The Nothing Thread....Move Along Nothing to See Here

There's a story Tony Carleo likes to tell about a visit he made to Las Vegas a decade ago when he was in his early twenties.

"I was sitting in a casino," he says, "and there was a crowd starting to gather around a craps table, people two or three deep because everyone wanted to see."

A man was betting on hard eight, that the dice would land showing exactly four and four before he threw a seven or another combination that added up to eight. It was a long-shot bet, but the man hit it, then hit it again, his $5 turning into 50 then 500. Each time he let it ride. Carleo elbowed his way through the crowd to get closer to the action. On and on the man rolled, somehow avoiding crapping out – he hit hard eight again and then once more. The crowd of people exploded. To hit hard eight once was improbable, to hit it four times in row nearly impossible. The dealer slid forward the man's winnings, a short tower of brightly colored chips worth $50,000 coming to rest where once there had been a single $5 chip.
For Carleo, the tale is proof of a belief that has always lived inside of him – as long as you have the balls to open yourself up wide to fate, there's no telling what might come your way.

"If he could do it, I could do it," Carleo says. "It could happen to me."

Years later, in December of 2010, Carleo arrived at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino around 4 a.m. on a Tuesday with a plan to put his belief to the test. He parked his Suzuki motorcycle near the valet stand, backing the bike onto a little service path so that its front tire pointed away from the casino. He wore dark coveralls, rubber gloves and a motorcycle helmet with the visor down. In his left hand, hidden inside his front pocket, was a gun.

"I didn't intend to use it for anything other than deterrence," Carleo recalls. "But you have to have bullets in it. Otherwise a gun is just a paperweight."
In a booth just outside the casino entrance sat a lone security guard, a small elderly woman. Earlier in the night, Carleo had supplemented his adrenaline with several rails of cocaine and OxyContin – still, he somehow had the wherewithal to wave at the guard. She waved back. Inside the casino, Carleo kept close to one wall, moving past the banks of blinking and chirping slot machines, patron-less at this late hour.

Five days earlier, Carleo had robbed his first casino: the Suncoast, 10 miles off the strip, holding up its poker room for $19,000 in cash. The score had boosted his confidence; this time, the adrenaline seemed to heighten his perceptions and clarify his thinking.

"I felt like a predator stalking my prey," Carleo says.

His prey was the high-limit craps table, the only one open at this hour.
 
Quickly, he closed the last 20 yards to the table and pulled out his gun. He could hear his voice shouting at everyone: "Move! Move!"

The stickman and dealers and players lurched back. One man dove to the side like a stuntman in an action film. There were millions of dollars worth of purple and yellow and red-white-and-blue chips arrayed in front of the dealer, and tonight Carleo could take as many as he could grab. He shoveled handful after handful into a backpack he wore backwards across his chest. Stacks of $1,000 and $5,000 chips spilled across the table's green felt. After 15 seconds that could have been 15 days, something inside of him screamed out in alarm.

"I had big plans for that night," Carleo remembers. "I was going to rob the poker room. I was going to smash and grab at the Cartier shop. But then fight or flight kicked in. And I flew."
It was 200 yards back through the casino to his bike. An old knee injury and the extra layers of clothing he wore under his coveralls made his movements feel like running through surf. The motorcycle helmet that had served so well to hide his face now blinkered his peripheral vision so he couldn't see whether some would-be hero was charging out from between the banks of slot machines to tackle him. When Carleo reached the heavy double doors, one of the valet attendants tried to block his path. Carleo waved the pistol and the man fell back.
Carleo gunned the engine and tore away down Flamingo Road into the desert night. He knew this heist dwarfed what he had done at the Suncoast, even if he didn't yet know how big it was. In the backpack Carleo wore across his chest were casino chips worth almost $1.5 million.
 
Carleo, then 29, had moved to Las Vegas 16 months earlier to take classes at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; he wanted to apply to medical school after he graduated. He took over a spare room at the house of his father, Las Vegas municipal court judge George Assad, and tried to keep his life on the straight and narrow. On a bulletin board, he pinned a photograph of his cousin Augie, dead from an overdose, over which he wrote the words "succeed for me."

Carleo wasn't without models for how a man might get ahead in life. "My father, my stepfather, my uncle – they all had money. Nice suits, nice cars, nice houses," Carleo says. "But they all worked hard to get it. Me, I didn't have time for that. I was too impatient."

Carleo had spent his twenties in Pueblo, Colorado trading one new scheme for the next. He helped manage a family bar and limo business; worked as a DJ; dealt weed, ecstasy, pain pills and coke; sold roofing out of his truck after bad hailstorms damaged houses around town.

Eventually he began plowing all his money into buying up rental properties, signing for loans with balloon payments that would kick in after a couple of years. When the financial crisis hit, Carleo was left holding the bag on a series of underwater mortgages. Now deeply in debt, he was forced to sell his own house and let the properties go into foreclosure. In May of 2009 he filed for bankruptcy. A few months later Carleo scraped together $30,000 by liquidating what remained of his possessions and made the 12-hour drive to Vegas to start his new life.

For a couple of semesters, he held it together, managing to keep up his studies despite the distractions of his new city and a lingering addiction to OxyContin. He had a girlfriend, as well as a series of assignations with other women attracted to his dark Italian features, broad chest, and liberal supply of drugs. Still, Carleo was often lonely in Las Vegas, a condition he tried to assuage by spending more and more time in casinos. In late November of 2010, during a two-week break from classes, things for Carleo started to fall apart.

"Every day I would wake up and have to find something to do," he says. "I wasn't working, school was out, and I had all this free time."

So, Carleo gambled. Maybe things would have gone differently if he had won, but he didn't win. After losing half his bankroll over the course of a few days, Carleo took his last $12,000 and headed for a high stakes poker game at the Bellagio.

"These guys were just waiting for drunk tourists or assholes like me to put their money on the table."
 
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In a matter of hours, Carleo lost six grand. At around midnight, he switched to black jack, laying out all his remaining cash on the table.

"It was like the Alamo. That was going to be my last stand."

In less than an hour, the dealer relieved Carleo of his last dollar. Carleo stumbled out of the casino to his car, angry and ashamed.

"I felt like a plane going down, just spiraling."

When Carleo woke up the next morning, he was desperate to get back to even. He called around to different drug friends, trying to find someone who wanted to buy some of his store of OxyContin. A stripper he knew took $800 worth, and Carleo drove straight from the sale to the Bellagio, immediately putting the cash into a poker game.

At the table, Carleo fixated on a tall, skinny European kid in flip-flops and shorts who pulled $5,000 chips from a purple Crown Royal bag. Carleo knew he could take the kid, and he knew that if he could get his hands on that bag, the relentless pain that had overtaken him would stop. The idea, Carleo says, "became like an infection in my brain."

There was, of course, another way for Carleo to get his hands on casino chips in a hurry. On every blackjack and pai gow and craps table were hundreds of thousands of dollars, just sitting there. It was a fantasy that has come to every gambler deep in the hole: What if I just reach across the table and grab them?


Two nights later, Carleo got a text message inviting him to a poker game at the Suncoast Casino not far from where he lived. The Suncoast was perfect for what he had in mind; it was 20 yards from the poker room cashier to a side entrance where he could park his motorcycle. "I couldn't afford to play in that Suncoast game anymore," Carleo recalls, "So I did the next best thing – I robbed it."

He was in and out long before security or police could arrive. More important than the $19,000 in cash he made off with was the knowledge of just how easy it was to knock off a casino.

"It was a mountain to get over to make myself walk through that door. But once I did it, I knew anything was possible."

He hit the Bellagio five days later.

By robbing the Bellagio, Carleo had achieved something he hadn't been able to do in a decade of striving – he had made himself a millionaire.
 
But, because he had stolen chips instead of cash, he was really only a millionaire inside the Bellagio casino. He would have to park his car in the casino's garage, ride the casino's elevator and walk the casino's marble floors under the watchful eyes of thousands of cameras. He would have to hand the casino's chips to the casino's cashiers and hope that they would give him money rather than call the police. And because trying to redeem too many chips at once might bring unwanted attention, he would have to do it over and over again.

Carleo was back the very first night after the robbery.

"I felt like a big swinging dick," he says. "I just jacked this place and now I'm going to cash in everything I took."

Carleo could detect no obvious signs of trouble along the familiar route to the poker room. There were no Wanted posters with his picture on them. None of the dealers or security guards treated him any differently than the thousands of other gamblers chasing their fortunes at one table or another.

"Once I walked in and didn't get bum rushed, I started to feel good," Carleo says. "They had no idea who I was."

Carleo found a seat at a high stakes poker game, buying in with hundred dollar bills from the Suncoast robbery. If the other players paid him any mind, it was only because they wanted to take his money. As the night wore on, Carleo slipped a few stolen $5,000 chips into his stack. The casino didn't bother to track who won and who lost at poker, and, at the end of the night, though the cashier asked for his ID and player's card, Carleo had no trouble cashing out.

"I wasn't some new asshole who came in off the Strip with a whole bunch of chips," Carleo says. "I was an old asshole with a whole bunch of chips."

Carleo wasn't content to lay low. The poker room was the safest place for his laundering operation, but it was only a couple of nights before he went in search of faster action. He found his way to the craps pit, to Table Number Five, the very same table he had robbed.

"I was just drawn to that table for whatever reason," Carleo says. "I like irony, I guess."

By then, the story of the "Biker Bandit" was all over the news – local TV stations aired security footage of Carleo in his coveralls and visored helmet jogging back through the casino to his motorcycle. As Carleo threw down a few bets for himself and a black $100 chip on hard eight for the dealers, it was all anyone at the table wanted to talk about.
 
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