Why I finally decided to be a YouTuber!

For the past few years, my wife, Ingrid, has been nudging me, quite annoyingly, to start up a YouTube channel and begin posting videos on my entire life story cheating casinos. As incredible as that life has been, I repeatedly balked at doing that since, number one: I didn’t see myself at 70 years old becoming a YouTuber, and two: I know how extraordinarily difficult it is to get any meaningful number of followers. She continued prodding me, telling me that everyone would love my stories and it would only take five years or so to build up a big following. I had to laugh and riposte, “Five years! Honey, I don’t know if I’ve got five years!” Well, she may have overlooked that as I am twice her age!

She finally backed off, but then something happened that changed my mind.?

Last June, I got an email from Business Insider (BI), a multi-national financial and business news website, asking me to do a video interview for their online program How Crime Works. I quickly dismissed it as I get these types of requests on a weekly basis but from mostly minor outlets, and as I’ve been so busy lately organizing conferences and doing on-property table games protection training, frankly, I just didn’t have the time to do stuff that doesn’t benefit me or pay for my time.?

But then, just on a whim, I searched “Business Insider: How Crime Works.” I’d vaguely heard of Business Insider, but then when I landed on the site, I saw it had 9 million followers! Suddenly, my wife’s words rung in my ears, “Everyone would love your stories…”?

A week later, I was on a plane to L.A. to do the shoot. And the whole way there and back, I was thinking of becoming a YouTuber! The BI producer told me the video would be published in 3 weeks. So, I told Ingrid on the plane that we’re not flying back to Peru, where we live, but instead we’re heading to Las Vegas! We’re gonna start filming content about my life stories inside the casinos! I meant, literally, inside the casinos. We would go inside the Strip casinos, sit at slot machines and in sportsbooks, and create the video content for a new YouTube channel.

Well, Ingrid almost jumped out of the plane! She looked at me in utter surprise. I had resisted her wishes to do just that for years, and suddenly now I was telling her we were dropping everything to go spend a few months filming video content in Vegas…or at least a few weeks to start. I wanted her to have our new YouTube channel launched with several videos already on it by the time BI published my interview.

So, we arrived in Vegas and began filming. First, we decided to call the new YouTube channel “Richard’s Incredible Casino Stories.” Then we began filming content. The first take was shot, of course, at the famous “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign at the south end of the Strip. And then, at my behest, we continued filming in a frenzy-like fashion as if each day was our last day on earth. I started off a bit slow and had to do literally hundreds of retakes, but then it began getting better—and fast! Soon, the words were rolling off my brain so fast that my mouth had trouble keeping up, and I began to love doing it. And I was doing it with virtually zero preparation. I′ve always loved to tell war stories, and I just got to doing exactly that. The hardest, but also most enjoyable part of it, was as I was talking, more related stories were popping into my head, and I had to weave parts of those into the story I was in the process of telling. So, at times it got messy and we had to do tons of editing, but I think the result of the videos is captivating enough because the stories are so damn good. Like I’ve said before, Hollywood screenwriters could never make up the stuff that actually happened to me and the stuff that I made happen in and around the casino-grifting life.

So, all was off and running, and I was going to be a YouTuber! And Ingrid would be loving it!

But then…

I got an email from the BI producer. They loved the video and couldn’t wait to publish it, and I knew a “but” was coming in the coming lines. That “but” turned out to be: that before they could publish it, they needed confirmation from the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) that I was who I said I was and did what I said I did.

Well, for sure, at that moment, I knew they weren’t publishing my interview in 3 weeks, and I also knew that it was unlikely that the NGCB was going to cooperate with such a request, regardless of the fact that its ex-Enforcement Division Chief James Taylor was a featured speaker at my first Global Table Games Protection Conference in 2022.

But I tried anyway. After several back-and-forth conversations with the Board’s administrators, they said they could not comply with my request. When I asked why not, the woman on the phone said because I’d never been arrested for a gaming crime!?

I went nuts inside my brain! Here is the NGCB telling me that had I gotten arrested, they could release that info and attest to all they knew about what I’d done for 25 years in the State of Nevada’s casinos. But since I hadn’t been, they had to keep it all secret.

So, out of mocking desperation, I cracked to the administrator I was speaking with, “If I go out and do a monster cheat move right now and get caught and arrested, would the Board be able to attest to my bona fides?”

Well, the woman on the line didn’t think it was too funny, and she apologized that the Board could not help.

So, I told the BI producer and asked if there were any other sources they would accept bona fide verifications from. I mentioned Griffin Investigations (GI), the private investigations firm whose agents followed me around Vegas for more than two decades. They knew me quite well, and I had already appeared on TV shows with its former prime field agent Andy Anderson, so that shouldn’t be a problem, I thought. Surely, they would have plenty of documented info on me, including my entry-page in their infamous Griffin Mug Book.

So, I called Paula Ludwig, the President of GI who also attended one of my Vegas game protection conferences. I asked her if she could make a copy of my file and send it to the BI producer. Her response jolted me, and let me know that suddenly my video interview with BI might never see the light of day. She said that since GI had gone digital back in 2010, all their paper records had been destroyed, and since I was considered “inactive” for a long period of time, and since she knew of my conversion to a reputable game protection consultant working with the gaming industry, I was never re-entered into their digital database. Then I asked her about Andy Anderson, whom I was sure would have his old files on me. After all, he was one of the creators of the Biometrica casino-undesirables database. But Paula’s response mentioned the “late Andy Anderson,” so now GI was another dead end.

Wow! It was now becoming clear that I was going to have a big problem coming up with some verifiable bona fides.

In the meantime, Ingrid and I continued filming content, going into every Strip casino to record segments. Within a month, we had 10 hours of footage of me telling my life story and cheating-career in casinos, and we were just getting started! For me, telling the stories was addictive. I actually couldn’t get enough of doing it!

So, with strained enthusiasm, I asked the GI producer if I obtained some surveillance flyers or alerts on my activity from back in the day, would that suffice? And she said yes, so I still had hope.

I began contacting surveillance directors and even gaming commission authorities from various states who were LinkedIn contacts. And like a broken record, they all said the same thing, “We went digital years ago and you are not in any of our current databases.” I then asked them if they had copies of any of the old Griffin mug book volumes. Surely someone would have one with my photo and description/MO as I had to have been in every volume Griffin published over two decades. Well, some of the surveillance people said they’d check and see, but most never got back to me, and those who did said they couldn’t find anything or just couldn’t give it to me.

So, now it was getting quite frustrating. I had by then recorded more than 20 hours of footage on my casino-cheating career, and my present career as a game protection consultant/trainer and industry conference organizer, but was still getting nowhere as far as a publication date for my BI interview.?

Imagine that! I am widely considered the best professional casino cheat in history, yet I had no documented proof that I ever cheated a legitimate casino out of $5 anywhere in the world! Man, was this a bummer. After all the time and effort my wife and I had put into recording those videos…Forget about the number of hours of footage we had accumulated. In terms of total time choosing and preparing locations, shooting and editing, several hundred work hours now seemed to be for naught.

How ironic! It was like Richard Marcus never really existed in the casino-cheating world. One surveillance director friend of mine cracked, “Hey, Richard, why don’t you get back into cheating? You could start with a clean slate and make millions, and prove to the world again that you were the best casino cheat ever!” I told him that wasn’t a bad idea, and we shared a big laugh but I was dying inside.

But the best was yet to come…in terms of ironies, that is.

The greatest irony of all of this came on a Teams Meeting call I was on with Ted Whiting, the Corporate VP of Surveillance for Mirage Resorts International and grand speaker at my recent London Tables Games and Game Protection Conference. The call was to discuss the logistics of bringing Ted to London, but first Ted informed me that he had some news for me.

Maybe he was about to tell me he came across some old alerts on me or he had an old Griffin mug book with me in it! My hopes soared!?

But then I remembered that I had never asked Ted if he had anything related to my cheating career. So, I asked him to lay whatever news he had on me.

He laid it on me: I was recently spotted by Facial Recognition sitting next to a much younger woman at a bank of slot machines at one of the MGM Las Vegas properties…and the woman with me was holding a smart phone, which we all know is the major weapon in a professional slot cheat’s attack arsenal!!

So, I couldn’t get a copy of a single flyer or alert from 25 years of cheating, but now there’s a new alert on me being inside a casino with a woman holding a camera! Would BI accept that as a bona fide? lol

Surely, Ted wanted to know what the hell I was doing there lol, and who the woman next to me was! This happened just a month before Ted was scheduled to speak at my London conference, and he let me know that my being observed sitting in front of a slot machine with a woman holding a camera set off a minor panic in Las Vegas surveillance departments!

Holy f------ s---! Not only was I about to lose out on seeing that BI video published, I was about to lose Ted Whiting as a speaker, unless I came up with something believable to tell him. Well, I simply told him the truth. The young woman was my wife and we were there filming content for my upcoming YouTube channel featuring the stories of my casino-cheating career.?

I did reassure Ted that at 70 years old, I wasn’t trading my current GP consulting/training career in for a new start with the Russian slot machine cheat-gangs led by “Alex.” Ted was cool about it and wished me luck.

And finally, after 6 months of going back and forth with BI trying to get them to publish the video interview, I got some of that luck. The BI producer was able to get credible documentation on my career from an unnamed source, and I did not want to put pressure him and ask who it was. I figured it had to come from a serious and reputable source, so perhaps it was the FBI giving them the goods on me via the Freedom of Information Act.

Well, to make this incredibly long story a little less long, the BI video, as you see in the photo, was published on December 21st. Ingrid was right. A lot of people are loving my story, and they’re getting just a tiny piece of it on the video. In its first two weeks, it’s already gotten close to a million views and 10,000 likes! I imagine it will reach at least three or four million views and 25,000 likes within a month or two. The video is well done, however, note that the 25M earnings figure stated at the beginning is an estimate of the total gross amount before expenses with the net divided 4 ways, so my personal earnings were a small fraction of that. Of course, no one not familiar with the intricacies of professional casino-cheating can properly edit my story.?

So now is the time for me to do it myself!

I am thrilled to announce that I am now officially a YouTuber, perhaps one of the oldest people ever to become one. My new YouTube Channel @richardmarcuscasinos was launched two months ago, although I have not announced it until now. I am telling my story in short 3 to 5 minute videos, and as of right now, we have more than 30 hours of content in the bank. These videos are filled with incredible and entertaining stories. If you’ve read my books American Roulette or The Great Casino Heist, you will like these videos even more because I am talking directly to you on them, telling the stories with personality that you cannot feel in print. And, to boot, every single outrageous casino-cheating and related story of my career is included. And we are not done filming yet. We’re currently shooting segments on my post-cheating career, that being the book-writing, keynoting the World Game Protection Conference in 2007, then my becoming a game protection trainer and consultant, and finally the organizer of the best Table Games and Game Protection conference on Earth, the American Table Games and Surveillance Conference, this February 24-26 at the Hard Rock Casino in Tulsa, Oklahoma…

Oh, I left out one thing: Please subscribe to my new YouTube channel: @richardmarcuscasinos