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

"You think that guy will get away with it?" Someone asked.

"The guy's fucking crazy," said one of the dealers. "Of course he'll get caught."

"Are you kidding? He's a genius. I guarantee you he's long gone by now."

For Carleo, it was surreal, like listening to the eulogies at his own funeral.

"It just gave me a thrill to be the one person there who knew what's up," he says. "Maybe it was narcissistic, but I really enjoyed playing at that table."

Carleo did finally come to the attention of casino management, but not as a suspected criminal. Casinos like the Bellagio employ an army of professionals to lavish attention on high rollers, showering them with free meals and rooms and tickets to shows in hopes that they will stay longer and gamble more. Carleo was assigned his own casino host, who comped him steak dinners and a $600-a-night suite. He took to riding the elevator down from his room in a beige velour tracksuit, a golden Bellagio "B" embroidered on the chest.

Over the next several weeks, Carleo blew thousands of dollars on drugs and women – he claims that he spent $5,000 one night at a strip club on what turned out to be a four-hour hand job. The real drain, though, was the same as it had always been: gambling.


"I got to play the part and live the dream," Carleo says. "There were times – I don't want to say I didn't care if I lost – but it didn't matter to me. No matter what happened on the table, win, lose or draw, I'm still walking up to the cashier and cashing out 20 or 30,000 dollars."

More than a million dollars of what Carleo had stolen were cranberry-colored $25,000 chips, which were only easily convertible for the highest of high rollers. Somewhere deep in the Bellagio's computer system was a list of all the men and women who had ever gambled high enough stakes to have legitimately won so many big chips, but Carleo's name was nowhere on that list. He was smart enough to know that trying to cash a single cranberry chip would raise suspicions, but beyond that, Carleo acted with very little restraint. He lived like his supply of stolen chips was not merely immense, but inexhaustible.
 
For New Year's Eve, Carleo flew his old friend and former drug-dealing partner Alex up from Colorado for a visit. As the hours ticked down toward 2011, Alex and a woman Carleo had picked up earlier that day in the Bellagio gift shop watched Carleo get savaged at a blackjack table. "He was firing hard, $10,000 a hand," Alex says. "And not winning."

Alex and the woman tried to get Carleo to leave the table, but he told them to get the fuck away from him. Pale, a sheen of sweat on his forehead, Carleo couldn't stop himself. When the New Year finally arrived and fireworks lit up the sky over the Las Vegas Strip, Carleo was still inside, hunched over the felt, chasing his losses until he had burned through all the chips and cash he had on hand.

"I think he lost over 100,000," Alex says. "We were on a lot of pills, so we weren't exactly thinking straight."

By then, Carleo estimates that he was snorting or smoking at least eight 80 milligram OxyContin pills a day, mixing in a line of cocaine when he started to nod off at the tables. Alex says Carleo was in terrible shape, his skin sallow, his eyes sunk deep into their sockets. When it was time for Alex to fly back to Colorado, the two of them fought in the car on the ride to the airport.

"I told him that he needed to chill out on the drugs, that he was going to kill himself," Alex says. "I didn't get a whole lot of response from him except that yeah, he kinda agreed, he needed to chill out. We cried a little bit and then went our separate ways."

The Las Vegas detectives assigned to the Bellagio case, Sam Smith and Jason Nelson, ran down a number of dead-end leads in their hunt for the "Biker Bandit."

"We got a lot of tips like, 'It's my neighbor,'" says Nelson, "We'd ask, 'Why do you think it's your neighbor?' and they'd say, 'He has a motorcycle.'" Someone had pointed them in the direction of one member of a crew known for pulling robberies on motorcycles, but Nelson and Smith couldn't put the suspect anywhere near the Bellagio on the night in question. A week after the robbery, a Salvation Army bell ringer had tried to cash in a $25,000 chip someone had dropped in his bucket, but he either couldn't or wouldn't identify the man who had given him the chip.

Then the detectives met the man they would eventually call "Leo." Leo was a poker dealer at the Bellagio, and he said that he knew who the robber was. "Leo was this guy from Jersey," Detective Smith says. "A really intense, really excited-type guy." He reminded the detectives of the Joe Pesci character – Leo – from the Lethal Weapon movies.
 
Leo said that in the days leading up to the robbery, he had spoken with a poker player who had fallen on hard times and had shared a fantasy he had of stealing casino chips.

"Man, I'd like to just run over to that table and grab a bunch of those cranberries," the poker player had said.

A week later, Leo saw the poker player again, only now he seemed to have come into a lot of money. He was sitting in games he never would have been able to afford before. Leo started playing detective, talking to other dealers and the cashiers to confirm his suspicion that the poker player was buying in with chips and not cash.

The man's name, Leo told the detectives, was Tony Carleo.

Detective Nelson learned that Carleo held a class M license to drive a motorcycle, that he had declared bankruptcy a year before, that all of a sudden he had started gambling big money. "It was just red flag, after red flag, after red flag."

Nelson also turned up one more troubling detail.

"Tony's dad was George Assad, a sitting Las Vegas judge," he says. "And I'm like, damn, if that's the case, I better be right."

On January 13th, they put a trap and trace on Carleo's cell phone to log all of his incoming and outgoing calls. A week later, they pulled his player records. In the four years leading up to the robbery Carleo had lost a total of $2,900 at the casino. Since the robbery he had lost $105,000.

"But knowing who did it," says Nelson, "and being able to prove who did it – that's two different things."

By this point, Carleo barely left the Bellagio, except to pick up stolen chips he had stashed with friends around town, or to unload cash into a safety deposit box at a nearby bank. At one point the box held more than $100,000 in laundered money. Now, just weeks after his pair of heists, he was down to $20,000. Of the $400,000 of easily convertible chips he had taken in the robbery, just a single $5,000 chip remained. As he emptied his deposit box out, Carleo said to himself, "You're a fucking idiot."

Carleo still had over a million dollars in $25,000 chips, but these were all but unusable. He fantasized about cutting a deal with a big name poker pro like Phil Ivey, someone the Bellagio could conceivably believe had access to a major bankroll. Carleo wasn't the only one trying to solve the puzzle. On the poker forum TwoPlusTwo.com, someone had started a thread devoted to the Bellagio heist and how the robber might unload the stolen chips. Carleo followed the discussion closely, even going so far as to create an account on the site, choosing for himself the screen name "Oceanspray25" and listing his location as "Cranada."
 
One day, Matthew Brooks, a recreational player in Virginia, posted the hypothetical question, "How many potentially worthless cranberries would you accept for a legit 5k chip?"

Almost immediately, Carleo began peppering Brooks with private messages.

"Would you be willing to trade 4 flags [$5,000 chips] for 3 crans [$25,000 chips] and if more were possible how many could you handle?"

Brooks for his part wasn't sure how seriously to take him.

"I was just kind of dumbfounded that the person who did the robbery would be on that forum," Brooks says. "It was way too high profile to do something like sell chips from a $1 million heist from the biggest casino in Las Vegas."

In one of his messages, Carleo provided the number to a disposable cellphone, so Brooks called him up, as much out of curiosity as anything. During a 15-minute call, Brooks says, Carleo shared details about the robbery. Brooks asked for proof, and after they got off the phone Carleo went to his home computer and emailed Brooks a picture of two $25,000 chips resting on a piece of paper signed "Biker Bandit."

Brooks forwarded the photo to the Bellagio and the Las Vegas Police. The IP address attached to the email revealed that it was sent from the house of Carleo's father, Judge George Assad.


A few days later, Carleo was camped out at the Venetian, playing in a $1,500 buy-in poker tournament. He was overmatched by the young pros in their headphones and hoodies, but the cards were running his way. By the dinner break Carleo had enough chips that he thought he had a pretty good chance of cashing out on top.

As he was about to head off to find a bite to eat and a quiet place to do a rail or two of Oxy, a doughy, older man sidled up to his table. The man knew the poker dealer and made small talk, before finally introducing himself to Carleo. He was a doctor named Kian Kaveh and somewhere he had heard that Carleo had $25,000 chips for sale.

"Right then and there I should have left the country," Carleo now says.
 
Carleo, strung-out on six weeks of drugs and gambling, made no connection between the doctor and what he had revealed to Matt Brooks on the phone. Still, he tried to be cagey, admitting only that he might know a guy who could get his hands on the chips. But before long, he had agreed to sit down in the Venetian's Race & Sports Book with Dr. Kaveh, and a connected guy from New Jersey named Dominic who would be the buyer.

Whatever Carleo thought about the doctor, he immediately liked Dominic: tall, good-looking and full of the Italian-American swagger Carleo hoped to project as well.

Carleo tried to keep control of the conversation. He demanded to see Dominic's ID, only relenting when Dominic asked to see his in return. When the older man offered him $10,000 in cash, then and there, for a cranberry chip, Carleo demurred.

"I don't even know you, man," Carleo said. "Slow down."

So Dominic did. He explained a little about who he was: He worked in the loansharking business back east and was thinking of starting up a crew out here in Las Vegas. Maybe Carleo wanted to join up?

Carleo met with Dominic repeatedly over the next few days, and gradually came to trust him. Dominic was different from the people Carleo ran with in Las Vegas, and Carleo was hungry for human connection built on something stronger than a shared need to score drugs. They played blackjack together and traded text messages about which college football games to bet on. Over thousand-dollar dinners at Prime Steakhouse and in the backrooms of Vegas strip clubs, the two men hashed out the particulars of a deal for Carleo's cranberry chips.

On January 30th Dominic slid a wine list across a restaurant table to Carleo, telling him, "There are some nice selections in there."

Inside the menu were $10,000 in cash and smaller denomination chips. Carleo pocketed the money and passed a $25,000 chip back to Dominic. In restaurants and casino bathrooms around town, Carleo would sell his new friend a total of $100,000 worth of stolen cranberries over the course of the next two days.

On February 2nd, the two met one final time in a Bellagio bathroom not far from the poker room.

"I handed him the cranberries," remembers Carleo. "I said, 'There's a couple extra in there for you."

Something changed in Dominic's face. He took the chips without a word, and disappeared back into the casino. Carleo could sense that things had taken a wrong turn.

"I just felt empty," he says. "I knew shit was about to get bad."
 
Bad shit arrived in the form of six metro police officers storming through the bathroom door, yelling at Carleo to get on the floor, wrenching his arms behind his back. "Don't resist!" The officers shouted at him.

Someone was punching him in the face. Carleo's knee buckled sideways underneath him and his head landed hard on the cold bathroom floor.

"Dominic" was actually Las Vegas police officer Mike Gennaro. Dr. Kaveh was a friend of Gennaro's, and also a casual poker player, who agreed to help initiate the sting operation on Carleo as a favor. Gennaro had learned his trade living undercover as part of an FBI investigation of a New York crime family. The money and chips Gennaro used to gamble with and buy Carleo's cranberries, $50,000 in all, had been loaned to him by the Bellagio itself. (Dr. Kaveh was not compensated in any way for his role.)

Seven weeks after Carleo jogged out of the Bellagio with $1.5 million in chips, he was frog-marched from the casino through a service entrance and taken downtown to central booking.

His father, up for re-election as a municipal court judge, issued a statement not long after Carleo’s arrest: "I can say that as a prosecutor and a judge, I have always felt people who break the law need to be held accountable." Nevertheless, just a week before Carleo pleaded guilty to the robberies of the Suncoast and the Bellagio, George Assad was voted off the bench.


Carleo was sentenced to nine years in Nevada's Lovelock Correctional Center, the same prison that currently holds O.J. Simpson. Journalists aren't allowed official access, so Carleo puts me on his friend's list. At our meeting in June, he has a slight paunch and a tired mien. Across a square wooden table, Carleo says the right things – how the robberies were a mistake, how getting locked up probably prevented a fatal overdose. At one point, he is suddenly overcome with tears when he thinks of how he let his family down. But just as often, he expresses regret for having failed to pull off his scheme.

"Look, I know I should have thrown those $25,000 chips away," he says at on point. "But who can throw away a million dollars?"

It's the oldest gambler's lament: Why didn't I just walk away when I had the chance?
 
In prison, Carleo bets stamps with other inmates on football games. He says he mostly comes out ahead, and that the small stakes are good for him. Still, before I leave for the 400-mile drive back to Las Vegas, Carleo asks a favor. "When you get to the Bellagio," he say, "put $10 down on hard eight for me. And let it ride."


Bellagio Bandit: How One Man Robbed Vegas' Biggest Casino and Almost Got Away

Tony Carleo stole $1 million in chips – then checked himself into casino's hotel to live like a king.

By Keith Romer

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture...bandit-tony-carleos-crime-and-capture-w447204


http://img.wennermedia.com/article-leads-horizontal/bellagio-27507ee6-885d-4acb-a991-320e25a021d8.jpg
 
 
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