Croupier Capers

Letting the chips fall

As roulette wheels spun and players began placing their bets at the lakeside Annecy casino in southeastern France, a plainclothes police inspector tapped the casino director on the shoulder. "A message has come from Paris, monsieur," he said. "Your establishment must close within two hours." Before the night was over, France's gambling police had arrested 14 croupiers and charged them with stealing $700,000 from the casino in the past year.

Annecy was the eleventh French casino to be raided and the seventh to be closed in the past two years. Police are seeking to halt a croupier crime wave that has robbed French gambling palaces of uncounted millions and besmirched France's longtime reputation for honest dealing at the roulette wheel. As gambling police explained it, the once honorable profession of croupier, traditionally passed on from father to son, has been taken over by organized crime. Even France's major croupier school has been infiltrated by gangsters. Croupier school graduates figured prominently among the 20 dealers who were tried in 1978 for a $300,000 robbery that shut down the Ruhl casino in Nice.

The croupiers' most common method of stealing from casino management is almost as old as roulette, which was supposedly invented by Philosopher Blaise Pascal in 1655. A crooked croupier merely palms a $100 chip or two from the stacks of losers' chips that he rakes to the side of the roulette layout after each turn of the wheel. Since the croupiers' dinner jacket pockets are traditionally stitched shut to prevent just such finagling, nimble-fingered dealers tuck stolen chips inside their shirts or cuffs.

At intervals during the play, the croupier passes the stolen chips to an accomplice, known as a baron, who masquerades as an ordinary player. At the Dieppe casino, barons cashed in $600,000 worth of purloined chips before the fraud was discovered; 23 croupiers were arrested there last September. Said one Dieppe employee: "The croupiers could have swiped the chandeliers from the casino if they had wanted to."

In some cases, roulette wheels were rigged to improve the odds for gamblers working with crooked croupiers. A favorite method involved padding the canoes, the individual pockets into which the spinning ball falls. Rubber pads were fitted under five or six of the felt-lined pockets. The added height caused the ball to miss the padded canoes, thus weighing the odds heavily in favor of the barons. A similar effect was achieved by tampering with the ailettes, or partitions between the pockets.

Commissioner Roger Saunier, who heads the Ministry of the Interior's gambling police, hopes that the jailing of the 60 croupiers now awaiting trial will have a deterrent effect on future croupier capers. If not, the centuries-old call of the croupier, "Rien ne va plus!" (No more bets!), that rings out as the spinning wheel comes toward its heart-stopping halt, may prove to be the death knell of the French casino industry.

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