Fabrizio was born in 1949 in Palermo, Italy. As is customary in Italian familes living on the island of Sicily, the son followed in the father's and grandfather's footsteps. Veterans on the European casino-cheating turf, especially that of Monaco and throughout France, Armando and Vittorio taught young Fabrizio in the roulette-wheel trenches. You might say he learned with an iron hand--and he learned well. Before too long he became both a proficient wheel mechanic and claimer. He was also a charmer, probably the most charming casino cheat of all time. In fact, he was so charming that he used these abilities to seduce heterosexual male casino bosses into paying his pastposts without suspicion.
Unlike his father and grandfather, Fabrizio was very cultured and well-spoken--in several languages. After learning the bread and butter move of the family's casino-cheating arsenal, the roulette slide, Fabrizio perfected it at about the same time he took over the Renzi pastposting team upon Armando's retirement. That roulette move is considered the second greatest chip-manipulation casino move after Richard Marcus's heralded Savannah move. The roulette slide was developed by Vittorio in the 1950s, improved substantially by Armando in the 60s and taken to the hilt and internationalized by Fabrizio in the 70s, 80s and 90s. It is still being done by Fabrizio's son, Luigi, who we might one day see in the Casino Cheats Hall of Fame as well.
The beauty of the roulette slide move was that it allowed longtime exposure at roulette tables without taking heat. It was that ultimate rare move that could be done time and again on the same roulette table, often amassing a dozen or more payoffs there before the Italian cheat team moved on--often to another table inside the same casino. When Richard Marcus ran into Fabrizio's team in 1977 at Harrah's Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, he saw their move but could not quite figure it out at first glance. Nor could he figure it out at second, third, fourth or fifth glance. It actually took Marcus 15 years of intermittent spying on the Renzi cheat team to figure out exactly what the slide move was. When he did, he was impressed more by this move than any other move he had ever seen or heard about. Over the years he would run into Fabrizio and his team and spy on them whenever he could. He marvelled at their slide move each time he saw it. When the two teams were aware of each other's presence in the same casino location, they would draw up a truce, dividing up that area's casinos: "these for the Renzi team, those for the Marcus/Classon team."
Fabrizio Renzi retired in 2002, leaving the "family business" to his son Luigi. What his legacy in the casino-cheating world is most recognized for is the carrying out of a move that literally withstands the passage of time. Despite modern casinos' state of the art surveillance systems equipped with digital cameras and highly developed software technology, Fabrizio Renzi proved (and his son Luigi still proves) that the hand is always quicker than the eye--and the camera.
No matter how much surveillance technology improves in the coming decades, it will never stop the Renzi's famed move from cheating the world's casinos out of millions.
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