In a dream, Tommy discovered the answer. He remembered, “I’m viewing myself from behind, and I hold in my hand.” He had been looking for a technique to trick the newest slot machines for the entire year 1990. He required a new instrument to replace the unreliable old one that had put him in jail. He worked on a Fortune One video poker machine all day and night in his apartment in Las Vegas. But no matter what he did, a puzzle inside the unit would prevent him from succeeding.
A flexible piece of metal jammed at the top and some piano wire materialized in the depths of sleep, providing the solution in its wonderful simplicity. The History Channel quoted him as saying, “I woke up, actually got out of bed, and went and built it.” The Monkey Paw was Tommy’s solution.
In 1980, Tommy Glenn Carmichael was only a routine repairman who hustled pool when a friend dropped by Ace TV Sales and Service in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Nothing about the thirty-year-old hinted that he would one day rank among the most creative cheaters in gambling history, despite having minor drug offenses and some adolescent mischief on his criminal record.
A Bally’s slot machine and a cheating tool is known as the top-bottom joint were among the things Carmichael’s pal had brought along. Carmichael responded simply, “We got to messing about,” when asked how his multi-million dollar illegal enterprise began that day.
With a top-bottom joint, it was difficult to initiate a payout. The “bottom” of the tool was made of a piece of the guitar string. It entered the machine’s left corner and pressed against the circuit board, sending low-wattage energy through the apparatus. A piece of metal with a nine-like curvature made up the “top” portion. After being inserted into the coin slot, it created a circuit that was strong enough to hot-wire the coin hopper.
Carmichael closed his repair business and relocated to Las Vegas after sensing his fate, anxious to use the top-bottom joint. After his initial trial, he left with around $35 in nickels—chump change compared to what would follow, but plenty to prove that he was onto something significant. He later told the Associated Press, “You are thinking you will have yachts and cars. The American Dream, you know.
On July 4, 1985, that dream came to an end. Carmichael was playing slots at Denny’s close to the Strip after a couple of years of success with the top-bottom joint when police shoved him against the wall and found the contraption. He was detained, found guilty, and imprisoned.
He didn’t feel fear, though. He was certain he’d found his purpose. Tommy wanted to remake himself as Las Vegas’s slot machine expert once he was out.
Slot machines had advanced significantly since their nickel-plated, side-handled beginnings when Carmichael was detained in 1985. German mechanics created the first slot machines in San Francisco in the early 1870s. Still, it wasn’t until the turn of the century that the Liberty Bell machine set the standard with its three reels of rotating lucky symbols like bells, horseshoes, and hearts.
Despite gaining popularity during Prohibition, slots took a while to take over casino floors. Slots were little more than a pull of the lever of chance with minimal payouts, in contrast to the skillful, high-stakes action of table games like poker and blackjack. The machines were considered the domain of bored wives passing the time while their husbands bet the farm, and they were confined to the edge of the casino floor. The machines suffered from “the Rodney Dangerfield syndrome,” according to a vice president of an Atlantic City casino, where they couldn’t receive any respect.
When Bally Manufacturing unveiled the Money Honey, widely regarded as the first modern slot machine, this started to alter in 1963. The front-light electricity and sound effects with The Money Honey gave the play some zip. However, the 2,500-coin hopper was more significant. Before the Money Honey, if a player won the jackpot, they had to wait for a casino employee to verify the victory and give them the payment. This “didn’t only slow down play, it kind of indicated closure, an end to the game,” according to casino owner Warren Butcher, “it tempted the consumer to halt play and walk out the door with his winnings.”
However, the likelihood that the player would keep playing their winnings back into the machine rose with a 2,500-coin hopper. Play became constant and never-ending. The Money Honey sent the sector on a famous path that, some 40 years later, inspired a Canadian company to target slot machine addicts who wouldn’t stop playing with adult diapers. Slot machines out-earned table games in Las Vegas casinos in 1981, while Atlantic City casinos saw a similar situation in 1984.
Every stage of the development of the slot machine sparked corresponding creativity among cheaters. Nickels and coins on strings were used as the starting point. It used to be possible to put laundry detergent in the slot instead of cash (how someone figured this out is anyone’s guess), or you could give the arms an awkward tug just in time to clog the gears. Then a series of increasingly complex instruments appeared, like Jenny’s Shaker, which allowed you to move the reels, and the Shim, which could control Mills and Buckley machines.
It was a never-ending arms competition with the producers. Security was one step ahead as soon as a cheating device gained mainstream. When Tommy Carmichael was arrested in Denny’s, the top-bottom joint, which had initially served as inspiration for him, was considered outdated. He explained, “I was playing a dinosaur. After serving his time in prison, slot cheats anticipated the next innovation in 1990.
Tommy’s Monkey Paw, so named because of its inviting, wedged tip, slid into the payout chute and activated a microswitch, emptying the hopper. It was a resounding success. Carmichael had received what he had prayed for, which was fantastic, so this wasn’t the cursed monkey’s paw from W.W. Jacobs’ short story. He estimated that he typically made $1,000 per hour and marveled, “You could leave an entire room unoccupied.” “You have a credit card that never expires.”
However, success in the slot cheat industry is never lasting. The Monkey Paw became obsolete less than two years after it was created due to recent advancements in security. The lasting impact of The Monkey Paw lay more in the confidence Tommy gained from reading it. Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I shall move the earth, ” said Archimedes. Tommy Carmichael said, “Give me a slot machine, and I’ll defeat it,” at the end of the nineties.
Tommy was browsing the slots maker International Game Technology’s (IGT) showroom in 1992 while posing as a customer. He had to comprehend the issues The Monkey Paw was having. To his surprise, the engineer complied when he requested to see inside one of the devices. Eureka. Tommy claimed, “I knew how to beat it the second he opened it up.
The new machines used electrical sensors to track how many coins were being dispensed by the hopper. The “light wand,” Tommy’s new invention, was made out of a camera battery and the tiny light bulb. The sensor in the machine was rendered blind by the light wand when it was flashed up into it, making it unaware of how many coins were being dispensed. Let’s say you put $100 into the machine and asked for your input to be cashed out. Whatever you had the nerve to accept, that hundred would instantly turn into two, then three, with the wave of a light wand.
It was Tommy’s most disastrous creation to date. Some slot cheats claimed they could make $10,000 a day with the light wand, which only cost $2.50 to produce. The gadget became so commonplace that gambling expert Jason England termed the middle of the 1990s the “light wand period.” According to England, who put the cost of the damage in the high hundreds of millions, “it was probably the gadget that pulled more money out of the industry than any other.”
Tommy had, at last, accomplished his American Dream. He dated a topless dancer, owned a home in Rancho Bel Air, and drove a Jaguar XJ6. He also promptly filed his taxes. He would defraud casinos in Connecticut, Colorado, and Louisiana while traveling about in a mobile home. Tommy took seven cruises in six months in 1995, robbing slots all over the tropics while taking a chance on a walk on the plank.
His technique was now flawless. He always collaborated with a group of “shades,” using them to circumvent security, and he scrupulously followed advancements in technology. Tommy responded to the challenge in a little under an hour with “the hanger” after IGT installed the Actuator Arm to oppose the light wand. At his peak as an artist, he was at the height of his abilities: “I honestly believed they couldn’t make one I couldn’t beat.”
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Slot cheats are unusually innocent, almost admirable individuals, despite lacking the romanticism of card sharps or the bizarre ingenuity of card counters. Cheating at table games involves stealing money from other gamblers. The casino is your only opponent if you cheat at the slots, though. Slot machines are known as “one-armed bandits” for a reason: humans have an innate awareness that their winnings are dishonestly obtained. So, like Omar Little in The Wire, the slot machine thief only takes filthy money. Tommy said, “I wasn’t robbing someone at the family store. It was constantly aimed at the casinos. Because of how plausible it occasionally sounded, one well-known cheater by the name of Timothy John Childs once claimed to be a “slot cheat” on a loan application.
However, the life of a slot machine thief was fraught with danger. When Tommy was caught using a second-generation light wand at Circus Circus in 1996, his business started to fall apart. Although the accusations were dropped, Tommy continued to show up on law enforcement’s radar. He was detained once more in Laughlin, Nevada, in 1998. He was concocting his most ambitious invention at the time. He claimed that “The Tongue” would allow him to steal around $2,000 per second by loading up machines with credits and then cashing out on the Ted Schillinger-produced television program Breaking Vegas, which was scripted by Peter Fruchtman. The idea was to amass a fortune and retire.
It was discovered that government wiretaps had been recording Tommy and his crew discussing The Tongue when he was captured again in Atlantic City in 1999. He pleaded guilty to running an illegal gambling operation in 2001 and was sentenced to eleven months in jail. Over $5 million in thefts were allegedly committed by his team. Even with all of that, Tommy most likely would have returned to life after becoming hypnotically pulled to the machine’s glittering user interface as so many other gamblers do. The Black Book, however, followed.
The Black Book was purportedly designed in 1960 to keep organized crime out of the Nevada gaming sector. It is illegal for you to enter a casino if your name is listed there. It has always been arbitrary and even hypocritical how people are chosen to be included. Not everyone who might have posed a major threat to gaming at the time was listed in the Black Book, according to Ronald Farrell and Carole Case in The Black Book and the Mob: The Untold Story of the Control of Nevada’s Casinos. This would have been difficult considering the extensive history of illegal gambling and bootlegging among early investors in Las Vegas. The Black Book has instead always been used to target particular groups and tip the scales of power. One thing is certain: it’s nearly difficult to escape once you’re inside.
Tommy didn’t argue when he learned that he would be mentioned in the book. It’s a kangaroo court, he declared, and there is no way to win. His home and vehicle had already been lost. He moved back to Tulsa after resigning. It was the end of the American Dream.
But the Strip’s Edison had one final flash of brilliance. Tommy created “The Protector,” a slot machine anti-cheating mechanism, claiming he had a change of heart and wanted to “correct a wrong.” The Protector was the one answer he’d always feared the manufacturers would find, according to his estimation of his responsibility for 90% of cheating devices at the time. The Protector caused the machine to shut down whenever any kind of light was present inside. Tommy sold his patent in 2002, and iGames Entertainment acquired it as a result. The gadget was purchased by Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines for use in its casinos after being given the go-ahead by Nevada regulators.
The unconscious of the slot machine industry, however, has never stopped being haunted by Carmichael, who passed away in 2019 and is survived by his two dogs, Mojo and Scochie. The Nevada Gaming Commission opened an investigation into the validity of the anti-cheating tool used by iGames Entertainment after learning that Carmichael had created it. There is little doubt in our minds that Tommy Carmichael has the expertise and skills to reprogram it, according to one Gaming Control Board member.