Modern Living: Crooked Shake

“The customer may lose his money, but he will lose it honestly,” Nevada Gaming Control Board Chairman Frank Johnson likes to say. And so most tourists believe; they are content to play at the tables in hopes of beating the odds, fully aware that they favor the house. If the players lose—and most do—they can go away at least feeling that they have had a fair shake. Then abruptly last week Nevada’s gambling industry found its image marked with two black eyes; the state Gaming Control Board closed the big Lake Tahoe Hotel Casino after detecting crooked dice—the second casino in a month to be shut down for running a rigged crap game.

Tipped off that heavy losses were being racked up at the Lake Tahoe Hotel, agents from the Nevada attorney general’s office infiltrated the dice game, stood in at the table for over an hour as one customer plunged deeper and deeper. The man they were watching was the stickman running the game, Clayton Gatterdam, 47, whom they spotted handling the dice instead of moving them with his stick, and occasionally reaching into his apron pockets between rolls. When the agents pounced, they found four pairs of mis-spotted dice in secret compartments in Gatterdam’s apron; a fifth pair was in his trouser pocket.

The game Stickman Gatterdam was running was a setup for suckers. Each set of dice was mis-spotted differently—the gull being to let the roller establish his point with straight dice, then slip in the mis-spotted pair that would make the point unattainable. Thus, by using “even splitters”—numbers 1, 3 and 5 on one die and 2, 4 and 6 on the other—Gatterdam made certain that points 4, 6, 8 and 10 could never be made. Crapping out became inevitable. Since Nevada law holds that a casino is responsible for its employees and is liable to lose its license if one is found cheating, Gatterdam was taken into custody, and the Lake Tahoe Hotel Casino was closed pending trial.

Casino owners normally check up on the honesty of their dealers. Private detectives and closed-circuit TV monitoring of the tables are standard practice. But the second crackdown, and its attendant publicity, sent tremors of anxiety through the Nevada casino world. “We have a fortune tied up in the business,” said an executive of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. “What’s the percentage in risking it all—for no reason at all—when we can protect our investment and make a very nice return on it just playing it straight?”