Aces Introduction
I have been driving all day to arrive at this destination. Truth be told, I need to get out and stretch.
But at the same time, I am almost at Aces, this new Casino resort built recently. This will be its grand opening.
I am driving from Las Vegas, on highway 93, so I have been in the car for over 8 hours, since 7:30 AM this morning. Give or take an occasional bathroom break, stretch break and a stop for lunch. Most of the time I have been listening to hip hop or Jazz to keep me focused.
The car I am driving is a used mercedes-amg s63.
The S 63 had been an LVMPD seizure, some Angel’'s prize before he went away to serve a life sentence for murder. I’d picked it up for pennies at a city auction and brought it to a friend who works as a Mechanic for the house to get it operational.
Because I am operating under a false name and identity, my car has been patched up and repaired to the top standard. It needs to be for my cover.
So I make the decision to keep driving to Aces instead of one more stop. I want to get set up and ready.
I am not in my usual work clothing of a black suit. Instead, I am wearing a blue polo shirt and a pair of jeans, something more comfortable. I am wearing regular tennis shoes instead of my normal dress shoes.
So even while working out or training in Krav Maga or with weapons, I wear sweatpants, never shorts, as I dislike the feeling of my legs being exposed or vulnerable. My hair is dark, finely cut, and nicely groomed and straight. Thanks to my training, my body is well developed for practical fitness. I sometimes get quite dark when I am outside for long periods of time during the summer but because of how often I am inside, stationed for hours in the dark, climate controlled surveillance room, I am much lighter when it comes to skin tone.
The surrounding desert countryside is beautiful and sparse, a rugged terrain of ancient sedimentary rock, dry washes and silent, purple-hued mountains. All underneath a vast, indifferent blue sky.
The air is clean, a stark and welcome change from the filtered, climate-controlled chaos of the Strip, offering a silence that is almost deafening and yet a major relief. The natural wonder does not assault my senses like hours upon hours at work usually does.
But if this job goes well, then I can leave the world of the strip for good. Combined with my savings from counting cards, advantage play and poker tournaments from out of state, I can retire early.
Retire in my mid thirties.
I look at some paperwork and a work badge that has my name on it. Manuel Herandez. After this weekend, I won’t ever have to look at that paperwork and badge again.
But only if I pull off my part of the job.
That badge... used to mean something. It used to represent the highest level of competence and the trust of the institution. To keep the game fun and safe. To keep people safe.
That illusion died a long time ago.
It died with Lieutenant Jason Smith.
Smitty took a chance on me when everyone else wanted me counting money in the cage. He taught me the basics of how to work a floor, something Jace was always better at.
I trusted that man more than anyone in management.
He was the only one who didn't look at us as just another piece of hardware to protect the balance sheet. He took a chance on me when everyone else wanted me counting money in the cage. Smitty taught me the basics of how to work a floor.
Something that Jace was always better at.
Now don’t get me wrong, I always knew that Las Vegas, from the outset, was built on vice and bad decisions. The phrase what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas exists for a reason.
I even understand why the house goes to such extreme lengths to counter advantage players and protect their money. If they didn’t, the House would rapidly lose at an unsustainable rate.
But those illusions started to chip away.
First, the introduction of countless hidden fees that are just low class.
Then came the pricing out of regular Americans who just wanted to unwind and party.
From the monitors, I had a front-row seat to a slow-motion collapse of character. I watched the baseline for acceptable behavior sink lower every year.
I watched competent veterans get passed over for the most critical surveillance positions by incompetent executives with fancy titles but zero operational skill, proving the House cared more about a loyal face than a secure floor.
Worse, the core of my job was corrupted. The system I utilized, the most sophisticated surveillance system ever designed', was systematically used not just for security, but for data exploitation. Corporate ran tracking algorithms to profile high value guests for marketing, turning our security feeds into a spy program against our customers.
But what really hollowed me out was watching my own team turn.
Upstairs, my fellow surveillance officers and analysts abuse the high res feeds for petty gossip, to spy on women, or settle personal scores with floor staff. And downstairs, the floor security officers and pit bosses cut corners daily, prioritizing break times over safety, turning a blind eye to obvious cheating that wasn't being done by an advantage player, or showing a lazy contempt for the guests they were paid to protect.
The rot isn’t just theoretical. It is in the daily operations of the machines and the very people I share a uniform with.
That is why I'm here. I am done protecting a house that will throw its own under the bus just because someone paid them to do so. I want to live on my terms, not on the terms of a house that treats me and my best friend as disposable.
Jace and I have worked in tandem for years, and the system we built is what made us the best team on the Strip.
I'm the eye that sees everything.
He's the hand that moves.
Whether it's a card counter at a blackjack table, a mechanic or a guest who otherwise needs to leave, I don't call the pit boss, I call Jace.
The pit boss will make a scene, maybe even escalate the situation into something that requires incident reports and legal review.
Jace doesn't do that. He reads the room, approaches without triggering alarms, and makes the interdiction look friendly until it isn't.
Regarding card counters, our protocol was surgical.
I would track the target's pattern for hours, sometimes days, building the behavioral case from the surveillance room.
I'd log their buy-ins, track their betting spreads, note their verbal cues and body language. I'd map their associates, identify their spotters, and figure out their communication signals.
All of that data would go into a file.
Then, when the moment was right, I'd feed Jace real-time updates via radio.
"Target is moving to Table 12. Two spotters at the bar, one in the high-limit lounge. True count is plus-seven. He's about to make his move." Jace would say.
Jace would position his team, control the exits, and execute the approach. The target would never see it coming because Jace went in with a soft touch. A friendly tap on the shoulder, a quiet conversation that started with "Hey, how's your night going?" and ended with them walking toward the cage to cash out, flanked by security escorts they didn't realize they had until it was too late.
No shouting. No handcuffs. No scene. Just a polite, professional exit that left the other guests completely unaware anything had happened.
That's the difference between a good interdiction and a bad one.
A bad one disrupts the floor, creates a spectacle, and makes the other guests nervous.
Worst of all, it involves paperwork.
A good one is invisible and requires no paperwork.
The target is gone, and no one else even noticed.
Jace is the best at making people disappear without them realizing they'd been caught until they were already in the back office.
That's why Smitty promoted him to lead the interdiction team. And that's why I recommended him for the position of floor supervisor.
I can’t do what Jace does. I can spot a counter from a hundred feet away on a grainy camera feed, but I can't walk up to them and make them think I'm their friend for thirty seconds. That's Jace's gift.
He makes people trust him right up until the moment they realize they shouldn't have.
However, AP’s and cheaters are not the most common problem we deal with on the job.
That would be drunk tourists and angry gamblers who lost a fortune.
Jace deals with the floor friction. I watch the games.
But what really keeps the house awake at night is employee theft, embezzlement and collusion. Something I deal with more than AP’s and cheaters.
Most cases involving cheaters and AP’s take hours at most to solve because the tells, patterns and gadgets are obvious to me.
But then there are the Ghosts.
I only ever saw one in the wild, a man named Wei Chen.
I tracked him for three days, watching him dismantle a high-limit baccarat table without ever breaking a sweat or changing his heart rate.
I couldn't prove he was cheating, and I couldn't find a single flaw in his game. He was the only person who ever made me feel like the surveillance was blind.
Only one other player made me feel that way. Rachel Lin, and she required an entire team.
In the long run, it is a good thing I found this line of work because I like structure and rules. Something the house is more than happy to provide someone like me.
The rules of a casino are quite simple really with two main parties. There are the losers, in the sense that the patrons leave the casino with less money than they entered in with. The winners either break even or walk away with more money than they entered in.
In this context, among gamblers, losers vastly outnumber winners.
Of course, the biggest winner of all is the house.
I work for the house by helping to protect their money. Sure I work to keep guests and employees safe but at the end of the day, the House's money is what matters most and why my job exists.
Of course, since I know every advantage play and cheating trick in the book because of my job, I can’t legally gamble in the state of Nevada according to my contract.
So on my days off, when they happen, I count cards and compete in poker tournaments.
Mostly in California, Oregon, Washington State, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, and Colorado
On occasion Atlantic City.
Jace joins me as my business partner on these trips.
I like to focus on states that are within driving distance of Las Vegas.
So the fact that I am coming to Aces is way outside of protocol for me.
But then again, the payoff from this job is well outside of protocol as well.
As I am thinking about that payday, I see Aces in the distance.
The resort is huge by Elko standards, standing at at least 21 stories tall.
But compared to the colossal, expertly crafted resorts on the Strip, it feels modest.
The building is a towering monument of pure, overwrought gold and sterile white, a cheap, gaudy imitation of Strip luxury.
So it stands out quite sharply in the remote desert, a gaudy, blinding beacon of calculated excess.
But the gold is quite overwhelming, it assaults the eye in the mid-afternoon light, reflecting back an aggressive, tacky vision that promises more than it can possibly deliver.
It possesses none of the architectural sophistication or polished illusion of quality that even a mid-tier Vegas resort would demand.
I see the title of the resort blazed as Aces in white and gold. I can only imagine what it would look like at night.
Which I suppose is the point.
It is clear to me that the good parking spaces are long since taken. Based on the cars alone, I can tell that many high rollers and rich clients have come to grace Aces at the opening weekend.
It takes me a while but I find a place to park. Albeit quite far away from the main entrance. So the walk is considerable. While I get my bags, I take some time to look around the parking lot and general area while I walk to the entrance with my bags.
One is full of my clothing, toiletries, my laptop and other items. The other is filled with just cash. One third of the floor bankroll.
Some of these license plates are those of famous podcasters and influencers of the type I keep careful track of as part of my job. People that the marketing department hopes to attract with generous deals in exchange for market share and advertisement.
I suspect that Aces did some type of similar deal to promote the opening weekend.
In the distance, I notice a racetrack of some type under construction, along with a runway.
Many of the guests here are young men. Young men with a lot of money. I notice quite a few with quite an entourage and what looks like podcasting equipment. Many are taking videos of themselves using their phones exclaiming that they have arrived at Aces as VIP’s.
Some of them I recognize as former speech writers for President Obama who became highly visible political media figures.
In fact, I am guessing that the majority of the VIP’s here are successful podcasters and influencers of some type along with their entourages.
That explains the abundance of what looks like podcasting equipment.
Based on the faces I am seeing, most of these podcasters and influencers are MMA commentators, gun fans, a nauseating mix of far right and far left political pundits who are nearly indistinguishable in their aggressive, hostile rhetoric, and the worst of the manosphere types.
That one guy who put a shock collar on his dog is here based on the fact that I saw him with a crew, who are all shouting about how the "beta" security guards should be "put in their place." The same guy who is gaga over how rad the Chinese Communist Party is, though he is wearing a designer wristwatch that likely cost more than a staff member's annual salary.
I think some of Rachel’s family who fled Hong Kong would like a word with him about what the CCP is actually like.
They reek of entitlement, wealth, and a vicious, performative misogyny.
Over the din of the parking lot, I catch snippets of conversation, casual slurs, loud bragging about women, and a particularly chilling complaint from one influencer to his cameraman.
"We're going to put our money in Alpha Coin and bankrupt every Israeli and Jew hedge fund that tries to short us. Fuck those Zionists and free Palestine!" the influencer performatively roars.
I hear another chilling comment. It sounds like it is coming from a hanger on who is screaming into a camera of the influencer he is following.
“I signed up with ICE to hunt motherfucker! I’m the guy who does the jobs you're too soft to even look at!” the follower screams.
ICE, the one Federal agency that has caused me more problems at work than any other.
Most federal agencies are surgical. The DEA, ATF or the FBI show up when they have a target, a reason, and a desire to keep the house running so the money trail stays warm. They have a clear target and they work with us to minimize disruptions.
ICE by contrast will uproot lives just to meet a quota.
Usually, when ICE stops by, my job gets harder because the back of house staff is too scared to talk afterwards about what they are observing on the floor.
That last comment makes it clear.
This crowd is a festering wound of every toxic trend in America, now gathered in one physical place.
It is mid afternoon, almost 4:00 in fact. So I get moving towards the entrance.
I want to get settled into my room as soon as possible.
Take a break from the craziness of the surroundings.
Unfortunately, it appears that getting checked in may be a challenge. I notice a long line of people. A long line of people who appear to be quite grumpy.
Mostly the hangers on of the VIP’s.
“Is this the line to get checked in?” I ask one of the guests while carrying my two bags. A young man who is dressed in expensive looking clothing and jewelry.
“Yes it is, you cheap faggot. Now wait your turn,” the guest snaps, his face flushed with the kind of entitled impatience that only comes from never being told 'no.'
He probably called me cheap for carrying my own bags.
To try and look tough in front of his peers, his body language changes to hostile, a ‘come at me bro’ type posture.
All I have to do is step towards him while letting my positioning inform him I can fight him if he wishes.
However, he wisely backs down.
“Thanks.” I say to them as I get in the back of the line.
I don’t like this at all.
The line for check in is quite long.
It stretches well outside of Aces and slightly into the parking lot.
The good news here is that I have more time to make observations about Aces and see what is going on.
While I am waiting in line, I take notice of a few things around me.
First, the line just seems to be getting longer. On occasion I take steps forward but it is a slow process.
I understand that long lines can happen, but usually, the line should not stretch well outside of the premises.
Especially when dealing with just the VIP’s.
While waiting in line, I get my reservation ready on my phone.
Because I am one of the players for the high stakes poker tournament, I am considered a VIP.
For the next three hours, I am waiting in line.
The crowd is getting more agitated by how long they are outside waiting to get checked in.
On the plus side, the weather is getting cooler outside.
So I have a bit more time to make observations and I am starting to feel less overheated. The influencers only seem to be taking photos near certain parts of the Aces building for their instagrams. The parts of the buildings that actually look like they are well done. The rest of Ace's look sloppy by comparison, if it is done at all.
It is clear that the paint job on the outside of the building was not done correctly. The sealant/caulking around windows and doors is visibly cracked, shrunken, and applied unevenly, failing to meet the frames. At the stairwell entrance, you can hear a subtle whistling sound when near an exterior wall.. The gold exterior cladding is visibly buckling in direct sunlight, with some sheets already warping and showing discoloration near the mounting points.
Places where I noticed young men in white and gold street clothes are guarding and directing influencers away from.
Taking a closer look at the young men guarding the unfinished parts of aces, I immediately recognize who they are based on their tattoos. Including tattoos of halos with guns, money and scantily clad women.
Members of the Angels, a Street Gang that recently arose in Los Angeles but have expanded into Las Vegas.
Most local criminal elements know to be careful when dealing with the Angels, these are guys who are known to kill anyone they see as an intruder into their territory without thinking twice. They killed a witness in Los Angeles by shooting up her home. I once saw footage of them beating an Angel they caught skimming within an inch of his life in a back alley on the strip.
I have dealt with the Angels before, mainly in the context of kicking them out when they started problems, mostly for bad behavior towards staff and conducting illegal business on house property. Or to be more accurate, I identified the problem for Jace and he would kick them out.
At one point I helped to foil a planned robbery before it started.
In fact, I did a report on them for my work to help my colleagues deal with them once they started robbing casinos on the west coast plus Idaho, Arizona and casinos outside of Las Vegas. As a part of my work, I deal with gangsters all the time, but they usually know better than to start trouble on the House premises, where every possible angle is covered by multiple cameras.
But why does Aces need to hire gang members at all?
A question I take a mental note of.
It is also of note that Aces is not even finished. Besides the hotel, Aces has a private runway and racetrack. Both of which are still obviously under construction.
The line behind me grows longer and longer while I only slowly progress towards the inside of Aces. This is really taking a long time. The people around me are growing agitated.
“I have been waiting for fucking ever!” I hear a guest a few spots behind me say indignantly. The people around me begin to make similar comments while getting more and more agitated.
“This is a joke, man! Where’s the alpha service Alec promised? That rent-a-bitich is just standing there, he wouldn't last five seconds in a real fight. He's a cuck getting paid by a beta organization,” another guest yells, tossing a half-full energy drink onto the pavement.
Something the visible security guards are doing nothing about.
They seem bored and uninterested in the crowd in front of them.
Their uniforms are ill fitting and just black clothing with the Aces logo, cheap polyester that looked a size too small on some and too large on others.
I notice they don’t have any equipment with them except for handcuffs, pepper spray, and a flashlight.
More importantly, where are their earpieces?
How are they supposed to communicate with surveillance?
One of them, a young man who looks genuinely scared, tries to calm down the crowd, but no one listens to him. He holds his hands up in a placating gesture, but his voice is thin, and he quickly retreats back to leaning against the wall, utterly defeated. It's clear that no one trained these guys, or gave them any instruction more complex than 'look intimidating.'
Once a fight breaks out, these guys are on their own. The worst thing you can do from a security standpoint.
My phone starts to vibrate.
It is coming from my team who has joined me on this job. One of the messages is from Rachel Lin in a secure group chat.
“Are you sure this was a good idea? We are going to be waiting in line for a long time. Not to mention the VIP’s are getting restless.”
The second responding message is from Jace.
“We all knew going into this that Aces was not ready for prime time. Let's be patient.” Jace responds in the group chat.
I eventually manage to get inside Aces itself as the line moves forward.