Silvio Petricciani - University of Nevada, Reno

32 Silvio E. Petricciani
They would pour it down the receptacle
of the slot machine. That would short out
the wiring, and they could keep on pulling
the handle.
So now when the guy came back at five
o’clock, I said, “Formula 409?”
“Where’d you find out?”
I said, “Sorry, I can’t tell you, but it’s
Formula 409.”
So we immediately had to rewire these
machines so that when they would pour the
Formula 409 down into the coin chute, it
would short out and burn it away, you see. It
would cause a short as opposed to tripping the
machine, and it would burn the Formula 409
away and that solved the problem. But I saved
ten thousand dollars because I would have
paid the guy to find out. I never even found
out his name. But he just turned around and
walked out of the place.
I imagine he was afraid you would call the
police.
No, no, no. No, there’s a certain protocol
that you don’t holler policeman right away
the minute somebody comes in and says
something because the police don’t know
what it is. So let’s find out what it is and we
go from there. Well, that was one incident
about slot machines and what can be done
electronically.
But of course when I told you about this
spoon—and you have to understand the
mechanics of a slot machine—but in the pay
chute, if you go up through the chute there,
there’s what we call the slides. And they have
built anti-spooning devices, but they also in
turn built another device that would pull the
anti-spooning device forward and then they
would go on up. And what they would do
is get into the machine. They would find a
machine that somebody left with a pay on it,
you see; then they would get up there and get
this, what you called a spoon, an object with a
kind of a horseshoe cup on it. And they would
go up in the pay chute, and it would fit up
inside of the slide. Then they would pull the
slide forward, more coins would fall into the
slide, then they’d let it back because it was on
a pay, and they’d just keep sliding it back and
forth and milking the whole tube dry.
So now we assume that we have the
machines pretty well protected. However, the
only way that you can actually protect a slot
machine, and you can quote me on this, is if
you put the slot machine in a glass-enclosed
room and allow somebody to drop their coin
in from maybe a twenty foot distance and
watch it roll down in there, trip the machine,
and then let something mechanical pull the
handle, a solenoid or something pull the
handle, and then you may have the machine
protected.
And you know, sometimes a person gets
very hardheaded, and they don’t believe
something even when it’s shown to them; but
strangely enough there was what they call the
rhythm system. This came in in the fifties with
the old mechanical machines, Mills, Jennings,
whatever. And there’s no way in the world that
you could make me believe that somebody
could take a slot machine and what they
would do is go by rhythm. They’d feed a coin
and pull the handle, teed a coin then pull the
handle, feed a coin then pull the handle until
they got the reels going at the same speed.
They’d pull the handle at the same time all the
time, and they’d get the reels to where they
could manipulate them to the point of where
they would pay out jackpots. And they’d
always come back to the same symbols. And
there’s no way in the world that you could
make me believe this until I saw it. And people
came into Vegas with holes in their jeans, and
they went out driving Cadillacs, believe this.