The Invisible Card-Marking Ink That Wasn't!

His Invisible Ink Shined Like a Star

This is one of the most interesting and funny incidents of card-marking in casinos that I have ever heard! It actually came to light back in 2014, but I hadn't heard of it.

I just did last December when the Las Vegas Gaming Commision announced it was considering Bujar Kaloshi for a page in its infamous "Black Book," formally known as the Nevada State List of Excluded Persons.

Those unlucky enough to make this list cannot enter any Nevada State casino under the penalty of being arrested for felony trespassing. They are a collection of gaming and casino cheats, organized crime figures, and people with generally unsavory reputations who are considered harmful to the integrity of Nevada's casino industry.

Bujar Kaloshi, a long-time casino cheat specializing in card-marking and who has many funny-sounding name-aliases, may be the first card-marker in history to be using invisible ink to mark the cards that really wasn't invisible! He wore special contact lenses to see the marks on the backs of the cards, secure in his confidence that casinos' surveillance video aparatus could not see the markings.

Well, he was almost entirely right. But one surveillance operator at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut had another idea, and what he did to implement it reminded me of the Beatles' publicity stunt in 1969 whereby spinning the album Abbey Road backwards, you heard chants that Paul McCartney was dead.

What the surveillance operator did, after recognizing Kaloshi playing at the poker table, was rewind the tape and put it in black-and-white mode which enabled him to clearly view the markings on the cards.

So the jig was up and Kaloshi's casino cheating career took a major hit.

He was subsequently placed in the black book