Dealer Charged with Cheating

00:20
05 Nov

A poker dealer from Cleveland has been indicted on charges of ‘gambling’ after being accused of hiding a playing card up his sleeve at the Horseshoe Casino.

The indictment by a Cuyahoga County grand jury claims that dealer Robert D. Brown "knowingly or intentionally cheated while dealing at the casino on Sept. 6," after agents from the Ohio Casino Control Commission were alerted to a card missing from the automatic shuffler.

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The investigators then claim that after a search of the shuffler and the surrounding table proved negative, the card was found hidden up Brown’s shirt-sleeve. Brown himself claimed in an interview with Lorrie Taylor of Cleveland’s Fox News 8 that he himself alerted the floor-manager to the missing card.

However, prosecutors claim that they have video evidence which shows Brown intentionally pushing the card up his sleeve, which differs from Brown’s assertion that it was “a fluke” occurrence.

I don’t even know where it was but they’re saying it was up my sleeve and it fell out.”;

The Ohio Casino Control Commission has not yet stated what they suspect Brown’s reasons for the card being up his sleeve were, but the Horseshoe Casino has suspended the 57-year old dealer from Sagamore Hills pending an investigation and his scheduled court appearance on November 13th.

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The poker world regularly sees such strange cases, with last week’s report on Christian Lusardi describing how the poker pro was jailed for five years after being found guilty of using counterfeit chips at the 2014 Borgata Winter Open in Atlantic City.

The 43-year old had introduced $800,000 of fake chips into the $2million guaranteed event, and attempted to hide the evidence by flushing them down the Harrah Hotel Casino’s toilets, damaging the pipes in the process.

The event had to be canceled in its later stages because of Lusardi’s handiwork, which later saw him plead guilty to charges of 2nd-degree trademark counterfeiting and 3rd-degree criminal mischief.

His five-year sentence was in addition to a $463,540 fine imposed as costs to the Borgata for the cancellation of the event plus $9455 damages to the pipe system. In a separate court case he received another 5 –year sentence for his part in an international DVD-counterfeiting operation.