Seattle Weekly: Mayor's son falls to casino scam

Thursday, August 23, 2007

"On a recent July evening, gamblers at the Nooksack River Casino heard an odd thing: A casino employee begging for somebody to win.

The game was "Whirlwind of Cash." It's a plastic tube filled with floating money that people are supposed to snatch out of the air. A raffle to determine who steps into the tube had been going on, unsuccessfully, for at least 15 minutes, but everyone who signed up seemed to have left. "Jim Thomas!" yelled the frustrated operator, adding, "I'd almost settle for somebody with those initials."

Next it's George, as in, "Is there any George?" A few more nonhits and gamblers were treated to this pathetic entreaty: "Please make some noise, somebody!"

The Sack (as some locals call it) is a bit of a drive out into the country, about 25 minutes from Bellingham down some gnarly tribal roads to the town of Deming. Lights shoot up from utter darkness like a crashed UFO in a B movie. Seeing as Deming had a population of 210 in the year 2000, according to the U.S. Census, there weren't many local players there that night. There weren't many players at all. The mini-baccarat table was shut down due to lack of interest. A dealer explained that it often operates during the day, when Canadians visit.

Slot machines occupy a majority of the floor space, and a few people were planted in front of them wearing the bemused mugs of terminal gambling addicts. They were monitored by a multiplicity of cameras and the ceiling-mounted sculptures of salmon. At the table-games area, mostly young dealers in salmon-colored uniforms slipped cards to mostly old, sometimes tattooed and leathery, players. The felt was worn and faded. A dealer accidentally knocked a chip into the hand of a player, who made a play at keeping it.

The Sack doesn't look like it could afford to lose $90,000. Yet according to federal indictments, that's what happened over four nights of play in October 2005, when the casino was descended on by the largest card-cheating ring ever prosecuted by the federal government—a megacorp of chicanery that, prosecutors say, employed more than two dozen people and stole as much as $20 million from nearly 20 gaming establishments targeted across North America. Among the cogs in this wheel of corruption, according to the government, was 26-year-old Jacob Nickels, son of Seattle's mayor. And the method of choice was one of the simplest tricks in existence: the false shuffle, aka the shank shuffle, aka the sky shuffle—or at any rate, a funny shuffle known to teenage magicians round the world."

Get the Story:
The Casino, the Mayor's Son, and the Shuffle That May Have Suckered Them Both (Seattle Weekly 8/23)