This Casino Weighed Its Coins — So Nobody Counted the Theft

George Jay Vandermark ran the slot machines at the Stardust, where about seven million dollars left four Las Vegas casinos as a skim until two Nevada auditors asked to watch the coins being weighed. A trolley of coins rolls onto a scale in a back room. A man in shirtsleeves watches the dial settle. He writes a number on a sheet. He signs it. The number is wrong. It has been wrong every week for three years. Nobody argues with it. Nobody counts the coins. They weigh them. The company that owns the Stardust owns three more casinos in the city, and the coin from all four is trucked to one room to be weighed. The state takes three years to look inside that room. The figure that finally enters the record is an estimate. It is not a count. A casino weighs its coins instead of counting them, so whoever controls the scale controls the count. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CHAPTERS 0:00 The Room Four Casinos Emptied Into 1:40 Four Casinos, One Owner of Record 3:24 Several Million Coins, Nobody Counting 6:05 One Hundred Million From the Pension Fund 10:33 Seventy Million Dollars of New Tower 11:23 Two Days of Hearings at the Wrong End 14:47 Four Sets of Books, Audited at Night 16:00 Two Men Walk In Without Notice 17:27 A Street Corner in Phoenix 20:06 Seven Million, Never Counted ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ SOURCES & FURTHER READING Nevada Gaming Commission hearing record, 23 August 1979. Nevada Gaming Control Board audit filings and subpoena record, 1976. Nevada Supreme Court, on gaming as a matter of privilege conferred by the State. United States federal appeal records, Kansas City skim prosecution, 1983–1986. Contemporary Las Vegas newspaper reporting, 1975–1979. NamUs missing persons record MP1108. The seven million dollar figure is the nominal estimate as it entered the public record after the fact. It is not a count, and no modern-money conversion is given. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ABOUT FOLLY FOLLY investigates the frauds, cons and heists that moved real money, traced line by line to the documentary record. Where the record is thin, we say so. A new investigation every week. Scenes are reconstructed with CGI; the narration follows the sources. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #LasVegas #CasinoFraud #TrueCrime