blackjack dealer fined
Blackjack Fine

A Blackjack casino dealer caught dropping chips in his tip box was fined $75,000 by a judge after pleading guilty to stealing $200.

Matthew Eisenberg, 26, was a good blackjack card games dealer, a great sleight of hand artist but a lousy tactician.

After a full year working at the Rivers Casino dealing poker and blackjack, Matthew decided to give himself a raise by palming a few $1 hips here and some $5 chips there. Instead of slipping the chips in his pocket, he dropped them into his tip box.

It didn’t take more than two days for the casino security to become suspicious when Matthew Eisenberg’s daily tips skyrocketed from $200 to $500 daily.

After careful observing the blackjack dealer’s casino table manners, casino security finally noticed that upon the conclusion of each hand, the blackjack dealer would sweep a few $1 and $5 losing chips with his right hand and slide it into the pile of the discarded cards.

When all the players were finished and the winners were paid out, he would begin straighten out the cards while stealthily grabbing those loose chips stuck in between the cards with his left hand, and dropping them into his own tip box.

After witnessing the blackjack dealer repeat the process 108 separate times, police were called and Matthew Eisenberg’s days as a casino employee came permanently to an end. Eisenberg plead guilty in the Allegheny County courthouse in front of Judge J.K. Williams III to one count of misdemeanor theft from a casino.

The judge was about to give young Matthew a 20 year prison sentence for running an illegal casino and robbing it, before the clerk reminded His Honor that gambling was legal for a few years now in the state of Pennsylvania.

Judge Williams III, unfazed by the snafu, threw the book at young Matthew, giving him a year of probation and fining him a cool $75,000 for stealing a total of $200 worth of casino chips.

“We believe that the crime fits the statute as written and we believe that the General Assembly wrote the statute to protect the integrity of the casino process. We also believe that it’s important for the patrons of the casino to know that there is a process in place to keep them from being ripped off and to deter the type of behavior that was described in court this morning,” commented District Attorney Stephen Zappala.