ORGANIZED CRIME AND CASINO GAMBLING
According to an interview several years ago with an individual who is high up in the hierarchy of organized crime, the Mob has people placed in almost every casino in the state of Nevada. The people help the Mob take money out of the casinos by allowing certain other mobsters to win money while playing at their table. In order to balance the chips on the table, the honest players like you and me have to be cheated.
In the interview quoted below, taken from the 1976 Jan-uary-February issue of Rouge et Noir News, we see strong evi-dence of this kind of cheating:

AN INTERVIEW

Knowledge of the intimate details of organized crime's current ac-tivities in the world of casino gaming is limited to a handful of indi-viduals. Our interviewee is one of these individuals, as you will find from the information he has provided.]
To what extent is organized crime active in Nevada ing?
I have difficulty with that question because the term "organized crime" means different things to different people. Rather than get caught up in a philosophical discussion, let me say that the elements that were represented by previous owners are still active in Nevada casino gaming.
Let me explain that further. Our people may have solid hotel-casino operations, but we have our people in key spots. We're pri-marily interested in the areas of casino credit issuance and collec-tion, junkets, and the supervision of table games.Why the interest in supervision of Blackjack games?

Blackjack provides one of our biggest and safest sources of in-come. We have trained card counters who are "allowed" to play for large stakes without being barred. It isn't necessary for us to cheat. The decks don't get shuffled up as often for our players, and house personnel don't overreact to large increases in our bet size.

The scam is so simple and effective that we've spawned a bevy of competitors. So many insiders now have working arrangements with card counters that it has become necessary to bar unaffiliated counters to protect the bottom-line performance. Unfortunately, the "boys" are getting too greedy for their own good.