True Crime Campfire - Burning Down the House: A Casino Bandit Grab Bag

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Almost everyone who walks into a casino feeling confident that they’re gonna walk out richer is what is technically known as “a sucker.” Every game you play at a casino gives the house an edge. Not much of one—otherwise, why would people play? Players have to win a decent portion of the time, that’s why they keep putting their money down on the table. But behind the glitz and glamour, casinos run on cold mathematical certainty. Over the long term, over hundreds of hands of cards and rolls of the dice and spins of the wheel, the house ultimately always wins.  But what if they didn’t? What if people, through brainpower and daring, managed to beat the odds and come out on top? It’s a tantalizing thought—and for the people in these three stories, it was too tempting to pass up.Sources: https://www.888casino.com/blog/famous-mit-team-membersBBC News: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27519748Esquire: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a37016468/heather-tallchief-roberto-solis-heist-netflix-now/NBC: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9766179Boston Magazine: https://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/2019/06/21/mit-blackjack-team/NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/us/fugitive-in-armored-car-theft-gives-up-after-12-years.htmlNew Scientist: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428644-500-roulette-beater-spills-physics-behind-victory/Science Alert: https://www.sciencealert.com/a-physicist-has-built-a-machine-that-can-beat-the-odds-at-rouletteJustice.gov: https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/nv/news/2006/03302006.htmlhttp://www.richardmunchkin.com/2011/08/my-interview-with-john-laurie-c-mit.htmlNewsweek: https://www.newsweek.com/heist-netflix-heather-tallchief-roberto-solis-true-story-facts-documentary-1610361Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Almost everyone who walks into a casino feeling confident that they're going to walk out richer is what is technically known as a sucker. Every game you play at a casino gives the house an edge. Not much of one. Otherwise, why would people play? Players have to win a decent portion of the time. That's why they keep putting money down on the table. But behind the glitz and glamour, casinos run on cold mathematical certainty. Over the long term, over hundreds of hands of cards and rolls of the dice and spins of the wheel, the house ultimately always wins. But what if they didn't? What if people, through brainpower and daring, manage to be the odds and come out on top. It's a tantalizing thought, and for the people in these

stories, it was too tempting to pass up. This is Burning Down the House, a casino bandit grab bag. have gone to try and score big with cards, roulette wheels, or dice. We've got three stories for you about people who tried their best to put one over on the house, and we're going to start with the famous MIT Blackjack team. Now, Blackjack in one form or another, has been around for at least 500 years and probably a lot longer, and human nature being what it is, you have to think that some form of card counting has been around nearly as long. There are a lot of ways to do it, and they can get very complicated, but the core principle isn't that hard to grasp. If you can keep track of the cards that have already been played,

you should have some idea of the composition of the remaining unplayed deck, whether it's mostly high cards or low cards. By the rules, the dealer has to draw if their hand is less than 17. So unlike players, they're forced to draw on uncomfortable hands, like say 15 or 16, where there's a really high chance of going over 21. What this means is that if the unplayed deck is mostly low cards, that benefits the dealer. If they're mostly high, that benefits the player. and bets can be placed accordingly.

And to pull this off, you don't need to be like Dustin Hoffman and Rain Man and have perfect recollection of every card played. In most card counting systems, the player just has to keep one running total in their head, so that, for example, for every low card played, they add one point. For every high card, they subtract one point, and cards in the middle don't change anything at all. When the number is high or low enough, this can give a general idea of what the unplayed deck looks like

and bets made accordingly. Anyone can do card counting on this basic level, but it's not like a magic key to a casino's bank vault. Most people who count cards will just reduce the house's edge by a tiny little hair's breadth. And because they feel more in control and enjoy themselves more, there's every chance they'll bet greater and greater amounts, and overall, the casino will still make big money off them. But if you play blackjack with perfect strategy, like the skill level that a professional gambler has, and you also count cards really well, then you can actually shift the odds of blackjack slightly in your favor. Very slightly, just a few percentage points. You don't suddenly

start winning every hand, but if you play for long enough and you have enough capital to make big bets at the right time, you can potentially make a whole hell of a lot of money. And that brings us to the MIT blackjack team, which we touched on real briefly in another episode a couple years ago, but we're going to do a much deeper dive here. There have been a a lot of smart cookies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In fact, it'd be pretty hard to find an unsmart cookie there. Over a hundred Nobel laureates and thousands of other extremely bright bulbs have passed through its halls, every one of them, a nerd.

Look, I'm sorry, I don't make the rules, but if you go to MIT, you are automatically a nerd. Buzz Aldrin might be a fighter pilot and an astronaut and have once at the age of 72 punched a guy who said the moon landings were faked, which makes him a legend. But he went to MIT, so he's a nerd. True. And so was Bill Kaplan, although he didn't go to MIT. Kaplan graduated from Harvard in 1977 and was all set to go on to Harvard Business School. But instead, he went home and told his mom he was going to take a year off and go to Vegas and make some money gambling.

Now, as you can imagine, mom wasn't thrilled about this idea, but Bill was sure he could make some money out West. In the 50s and 60s, a few mathematicians had taken a serious look at blackout. jack and developed card-counting-based strategies that in theory tipped the long-term odds a hair in the player's favor. They published successful books that promised big wins, but most people didn't have the ability, time, or resources to fully employ the necessary techniques. A lot of people treated the ideas with the kind of skepticism that most books promising easy money deserve. But Bill Kaplan was a stats guy, and he thought the math behind all this was pretty solid. His stepdad challenged him. Play me every night and prove you can win. And they played for two weeks

with Bill, in his own words, crushing his stepdad, which must have been deeply satisfying. I'm sure. His stepdad told Bill's mom that the kid might actually be able to make money in Vegas. And so with his mom's wary blessing, he headed west. He hit Vegas with a thousand dollars, and nine months later headed back to school at Harvard, 35 grand richer. He wasn't the only nerd in Cambridge with an interest in cards. In 1979, J.P. Masser was studying for his master's in computer science at MIT and used what at the time was an astonishingly powerful computer to prove that Blackjack could be beaten. And while J.P. Masser doesn't actually look anything like Professor Frank from the Simpsons, I feel like he probably should. Ha! With the cards of the counting.

After that, Master ran a class for Blackjack at MIT, and at the end of 1979, he and some friends and students slew down to Atlantic City to try it and put his theories into practice. So the nerd squad hit the bright lights of the Jersey Shore, and they did okay, I guess. Five months later, after frequent weekend trips, the group had won around four times their original capital. If you visit a casino for fun and you walk out with more in your pockets than you walked in with, you're going to be over the moon and start feeling like you're kind of a big deal. But this crew had invested months of time and intense effort, and at the end of it, they were headed home with less money than if they'd just stayed in Massachusetts and got a weekend job at Dunkin' Donuts.

Cambridge is a small and very brainy city. Harvard and MIT sit barely a mile apart along Massachusetts Avenue. And when J.B. Masser went home with his tail, at least partway between his legs, he went out to eat at a Chinese restaurant and happened to overhear Bill Kaplan talking to some buddies about his profitable blackjack adventures out in Vegas. Masser introduced himself and asked Kaplan if he'd come down to Atlantic City to watch his crew play and see if he could give them any advice. Kaplan agreed. He'd been part of a Vegas-based blackjack team throughout his post-grad work, but they'd recently gotten burnt out and split up. Having someone show up and basically off from a new team was a lucky break. So he flew down to Jersey with Masters Nerd Crew. They were kind of a mess.

Each person had their own counting system, which were all overcomplicated, in a way that theoretically improved their odds of winning even further. In theory, in practice, the players made so many mistakes that it negated any advantage they gained. A good card counting strategy is simple, something you can do quickly and easily under pressure. Typical nerd hubris, but I'm a genius. It has to be complex. No one else, no normies could possibly understand my strategy. Like, keep it simple, stupid. Back in Cambridge, Kaplan gave Masser his report and said he'd be willing to manage the new blackjack team, but only if they let him put his business school brain to work. There would be strict training. Everyone would have to use the same

systems for counting and betting. Players would have to keep exact records of everything they did in the casinos. Before a player was approved to play, they'd have to go through a checkout test. The team would dress up an MIT classroom to kind of look like a casino and the player would have to bet successfully while people milled around, talking and laughing, jostling them, interrupting them, and with all kinds of lights and noises in the background, including an air horn. In 1980, when Kaplan thought they were ready, 10 players hit the casinos, with an investment stake of $89,000 gathered from amongst themselves and from outside investment. investors. That's about $340,000 today. In the prospectus he'd shown investors,

Kaplan had projected hourly profits up $170. After the team's first 10-week run, they doubled the original stake and made profits of $162 every hour. Pretty much right on the nose of the prediction. Most of the players were undergrads and their take home was about $80 an hour, about $300 in today's money. With success like that, it wasn't all that hard to find new investors. and throughout the 80s, the MIT team tore things up on the casino scene. In the latter half of the decade, though, they worked without Bill Kaplan. He'd been winning big bucks from casinos since 1977, and he was banned from playing in most of them. If he even set foot inside a casino, staff would follow him around to try and ID the members of his team.

He backed out and started applying his stats know-how to the real estate world instead, where he continued to make gobs of money. The team went on, run by Masser and John Chan. Chang. Chang was an electrical engineering student who'd been drawn to the team because he was fascinated by the game and because he needed the money. His first game, he saw people making $5 bets and thought, oh, geez, that's a bit steep. Bit rich for my blood. I laugh because it sounds like my cheap ass. I'd probably be that same way. That's exactly how I gamble. I don't even like table games. I don't like to talk to people. I sit in front of the video machines and people think they're like, you're not going to win. I'm like, no, it's fine. I don't go to the casino expecting you to win. I go to have fun and drink booze. It's understandable, though. Five bucks was a couple days' worth of food for him.

A big score to him meant he could buy the new calculator he wanted. I told you all these people were nerds. But he was really smart and in short order was one of the team's best players. The MIT Blackjack team was actually a series of teams with a few common core people. Throughout the 80s, there were at least 70 members, most of them current, or recently graduated students from MIT or Harvard. The teams had varying degrees of success, but they were all profitable, some extremely so. The best rate of return was 300% in a year.

In 1992, Bill Kaplan got back into the game. He, J.P. Masser, and John Chang formed strategic investments, with a plan to bankroll a new team with high dollar investments to maximize profits. The new team would go through the same rigorous training previous iterations had suffered through to sharpen them up for the plan and strategy they were all going to use. They'd work in teams of three, a spotter, a controller, and a big player. The spotter does the actual card counting. When they think the deck has gone positive, i.e. is likely to be mainly high cards from here,

they signal to the controller. The controller is a player who makes constant low dollar bets, which they use to check if the deck has indeed gone positive. If it has, they signal the third member, the big player, who swoops in and makes a huge bet with the odds of winning in their favor. This SI team more or less waged war on the casinos. They had nearly 80 players split between the coasts, and their specialty was to have multiple teams hit different casinos at the same time, before Word could get out on the techniques that they were using. Afterwards, the players would report back on their games in as much detail as they could remember, and the team leaders would pump the data into

computer simulations to try and refine their techniques to an even sharper point. They played all over the world, although some places were preferred more than others. In the U.S., state commissions generally enforce tight restrictions what casinos can get away with, but that wasn't true everywhere. For example, the team soon figured out that small casinos in France would often use a short shoe, a deck with all the tens and aces taken out if they thought players were winning too much. Complaints about this would be met with denials and not so veiled threats. You should be careful, monsieur. The players got caught, of course, and often, but that was just part of the

game, an expected consequence. So I know someone that works like security in a casino and they actually take classes on how to count down decks to determine if someone is advantage playing. Like, and according to him, it's pretty obvious. Because like, I'm like, well, what if they're just lucky? He's like, no, It's like they bet perfectly in every scenario. Yeah. And it's pretty fascinating because to catch the cheaters, they have to learn to cheat as well. And like, this guy I know does play Blackjack quite frequently. And I ask, do you count?

And he's like, no. And I'm like, how do you not? I'm so curious. Yeah, I don't believe him. Right. Yeah, he won $100 the last time, I guess. And getting your ass thrown out of a casino by a couple of scary goons was something players were trained for. as much as you can train for something like that.

Casinos have a reputation for roughing up people who try to screw them over, a reputation that's both pretty useful for them and also pretty highly exaggerated. Although they heard of other teams who'd been less lucky, none of the MIT crew had any close encounters of like the thumb-breaking kind, although they did once have their winnings mysteriously stolen the same night they'd won them. Now, I'm not saying that some casinos have connections with organized crime. Well, I'm just not saying that. And I'll leave it at that.

Yeah, we don't know anything about that. When Vegas casinos caught a card counter, they'd throw them out and ban them. Most often, the team would just roll in new recruits from back in Cambridge, where there was no shortage of super bright young men and women looking for some adventure and quick money. Eventually, the casinos known as said a lot of the people that were banning had addresses in the Cambridge in Boston area. They sent investigators. They sent investigators up there. to New England, who figured out where this pipeline of blackjack prodigies was starting from.

Like, that's an insane amount of money to invest in catching this, which is, I mean, that's standard casinos. But I just love it. The casinos got hold of recent yearbooks from MIT and Harvard and scanned in the headshots to add to their big books of people to watch out for, which I guess sucked for some innocent nerds looking for a fun time in Vegas around this time. Seriously. With the prime players having been made, they sometimes resorted to discuss.

sizes. Players hit the casinos dressed as nurses or in wheelchairs or in wigs and fake beards. John Chang, who was skinny and who by his own description, couldn't grow a beard, had his girlfriend dress and make him up like a woman, which seems like he was into, so good for him. Over two years, the strategic investment team raked in the cash, and then it all fell apart. Blackjack teams often don't last long. It's intense, high pressure work, people get burned out, And when you're dealing with a big team and high incomes, you also end up dealing with lots of squabbling about how to split the cash. Who earned what? Which players were more valuable? There should be like a VH1.

Seriously, behind the scenes about it. Like a, oh, he just, he got a big head and he wanted to go solo. These are not calculations that make for a happy and harmonious group. But the real death knell for strategic investments was a long run of old-fashioned bad. luck. All their well-honed skills just moved the odds in their favor. There was always the possibility of getting completely hosed by random chance, which is what happened. Strategic investments made millions, and then very rapidly lost almost all of it and dissolved. Oh, God. Some players started teams of their own. Many others went on to other high-flying careers,

which I guess is what happens when you recruit from Harvard and MIT. There are some prominent attorneys and professors out there with wild tales about their days ripping off casinos. But were they ripping them off? Card counting isn't illegal, but is it cheating? I think it's a little bit of a gray area. If it's just one person working the table, then no, that's just somebody playing the game well. There has to be an advantage for skilled play. If it's a group of three people working together to maximize their chances of winning,

I don't know. That's pushing it. Regardless, it's kind of hilarious to see casinos get all self-righteous and been out of shape about people pushing the odds in a card game, marginally in their own favor. Guys, that plus booze and pretty girls is your entire business model. And, you know, I think of, I think it's funny that, of course, they don't have a problem with, like, poker, right? Because that's people betting their own money against other people. So, like, and that's a skilled game, right? Like, good poker players are talented.

And I would think good blackjack players are also talented. So, yeah, I got to say, I can't, I don't really think, yeah, I mean, I get why the casinos don't like it, but it seems like you're beating them at their own game. And like from what I, from what I understand is like a really good card counter can really do damage. Like they can really make a, like, they can really get away with a ton of money. The talented ones will bounce from casino to casino and spread out their winnings. Or the smart ones, I mean. Because, like, you know, if you sit there and win hundreds of thousands of dollars in one sitting, I'm guessing the casino might just ban you on principle. Like, they might just say, uh, no, thank you. You can go anywhere else but us. And they talk to each other. I don't know if you know that.

Oh, of course. Oh, I'm sure. They share, they share info. So stay frosty, folks. Hi, I'm Darren Marler. Host of the Weird Darkness podcast. I want to talk about the most important tool in my podcast belt. Spreaker is the all-in-one platform that makes it easy to record, host, and distribute your show everywhere, from Apple Podcasts to Spotify. But the real game changer for me was Spreeker's monetization. Spricker offers dynamic ad insertion. That means you can automatically insert ads into your episodes.

No editing required. And with Spreaker's programmatic ads, they'll bring the ads to you, and you get paid for every download. This turned my podcasting hobby into a full-time career. Spreaker also has a premium subscription model where your most dedicated listeners can pay for bonus content or early access, adding another revenue stream to what you're already doing. And the best part, Spreaker grows with you. Whether you're just starting out or running a full-blown podcast network, Sprieker's powerful tools scale effortlessly as your show grows. So if you're ready to podcast like a pro and get paid while doing it, check out spreeker.com. That's S-P-R-E-A-K-E-R.com.

For our next story, we're going to turn to a more direct way of getting your hands on a casino's cash, just flat out stealing it. In 1993, 21-year-old Heather Tall Chief moved from San Francisco to Las Vegas. That specific choice was out of the blue, but anyone who knew Heather wasn't surprised she'd made some kind of change to her life. She'd been working in health care at an AIDS hospice, where she was highly thought of for her hard work and empathy, but that's a tough gig. She got to know patients real well, befriended lots of them, and then they'd die. Heather had grown up with parents who were both kind of screw-ups and fell into a caregiver, role early in life. She really did empathize with her patience and the emotional toll of losing them was significant. Her life spiraled briefly out of control and she lost her job. Well, we say

briefly, you could also say that this was just the first step in Heather Talcci flying off the rails so fast she might as well have been rocket powered. But what was to come next would be the opposite of chaos. At a San Francisco bar, Heather caught the eye of Roberto Solis. No wonder, Heather was absurdly gorgeous. Roberto was a charismatic guy, intelligent and well-spoken, a published poet. He was also 27 whole years older than Heather, which I am entirely comfortable putting into the yikes column. But he was smooth, and Heather was as vulnerable as she was beautiful at that time. He bought her drinks and offered to read her tarot cards. They went home together. After that, he performed a full love carpet bombing on this girl he'd just met. Flowers, poems,

petals on the floor. For Heather, someone who was in kind of a messed up place and who had never had much in the way of a solid parental figure, this kind of attention from a confident older man was irresistible. She'd later say she found Roberto's attention comforting. He made her feel safe. She moved in with him not long after. Roberto Solis was more than just a poet. In 1969, he'd gotten a life sentence for murder after shooting a guard during an armored car, heist that went south. The guard, Louis Dake, 61 years old, and a father of six, had showed Roberto an empty money bag when Roberto and two accomplices tried to hold up his armored car. Furious, Roberto shot him twice in the back. It was while he was in the joint that Solis took up poetry, writing

under the name Pancho Aguila. His work led some prominent local writers to plead for leniency from the parole board, and in 1991, he was released. Not quite sure of the logic there. Surely no one who puts words together well could do bad things. And just to take a brief detour, by the way, this shit happens with like disturbing regularity. Like just off the top of my head, that serial killer Jack Unterveger, like that's another guy who got released from prison for being good at words and ended up, you know, killing a bunch more people. So maybe let's quit doing that. Shockingly, artists can be bad people.

You know, it's funny because, like, you see similar stuff with Son of Sam where people are like, well, he's turned over a new leaf. And it's like, it doesn't change the fact that he's a fucking loser nerd that killed people. Yeah, like, what do you mean? Or Gacy, that's a big one too. People are people, his art is in really high demand, which makes me fucking sick. Yeah. So just a few months after Roberto had picked her up, the two of them moved down together to Las Vegas. The move was Roberto's idea.

Heather, applying for a driver's job with the Loomis Security Company, was also his idea. She knew perfectly well he'd done time for an armored car heist, but would later claim she found nothing suspicious in him pushing her to get a job driving one. I find that a little hard to believe. My boyfriend who broke into the chocolate factory wants me to get a job at the chocolate factory. How could I possibly know that he had bad intentions? Heather passed a background check and her health was good and that apparently was all you needed to get a job with Loomis. She was popular with her new co-workers.

It didn't hurt that most of them were middle-aged dudes and she was real, real pretty. She was friendly enough but kept everyone at some distance. She started dressing down in clothes that concealed her figure and took to wearing her hair tied back in a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. They weren't prescription lenses. She had perfect vision. If anyone had found out about that, they might have thought Heather was really going out of her way to try and avoid too much male attention. If they thought a little longer on it, they might realize that if at some point in the future, Heather decided to glam herself up, she'd be almost unrecognizable as the woman they'd been working with.

Like other new drivers, Loomis started Heather off on casino house runs, transporting new banknotes to gaming tables across the city. New sequential notes are pretty easy to trace, and no rocket. with any brains would try to knock off these cars. This was considered low-risk work. Heather was described as an ideal employee, really smart and always diligent and punctual. Her employers started to think they really lucked out in hiring her. This was a young woman who could really go places in their organization. By September, she was promoted to riskier work, ATM runs. Five days a week, she and two armed colleagues would drive millions of dollars

over to the Vegas Strip. On the morning of Friday, October 1st, 1993, Heather and her two colleagues, Scott and Steve, started their day with Heather behind the wheel. The only unusual thing about Heather was her footwear. She usually wore sturdy boots, a sensible choice for somebody who'll be driving all day, but this morning she had on kind of fancy dress shoes. Her colleagues didn't think much of it, figuring she was going to go right out to dinner after work or something like that.

Fridays were when they delivered most much. to the strip. Weekends were always the busiest time in Vegas, and the banks and casinos wanted their ATMs crammed full. So Fridays were long days for people delivering the cash, and October 1st especially. This was one of the changeover days when resorts shifted from one convention to another, lots of people checking in and checking out and heavy traffic on all the roads. Their first stop at 8 a.m. was the Circus Circus Casino. Scott and Steve manhandled the heavy money containers out of the back of the truck, then locked the doors and banged on the side to let Heather know they were out. Because it was changeover day, there was nowhere to park out front, so Heather

would just drive around the back of the casino and wait till it was time to come pick them up. Ideally, this should be in a couple hours, with Scott and Steve going from one ATM to the next, filling them up before heading to the exit. But when they got to the exit, Heather and her truck weren't there. They waited a little while. This was the kind of thing they were supposed to report immediately, but everyone liked Heather, and they didn't want to get her in trouble. Maybe she'd just gotten caught in traffic. But after a couple more minutes, their thoughts started turning to darker possibilities. Maybe Heather had been in a bad wreck. Maybe she'd been held up at gunpoint, a scenario that had recently happened to a driver in New York, and everyone who worked for Loomis had

heard about it. They called home base, who sent a second truck to pick them up and comb the streets nearby looking for Heather. Soon, the police were looking for her, too, but with no success. There was no GPS in 1993. The only connection they had with the truck was radio, and no one was picking up. Heather, the Loomish truck, and around $3 million in unmarked bills, had vanished. Security footage from the casino showed Heather driving the truck away. No gunman, no one else in the cab.

She'd taken the truck herself. As soon as they realized it was Heather who'd stolen the money, investigators figured there must be someone else involved. 21-year-olds with no criminal records don't usually jump right into a multimillion dollar heist. They descended on the apartment, Heather shared with her boyfriend, Gabriel Suave. Gabriel Swab.

Ooh, boy. It's getting a little hot in here, in it, ladies. Yeah, I don't know anything about his poetry, but you've got to give Roberto Salas some points for that pseudonym. The great poet Gabriel Swaz. His shirts are always unbuttoned, his chest perfectly oiled, and he makes women swoon for sport. He's literally surrounded by a visible cloud of cologne. You can get pregnant just by looking at him, just by making eye contact.

It's like the perfect dusting of chest hair or two. And like, he's wearing, for some reason, like a peasant shirt with like wide sleeves. Not in style anymore, but he's wearing it. Heather was well known at her apartment complex, always hanging out by the pool and the hot sun. But nobody knew Roberto. People hardly ever saw him. He had a condition that made him sensitive delight, so he stayed inside most of the day. If he did go out, he often wore an eye patch.

He always used the back stairs. Oh my God, this just gets better. Gabriel Suave is a vampire and a pirate? A pirate vampire? It's like right out of the romance novels. I don't know how much more turned on I can get. I have some mercy. Yeah, this dude has the mystique turned up to 11.

Like any good vampire, pirate, pirate vampire, he just kind of lurked around the place. Like a ghost? Of course, ghosts don't leave fingerprints. And Roberto Salas did. And soon investigators knew they were dealing with a dangerous dude. despite his poetic soul or whatever but that didn't help much in finding him beyond the fingerprints there wasn't much in the way of clues in the apartment

Roberto and Heather had clearly expected the police to be there soon Heather had left a letter addressed to her mom on the table assuming the cops would find it the FBI moved in to help with the investigation and Leeds started cropping up Roberto had told people in the neighborhood that he and Heather were thinking of moving to Mexico and had even given them business cards with addresses down there and in San Diego. Travel records showed he and Heather had visited Mexico

just before she'd gotten her job at Loomis. Had they flown south of the border? But it turned out the addresses on the business cards were fake, and investigators soon decided that Roberto had set up the whole Mexico angle to lead them down the wrong path and buy them a little more time. The armored car was found in a warehouse just a few blocks from the Circus Circus Casino. Nobody had seen Heather drive in, and even if they had, they might not have been too surprised. Roberto had told people in local businesses he was setting up shop to convert vehicles into armored cars for companies like Loomis to use, so it would make sense to see one there.

That's actually pretty smart. I hate to admit it. There were packing materials inside the warehouse, and investigators figured Heather and Roberto had shipped the cash to a second location. Three million in bills weighs a hell of a lot, far too much for them to just carry around. They also found pamphlets on yacht charters from San Diego and Acapulco, addresses and phone numbers in Miami and the Caribbean. The Miami address led them to a post office box with fake Surinamese passports for Heather and Roberto, or rather, Nicole Marie Rager and Joseph Anthony Panura. As far as investigators could tell, Heather and Roberto had never tried to pick up the passports. In fact, they suspected they'd been led to the PO box deliberately in another attention.

attempt to throw them onto the wrong trail. They were just scattering breadcrumbs wildly, like just chase this, chase this, chase this, chase this. There was just one more lead. Just past 11 a.m. on October 1st, a couple hours after Heather had driven the armored car away, an odd couple arrived at the Vegas airport for a chartered private flight to Denver. A doctor, an older man, pushed a wheelchair in which sat what appeared to be a very sick elderly woman. They only had three small suitcases with them. which didn't have to go through any security checks. If you've only flown in the post-9-11 world,

it's hard to explain just how Lucy Goosey security was on domestic flights before them, especially for private planes. This couple were already pretty memorable and only got more so when the plane landed at Denver and the pilots saw the supposed invalid old lady just trot down the stairs and jog to a waiting limousine with her doctor hurrying along behind with the wheelchair.

This, of course, was Heather and Roberta. in cunning disguises. Investigators soon traced them to a Denver motel room that Heather had rented the previous week, but they'd checked out the same day of the robbery, not long after the plane landed. All that was left there was the wheelchair. And after that, well, investigators had no idea.

Heather, Roberto, and $3 million had vanished. Time passed, and investigators grew more concerned, both that they'd never find the money, and also for Heather's safety. They had no idea whether she knew she was on the run with the convicted murderer, and there was real concern that now that he'd used her to get the money, Roberto would just kill her so that he could keep it all for himself. One investigator said he thought she was shark bait. Years passed. Heather and Roberto rose on the FBI's most wanted lists,

with Heather at one point being number three on the list, making her for a while, the most wanted woman in America. The case was featured on America's Most Wanted, Unsolved Mystery, and Dateline, the kind of media barrage that often shakes loose some leads, but all investigators heard were crickets. Roberto Solis had started prepping and convincing Heather to help him in a heist almost as soon as they hooked up. We've seen a million times just how quickly a new love interest can convince somebody, especially a vulnerable person, to do stuff they would never even have imagined doing before. Just weeks after they got together, Roberto had Heather applying for fake IDs and passports using techniques he'd learned from every 90s scumbagg's favorite reading

material, Soldier of Fortune magazine. It pops up all the time. Here it is again. By the start of 1993, she had driver's licenses for 12 different countries. Roberto had convinced her to move to Vegas by telling her he had a surefire way to beat the odds in the casinos. Hey, maybe he counted cards. I'm sure a tarot reading murderer slash poet would have fit in great with all. all the MIT math nerds. Before Roberto made his inevitable fortune, Heather would have to work to make him some money, and hey, look, he happened to have this job application

from Loomis for her to fill out. After Denver, Heather and Roberto had flown to Miami, and then to the Caribbean island of St. Martin, traveling on fake passports. St. Martin is part of the Netherlands, and from there it was relatively straightforward to move to Amsterdam, where they settled down. Not for long, though,

Heather was soon pregnant and gave birth to their son, Dylan. Roberto had already started showing his true colors as a piece of shit, surprise, surprise, and their relationship was abusive. He moved other women in with them and then got all dismissive and superior when Heather wasn't cool with this. You just got to open your mind. Enogamy is so unnatural, Heather. Jealousy is an unhealthy emotion. Like, I can just hear him. I can just hear him in my head.

I can't do. And all of this just got worse when Dylan was born. Get out of town. I figured a new baby would magically fix everything. I know. I'm as confused as you are. A couple months after Dylan's birth, Heather wanted out. She took her young son and a little bit of the heist money and walked out. She didn't take much at all. Either she didn't care about the money or she was scared to try and take more from Roberto.

So there she was, a young woman with an infant child, one of the most wanted women in the world, homeless, nearly broke, living under a false identity in a foreign country. She turned to sex work for a while, then found a gig as a hotel maid. In both jobs, she tried to avoid Americans in case they recognized her. She soon got a fake British passport and started going by the name Donna Marie Eaton, English accent and all. She soon met a guy who treated her well, and for years the two of them lived a mostly normal life. She had no more contact with Roberto, and he apparently made no effort to contact either Heather or their son. We know all these details about Heather's life because in 2005, at the age of 33, Heather

Tall Chief got in touch with a U.S. lawyer and flew to Las Vegas to turn herself in. She was tired of living a lie, tired of worrying all the time, and she wanted Dylan, who was Ted now, to have a chance at a normal life. The kid didn't even have a birth certificate. She wanted him to be able to get citizenship and move to the U.S. In her still English-tinged accent, Heather pled guilty to a raft of felonies. Her attorneys argue that there were mitigating circumstances, though. Specifically that Roberto had brainwashed her into obeying his every command through a combination of hypnotic suggestion and sex magic. All righty. Sex magic. Yep. Yep. See it all the time.

I mean, you've seen people that they're with somebody and you're like, is there dick made of meth? Like, why are you with this person? Yeah. yeah i buy the coercion i just i just wouldn't call it sex magic yeah i think it's yeah it's just what are you doing the prosecutors were skeptical they argued that heather helped with the heist for more ordinary reasons reasons as old as time greed plus wanting to please a romantic partner i'm not sure exactly how the judge weighed all this up but heather's sentencing was pretty lenient she was potentially facing up to forty years in prison and she only got five five years in prison prison is obviously not easy, but in 2010, Heather Tall Chief was released while she was still in her 30s, which isn't bad for somebody who was once the most wanted woman in America. For sure. She's working in health care again and slowly, very slowly paying back the $3 million, one small installment at a time. She's close to Dylan, who's also in the U.S. now, and apparently

working in the music business. The Netflix show Heist did a couple episodes about Heather and Roberto a few years ago, which were built around a long interview with Heather, although she requested that an actress read her words because she didn't want to blow up her career, which is understandable. It's fascinating stuff, but although Roberto Solis was clearly the driving force behind the heist, Heather was an astonishingly effective chameleon for years. I wouldn't necessarily take her word as gospel, and I wouldn't leave her alone near my wallet, either. As for Roberto Solis, he was never caught, and the stolen money was never recovered, which is infuriating. He'd be pushing 80 years old now if he's still alive about

which Heather, for one, has doubts. Three million dollars, six and a half in today's money, can keep you living large for a long time if you're careful. But of course, Roberto wasn't careful. Two armored car heists in a lifetime is two more than a careful person tends to try, so I'm guessing he burned through it all pretty fast. What happened next, we're probably never going to know. And to wrap up this episode, we're going to take a quick trip back to nerds of the 1970s. A couple of physics grad students in Santa Cruz, Dwayne Farmer, and Norm Packard dreamed of forming a science commune. Like we said, this was the 70s. But starting a science commune, whatever the shit that is, takes money, which they didn't have.

So they chose to do what any bright kid needing some quick money would do. they'd invent a computer that let them cheat at roulette. I just love these guys. The idea was to roughly predict where a roulette ball would land based on measuring the velocity of the wheel and the ball, which could be determined with two simple inputs, activated every time the ball and one part of the wheel passed a specific point. You can see how that might work.

I get it. A purpose-built, hand-coded computer, the first wearable digital computer in the world, would signal its prediction via a small, vibrating pad in time for bets to be placed. The initial plan was for the computer to be hidden in the armpit, but that came with all kinds of problems, and I'm guessing would involve the wearer flapping their arms like a seagull

to trigger the inputs, which is not exactly inconspicuous. Like, what are you doing, sir? Nothing? Nothing? Just trying to dry my armpits off a little. So instead, they made a computer that could fit in the sole of a shoe, with triggers attached to the big toes. and the vibrating pads stuck to the left side of the leg. To check their creation out, Farmer bought a roulette wheel

and set it up in his garage. And it worked. The computer couldn't predict which number the ball would land on, of course. That's impossible, but it didn't have to predict that. Even removing a small section of the wheel from the likely landing points could tip the odds in your favor. And just like in card counting, that doesn't mean you're going to win every time, but if you play long enough, you'll make a profit.

Farmer and Packer didn't make a profit, though. The shoe computer, a genuine breakthrough that's now in a museum, was temperamental, and the kids got nervous about what the casinos would do to them if they got caught. They sweated, which didn't help the computer at all. After a few exciting but frustrating casino trips, they called it quits. Farmer later recalled that he made almost enough money to pay for the roulette wheel he'd bought to test the gear. Womp, womp, wamp.

Still cool, though, you know? sometimes it's more about the challenge I guess the dream now go out there and get them folks we believe in you watch your kneecaps so those were some wild ones right campers you know we'll have another one for you next week but for now lock your doors light your lights and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire and as always we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons thank you so much to stepha lovigus christin Deff, Alexa, Elizabeth, Brea, Sam, and Barbara. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back.

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