The crime fighters who have spent their careers battling casino cheats, illegal gambling, and even fair playing advantage gamblers are all fodder for lively stories.

Eliot Ness

Eliot Ness is perhaps one of the most familiar crime fighting figures associated with the heyday of the Chicago mob scene. Born in Chicago in 1903, Ness went on to study criminology. He was hired to be part of the Chicago Prohibition Bureau during the late 1920s. Chicago during the Prohibition years was a corrupt marriage between crooked politicians, dirty cops and the Mafia, led by the infamous and cruel Al Capone.

Nearly the entire Chicago police force was dirty, especially the Prohibition Bureau. Ness was recognized for his honesty and culled from the masses. Officials put Ness in charge of assembling a team of honest men in the Bureau to be responsible for breaking Capone’s mob habits, most notably, bootlegging and illegal gambling. Capone had risen to such power that he was virtually unbothered by the law. He ran stills, built breweries and ran illegal gambling joints, along with staging cruel and brutal assassinations of his opponents.

By the late 1920’s, Ness’s team had been sufficiently effective in gathering evidence and disabling Capone’s businesses that legal charges could be brought against Capone, especially for his blatant tax evasion. Capone was eventually sent to jail for a mere eleven years for tax evasion; however, he succumbed to syphilis while there.

Ness went on to publish his book, The Untouchables, which documented his years fighting Al Capone.

Casino Investigators

How do casinos keep track of criminals? Today, crime fighting on the casino floor is big business and there is big money at stake. Card sharks and cheats continue to perfect ways to evade casino “eyes.”

One of the best known investigation firms representing the interests of many of the casinos is Griffin Investigations. Begun by Beverly Griffin in the late 1960s, she sought to fill a niche in a market that was requiring increasing levels of security. She created systems to monitor cheats and card counters who were “stealing” millions from her clients, annually.

The Griffin, as it has come to be known, came into prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with the meteoric and legendary appearances of the Hyland Team and the MIT Blackjack Team, both of whom won millions from casino blackjack tables with their expert card counting techniques. The business of the Hyland and MIT groups inspired newer and more high tech means of combating card counters and advantage players at the casino tables.