Lady Luck Ran Out

The gloomy gamblers of the Continent who frequent Monte Carlo's famed Casino are usually content to court fortune with no better equipment than a good-luck charm or an "infallible" system. Three Californians--Jason Lee, 60, Philip Aggie, 37, and Ralph Shaker, 40--were of a more practical stripe. Resolved to beat the American-type craps table at the old Casino, they arrived in Monaco, dropped $35,000 at the table, but returned to the U.S. with a handful of wax impressions of the Casino's dice. A month later, they went back armed for victory.

Ostentatiously ignoring one another one day last February, the three took their places around the craps table. Their plan was simple, and for a while it worked fine. Subtly substituting their own obedient ivories for the Casino's more capricious cubes as occasion demanded, the three picked up 2,300,000 francs ($6,570) between them. Then something went wrong; the Casino dice that Aggie had temporarily removed from the contest got stuck in his sleeve, and he had to pass the croupier a loaded pair. A cherubic, bow-tied observer with the look of a house detective tipped the nod to the croupier, who promptly raked in the dice, and the three Californians, sensing that their good fortune might be at an end, tiptoed softly out of the gaming room, past the well-tended Casino gardens and across the border into France, which is only a few blocks away.

Soon afterward, French police had a look at their baggage and found 83 pairs of mismarked, loaded and topped dice, all counterfeited to bear the Monte Carlo mark, with a bill for the manufacture of same from a firm in Los Angeles. They arrested the trio.

Last week a Monacan judge invited the three Californians to stay on in Monte Carlo for an all-expenses-paid vacation lasting from six months to one year. The view of the Mediterranean from the jailhouse is said to rival that from Princess Grace's own boudoir window.

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