marlboro

Those of you who often read my blog or surf my website probably know about the famous French cheap marlboro Scam that happened at the Casino Deauville in 1973 and is featured on my Scam of the Month page. I had thought that this great scam would surely be the one and only major casino scam pulled off with a pack of cigarettes! I was right–until last week, that is. In one of the major casinos in Macao (I don’t know which one because I can’t read the Chinese from the newswire), a doozy of a casino scam was pulled off using a pack of cigarettes–and yes they were Marlboros! Just like in the French Cigarette Scam 35 years ago. This time it happened in the high rollers VIP Baccarat Room. A certain Chinese ultra-high roller (UHR) was wagering HK$400,000 (Hong Kong Dollars) per hand. That’s approximately US$52,000. Two skilled casino cheats posing as high rollers sat on either side of the UHR, also betting high, albeit much less than he. When the UHR got on the Bank and hit a hot streak, the two casino cheats began taking turns tapping his growing stacks of HK$100,000 chips (US$13,000) with their respective cigarette packs in a gesture of good luck. The UHR seemed to like the gesture as his mountain of chips kept getting higher and higher each time they tapped it–although not as high as it should have! That’s because on the bottom edge of the cheats’ cigarette packs there was double sided tape that was extremely adhesive. Each time one of the cheats tapped the UHR’s stacks of $13,000 chips, the top chip in the stack found itself stuck to the bottom of the cigarette pack and was immediately peeled off and transferred into one of the cheats’ pockets!

Add to those conditions the presence of dry fuel — everything from desert bushes and trees to combustible materials in buildings — and you have the makings of a dangerous, perhaps tragic, fire. On March 16, a brush fire in Socorro spread quickly, destroying three homes and damaging five others. County Judge Anthony Cobos said, "With the high winds and the incident we had last week in Socorro, I think that it (ban on burning) is a precaution we should take." But it’s not just people burning off weeds or homeowners burning trash who need to be careful. Someone mindlessly throwing away a still-smoldering cigarette butt can also start a fire. All that has to happen is for the winston cigarettes to fall in some dry weeds, be encouraged by a little breeze, and there you have a brush fire. Or maybe someone’s cooking out and the wind blows a few embers into the brush, or you dump burning embers into a trash can or just out in the desert. Or maybe someone thinks, "It won’t hurt just to burn a few little weeds."