Schemes to take down the casino with ingenious grifts and madcap ideas are usually the preserve of the minds and pens of Hollywood scriptwriters.
But from time to time, a story emerges in the news of a plot so inventive and smart that you are left thinking ‘why didn’t anybody think of that before?’
The Ritz is one of the most glamorous, sophisticated and historic casinos in London. The Edwardian era establishment in the capital’s Piccadilly is a hotspot for Instagram slaves, but for serious casino gamers with sizable wallets and a taste for the finer things in life, this is the place to be.
Surely such a venue would employ the most rigorous security that is simply unbreachable by fair means or foul, right? Well, a gang of three opportunists who frequented the Ritz back in 2004 showed that to be false….to the tune of £1.3 million in reaped spoils.
The Set Up
So let’s get stuck into the background of this sensational ‘heist’.
Two Serbian men and a Hungarian woman plotted to take down the house, but there were no guns, no gangs and no bloodshed – their scheme simply involved a mobile phone, a laser scanner and a computer.
The actual mechanics of the grift are unknown, with even chiefs at Scotland Yard left puzzled and unable to fathom out how the ‘extremely complex’ strategy had played out.
But it’s thought that the trio had used a tactic known as ‘sector targeting’, which granted them a stronger insight into where the ball would land on any given spin of the roulette wheel.
It’s a strategy that enabled them to walk away with a seven-figure payout across two nights of big wins at the Ritz….
What Is Sector Targeting?
The actual science behind sector targeting is complex, dynamic and hard for mere mortals to comprehend, but the explanation of its basic aims is straightforward enough.
The grifter is basically trying to figure out the relative velocity of the ball as it is released into the wheel by the croupier. Data is collected on how long it takes the ball to complete a spin, and how many segments of the wheel it passes before coming to a halt.
In short, a player is trying to figure out the ‘decaying orbit’ – enabling them to predict which number, or at least which group of numbers, the ball is likely to land on.
The punter will then Dutch a number of bets together in order to maximise their likelihood of winning – be it single numbers, groups or corner wagers.
It’s nigh-on impossible for the average Joe or Jane to calculate the relative velocity required for their sector targeting, which is why our plucky trio back in 2004 deployed their smartphone, laser scanner and laptop combination to work out the angles for them.
Remember, when playing roulette in person you don’t actually have to place your bets before the ball is released – typically, you have two or three complete revolutions of the wheel to get your money on.
So, if you can calculate the probability of where the ball will land simply by recording its velocity in those early spins, you have an excellent chance of being able to predict the winning numbers or sectors.
As our intrepid trio did, to some tune….
The Grift
The identities of the three people involved have never been revealed, not at least publicly anyway, and all we know was that two Serbian males aged 38 and 33, plus a Hungarian woman of 32 who was described by detectives as ‘very chic and beautiful’, travelled to the Ritz to put their devious plan into action.
On the first night, things went pretty well. Their scheme remained undetected by the croupier, and a series of wins enabled them to walk away with £100,000 – not bad for a night’s work.
The trio returned the very next day, and whether they upped their stakes or had added extra precision to their sector targeting who knows, but the outcome was that they trousered a whopping £1.2 million.
When any punter wins such a lofty sum, a few things routinely happen. Only a small portion of the windfall is paid in cash – in this case it was £300,000 – with the rest paid as a cheque. This prevents the gang from quickly spending their winnings, with a handful of days passing before the funds are finally deposited into their account.
And another standard procedure for huge payouts is for casino staff to review all of the security tapes to see if the player(s) has been on the take, and after watching the footage back of that fateful two-nighter back in 2004, the Ritz spotted some anomalies that led to them calling the police.
The trio were found holed up in a nearby hotel in the West End, where Scotland Yard officers would arrest them and seize the cash they had won. They also confiscated mobile phones, computers and other hardware.
The Aftermath
Now that the three suspects had been arrested (and later bailed), police had to decide a) what they had actually done, and b) whether that act was illegal or not.
So complex was the case that special detectives were called in from the serious and organised crime unit to examine the evidence, and ultimately a judgement call was required – is sector targeting actually a criminal act, or simply a morally questionable but lawful tactic like card counting?
There wasn’t a great deal of legal precedence to work with at the time. One grifter, Scott Lang, came up with his own sector targeting technique back in the 1980s, which saw him use a stopwatch to calculate the ball’s velocity and orbit.
Unfortunately for everyone else, Lang wrote about his scheme in a book, and unsurprisingly casinos banned stopwatches from the gambling floor not long after.
The charge brought by the Ritz and Met Police was ‘obtaining winnings by deception’. They argued that the gang used nefarious means to score their seven-figure payday.
The old Gaming Act, which was enacted way back in 1845 and was still in use come 2004, decreed that gamblers could not use ‘unlawful devices’ to improve their chances of winning.
However, there had been other cases in which winners had argued that they had not used technology to interfere with the game or manipulate the croupier in any way.
It’s the kind of argument that reasoned people can see both sides of, but in the end the courts decided that the trio had done nothing wrong – they had not manipulated the outcome of the roulette wheel in any way.
And so they were free to walk away with their money….the Ritz were forced to cough up all £1.3 million to the ingenious threesome.
Ringing In the Changes
Although this case alone didn’t lead to a change in gaming legislation in the UK, it formed part of the thinking behind the raft of updates that would be introduced in the Gambling Act 2005. Unsurprisingly, casinos up and down the land also began to improve their security as a result of the Ritz calamity.
The Gaming Act of 1845 was torn to shreds, effectively, and a new set of rules on what constitutes ‘cheating’ were introduced.
According to the legislation, cheating at gambling was to become a criminal offence – both those who personally cheated and those who assisted others.
The definition of cheating remains something of a grey area, although a general guide is that anything that artificially improves winning probabilities falls under this remit.
So would our trio that plundered the Ritz still have gotten away with their gains today?