after stealing the cash-laden van.
The day of the heist could not have gone any better. While her fellow Loomis colleagues went inside Circus Circus, Tallchief was left alone with a truck containing $3.1 million – around £2.6 million – in bank notes.
You can probably guess the rest. She accelerated out of the area with the loot, before she and Solis went on the run – first across the United States, before latterly ending up in Amsterdam.
The couple had a child and settled in the Netherlands before later splitting up, however Tallchief would remain on the run in the country until 2005 using a series of false identities. Eventually, she could take it no longer and handed herself in to police after spending nearly a decade on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
Tallchief was imprisoned for five years after pleading guilty to embezzlement and owning a false passport, with the authorities accepting that Solis was the brains behind the operation. She was also forced to pay back more than $2 million to Circus Circus – despite claiming she only ever saw a maximum of $1,000 of the proceeds from the robbery, with Solis helping himself to the rest.
As for the mastermind of the plot, he remains at large to this day….
Immortalised in a Netflix series called Heist, it’s believed that the Circus Circus heist remains the most lucrative ever committed.
The Bellagio Heist (2010)
One of the most iconic venues on the Las Vegas strip, the Bellagio was subject to a robbery so direct and so basic it beggars belief that a billion dollar enterprise could be taken down in such easy fashion.
Anthony Carleo, who it later emerged is the son of a high court judge, simply rode up to the front entrance of the Bellagio on his motorcycle, walked inside, unsheathed a gun and demanded a craps dealer fill his bag with chips. The crook, who dubbed himself the ‘Biker Bandit’, then rode off from whence he came.
The problem with stealing chips, rather than cash, is that you have to be on the premises to use them – and Carleo suddenly found himself with $1.5 million’s worth to shift, with the Bellagio introducing new chips and stating that the type stolen by the 29-year-old would no longer be used in circulation.
So he started hawking his chips around in various online casino forums – even signing up for accounts using the alias Biker Bandit. As if to prove his brazenness, or stupidity, Carleo even used the chips himself after returning to the Bellagio. He would also drop a chip worth $25,000 into the top pocket of a Salvation Army fundraiser, who then incredibly tried to cash in at the casino.
The criminal would later be undone when he was caught trying to sell some chips to an undercover police officer, even sending the official a signed photo via email of two Bellagio ‘cranberries’ worth a combined $50,000.
Carleo was arrested without incident, and later charged and sent to jail for nine years.
The Soboba Casino Heist (2007)
Given the number of security personnel employed by casinos, not to mention their sophisticated crime-prevention techniques, it has become increasingly difficult to pull off a major heist these days.
Perhaps the best opportunity lies with an inside job, and that’s exactly what happened at the Soboba Casino in California back in 2007.
Step forward Rolando Luda Ramos, whose job as a ‘surveillance technician’ was to ensure that the casino’s CCTV cameras were working and appropriately located.
Well, one day Ramos decided to enact a plan that had been eating away at him for some time – namely, to turn off all of the cameras in the casino’s back offices and steal a huge sum of money.
There were complications, however, that led to the uniformed 25-year-old – armed with a plastic BB gun – having to hog-tie four of his fellow employees and lock them in the casino’s vault, before bundling wads of bank notes totalling $1.5 million into bags.
Ramos made his escape and laid low for about 48 hours, before trying to flee the country with his ill-gotten gains via Los Angeles International Airport. However, he was spotted by security, arrested and eventually charged with nine counts of robbery, false imprisonment and battery. His accomplices, who included Eric Alan Aguilera and getaway driver Sonya Boyorquez, was also apprehended.
At the time of his arrest, Ramos reportedly asked journalists ‘Did I top ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ or something? I didn’t even know how much I got away with,’ claimed he was high on cocaine and tried to convince officers that Aguilera was the mastermind.
Sent to jail for 18 years, it won’t be long before he is walking the streets again….
The Stardust Heist (1992)
While the plot of George Clooney, Brad Pitt and co in Ocean’s Eleven was one of sophistication and technical detail, in real life casino robberies are often far more straightforward.
Take the extraordinary case of Bill Brennan, who worked as a cashier at the Stardust Casino on the strip in Sin City. At the end of each shift, his job was to count up the cash and deposit it into the safe to be collected armed security at a later time.
However, on this fateful day in 1992, Brennan counted up the casino’s taking as normal….and then simply walked out of the building with $500,000 in cash and chips.
Incredibly, he was able to disappear without a trace, and spent 14 years on the FBI’s Most Wanted list until 2006. After police raided his apartment, they noticed that his beloved pet cat had gone – they also found books about changing your identity strewn across the property.
The Stardust actually ceased operations that same year, and so the criminal case against Brennan was effectively dropped – however, he has never come forward to admit the crime, and his whereabouts remain unknown some 30 years after one of the most opportunist casino heists in history.
The Park Lane Club Heist (2017)
Not all high stakes casino heists unfold on the Las Vegas strip.
On the leafy streets of Central London, a robber struck at the Park Lane Club in the first documented casino heist in the English capital in decades.
The act itself was brazen enough – the individual waltzed into reception wearing a balaclava and boiler suit, waved around his gun and as croupiers, dealers and players fled, the criminal helped himself to wads of cash from the drawer.
The thief left behind £5 notes – he must have known these are typically marked and traceable, and he exited the Park Lane Club via a secret side door known only to a handful of senior staff.
So was it an inside job? Apparently so. The former employee Stuart Wigley was later charged and sentenced to six years in prison.