Black Book

With this success, Benter soon abandoned any idea of returning to college.

This lifestyle all came crashing down though in 1984 when Benter, Woods and some of their partners earned a place in the Griffin Book, a blacklist that a detective agency circulated to casinos filled with known troublemakers and card counters.

This list made it almost impossible for them to keep playing in Vegas.

They needed to find another game.

The company collected photos, aliases, physical descriptions, betting patterns, and reports from casinos around the country.

All of that went into a database that players called the Griffin Book.

So in effect, if you were in this book and you walked into a casino, the people watching would see you, and you'd be thrown out, and then you go to the next casino and the same thing would happen.

Once your picture ended up in the Griffin Book, it became a lot harder to stay under the radar, even overseas.

We went down to this Caribbean isle that, that had advertised that they wanted high rollers, and we started to play, and we were doing really well.

We were winning a lot of money.

They were all nice to us and everything, and then one day the casino manager comes to me and says, "Would you consent to being strip-searched? [laughs] We, we think you're using a, a computer." And leads me into his office, and I literally take off all my clothes, and there's no computer anywhere to be seen, [laughs] nor was there any computer ever anywhere.

He's just totally embarrassed because he's gotten this information from the Griffin Book, presumably, that I'm in there and I'm suspected of using a computer.