“Did you get one of these emails?” Valentine asked.
The people on line said they had. He showed the email to the people in the seats, just to be sure. They’d all received the email as well.
The noise inside the casino was too loud to think. Valentine went back outside with his son, and stood beneath the withered palm tree. The homeless man was still sound asleep.
“Who do you think’s behind this email?” his son asked.
“Fred Friendly and his gang,” Valentine replied. “The convention and visitors bureau does email promotions to bring customers into town. Fred and his gang got their hands on the data bases, and sent this letter to them.”
“You think they’re trying to skip town, and this is their smokescreen?”
Valentine glanced at the email clutched in his hand. The letter hadn’t been written on a whim. Someone had spent time constructing it.
“I think it’s real,” Valentine said.
“You do?”
“Friendly and his gang have a score to settle with Governor Smoltz. I’m guessing they rigged a bunch of video poker machines to pay off jackpots, and planned to send out that e-mail if the law ever caught up to them. When they heard that Bill ordered the Universal slot machines taken out of commission, they put the plan into effect.”
Valentine’s cell phone was vibrating. It was Bill, and he answered it.
“Bronco’s gone,” Bill said.
“Forget Bronco,” Valentine said. “I’ve got some really bad news for you.”
Chapter 55
Bill was at the other end of Fremont Street. Normally, it would have taken two minutes for him to walk to the sidewalk outside of Fitzgerald’s casino where Valentine and Gerry were standing. Because of the crowds, it took ten minutes.
Bill looked frustrated and angry when he arrived. Bronco was in the wind, and their chances of now finding him were slim. Valentine didn’t think his news would make Bill feel any better, and showed him the email. Then, he explained what Friendly and his gang were up to. When he was finished, a wall of resolution rose in Bill’s face.
“That isn’t possible, Tony.”
“Why not?”
“Because I personally worked on a project to upgrade the security of every video poker machine in Nevada,” Bill said. “This is one game which can’t be scammed.”
“You’re sure about that.”
“Damn straight I am. I’d bet my paycheck on it.”
Gerry started coughing. It wasn’t a natural sounding cough, and Valentine quizzed him with a glance. “What’s the matter?”
“Bill’s wrong,” his son said. “Video poker machines can be scammed.”
“They can?”
In a quiet voice, Gerry said, “Yeah. I helped scam one.”
Valentine stared long and hard at his son. There was a streak of gray hair on the back of Gerry’s head, just like his own. They were alike in so many ways, yet there were times that he felt he hardly knew his son at all.
“Go on,” Valentine said.
“This was back when I was running the bar in Brooklyn. This guy came in one day, a client of mine.” He glanced at Bill. “I used to be a bookie.”
“So I’ve heard,” Bill said.
“Anyway, this guy owed me five grand from some football games he bet on. He had this thing about the Jets, and their quarterback was having a lousy year—
“Get on with it,” Valentine said.
“Sorry. So, this guy offers me a deal. He says his kid brother, who’s a computer wiz, knows how to scam a video poker machine in Atlantic City. If I play the machine, I can win my five grand back. I told him I wanted to know how his kid brother had scammed the machine. You know, just to be sure that it couldn’t be traced back to me.”
Valentine’s face felt like a four-alarm fire. He’d still been working for the Atlantic City police department when Gerry had his bar, which meant that his son had scammed an Atlantic City casino while he was still policing them. He knew Gerry had balls; he just hadn’t known how enormous they were.
“So the guy brings his kid brother into the bar the next day,” Gerry went on. “The kid explains how he got a video poker machine for Christmas. He analyzed the machine with his computer, and discovered that it used something called a random function to shuffle its internal deck of cards. This random function created different “seeds” which insured that the cards were always different.”
Valentine had little experience with video poker machines because the belief in the industry had been that no one had ever successfully scammed one. Looking at Bill, he said, “This make sense to you?”
Bill nodded. “Random functions generate starting values, which are called seeds. The seeds are randomly changed to insure a fair game.”
“Exactly,” Gerry said. “The kid discovered that his game used the machine’s internal clock to create seeds. When he hit the start button, the random function looked at the number of milliseconds which had elapsed since 12:00 A.M., and used that number to create the seed. Since there are eighty-six million milliseconds each day, the seed should have been random. Only it wasn’t, because the kid could generate the
“How did this translate to you beating a video-poker machine in Atlantic City?” Valentine said. “The kid was playing a game, for Christ’s sake.”
“The kid’s game was manufactured by a company that made casino video poker games,” Gerry explained. “He told his brother, and his brother went to Atlantic City, and played one of the company’s real games. Guess what? The same cards came out as his brother’s game at home. They were generating the same seeds.”
Bill crossed his arms. “Gerry, what you just described is ancient history. Remember what I told you before, about my being involved in updating the machines? We discovered that flaw, and made the manufacturers stop using internal clocks.”
“But what if a company
“Like Universal did when it used the same fingerprint on its slot machines,” Valentine said.
“Exactly,” Gerry said. “And Fred Friendly’s gang discovered the flaw. But instead of making the company update the machines, they keep it a secret, just waiting for the day when they knew they could screw the casinos with it.”
Valentine sensed where his son was headed. “If that was true, it would mean that those video poker machines could be scammed if a player played at a certain time, and a certain way. Just like the e-mail is telling them.”
Bill’s face had turned ashen, and he clenched both his hands into fists. Out on the boulevard, traffic had gotten worse, the angry blare of car horns echoing across town. “How far are Fred Friendly’s offices from here?” Valentine asked.
“A couple of miles,” Bill said.
“We need to pay them a visit.”
