More light has been shed on the infamous $32m heist pulled off by a dastardly duo at a Crown Resorts casino in 2013.
In March 2013, reports spread that Crown Melbourne had fallen victim to a scam perpetrated by a high roller who’d colluded with a Crown staffer who liaised with the casino’s VIP clientele. The scam reportedly involved tapping into the VIP room’s video surveillance in order to alert the gambler as to what cards were coming out of the dealer’s shoe.
On Saturday, Fairfax Media reported that the high roller at the center of the controversy was James Manning, a New Zealand businessman. During Manning’s hot streak in the Crown Melbourne VIP room, eight particular hands caught the interest of Crown security, due to what an unidentified Crown exec called “very, very suspicious” factors.
Manning “bet against the odds and won” all of the eight suspicious hands, leading Crown staff to figure out something was amiss. Eventually, they concluded that their surveillance had been compromised and that the VIP services manager who’d recruited Manning was signaling to indicate which way the high roller should bet.
Manning, who was staying with his family at a comped villa at Crown Towers, was rousted from his bed in the middle of the night and evicted from the premises. The “majority” of the $32m had yet to be transferred out of the casino’s accounts, so Crown opted not to press charges, settling for banning Manning from darkening any Crown casino’s door in future.
Complicating matters, Crown had been hyping Manning as the high roller who’d agreed to purchase a $12,500 cocktail that Crown was hoping would set a Guinness world record for the priciest drink ever sold. The property’s Club 23 bar had scheduled a major media event at which Manning would pay for and consume the drink, which contained shots from an 1858 bottle of cognac.
Left in a lurch by Manning’s eviction, Crown eventually struck a deal with Giang Nguyen, a high rolling regular at the casino who happened to be on the property at the time. Nguyen agreed to fork over the money and sip the drink, provided Crown reimbursed him once the cameras had stopped rolling. “The whole thing was fake,” according to an anonymous Crown employee, yet the Guinness record still stands. Great, next they’ll tell that the Indian man’s four foot fingernails were actually Lee Press-Ons.
