In what has been called the greatest series of heists since “my son Jimmy got his hands on my credit card when he was five,” a string of small, family owned-and-operated casinos were taken for a ride by a grifter calling himself John Doe.
“Mr. Doe was such a nice, young man,” Mrs.
Dorothy Longoria-Parker told the police in her statement.
“The way he played the cards, though, I’d never seen anybody beat my Ed in our 53 years of running the Neat-o Casino!
” Mrs. Longoria-Parker listed her losses as $2,000 and her grandmother’s antique stovetop, but had not realized that she had been duped by the same con-man who has stolen from 43 “mom-and-pop” casinos up and down the 101.
All of the casinos fell for Doe’s classic M.
O.: the “three-toed banshee.” Doe approaches the casino as an unassuming gambler who then proceeds to pull wads of cash from his pocket as the stakes get higher. Most of the time, these mom-and-pop casinos can’t catch his stealthy updates of the deck’s current value hidden on his hairy forearm.
While some casinos report Doe as a Milwaukee businessman up in the bay area for the weekend, others say that he was instead a Texas oilman whose wife had recently left him. Police are encouraging the public to report everyone who matches his physical description to the local authorities: “tall and white.”
