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Griffin Investigations |
Griffin Investigations was a famous private investigation agency, which specialized in finding and nabbing professional gamblers who tended to put too much of a dent in the casinos' real money coffers. The long-running war between Griffin and the blackjack card counters will always be remembered as an infamous chapter in the history of blackjack.
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Griffin Investigations spent decades perfecting their card-counter-catching techniques, and the professional blackjack gamblers spent those years coming up with ways to ingeniously evade them.
Griffin Investigations was founded by Beverly and Robert Griffin in 1967. At that time, the casinos' nemeses were petty cheaters, the kind who used loaded dice and marked cards to beat the house. These cheating methods "fixed" the games and there was no question about their illegality. But a decade later, in the late 1970s, the casinos and Griffin Investigations found themselves more and more frequently up against a different form of gambler: the blackjack card counter.
Blackjack card counters do not technically cheat at cards; what they do is not illegal. No illegal gadgets are used to change the outcome of the game. The card counter's tool of trade is his head, his memory, and his concentration. With these tools, a card counter can win at blackjack more than the casinos care for. The blackjack casinos didn't even know what they were looking for at first, but they knew that something was afoot and that seemingly innocent blackjack gamblers were winning big, time after time. With the onset of this new and sophisticated way of winning at the blackjack table, Griffin Investigations had to change their own methods, as well.
| Card counters, particularly those who worked as a team, were hard nuts to crack. First of all, although blackjack card counting was not illegal, it was still impacting on the casinos' profits and the casino managers wanted the big card-counting and shuffle-tracking winners out of their hair, legal or not. In addition, groups like the MIT Blackjack Team of that era were backed by big money; they were well-oiled machines that worked with coordination and intelligence. They were just as much "big business" as the blackjack casinos themselves were. Griffin Investigations realized that it would take more than just old-fashioned detective work to put an end to the new phenomenon. |
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It took a while but Griffin managed first to figure out the modus operandi of the major blackjack card counting organizations and, once they did that, they worked on the best means of attack. The agency compiled what was called the "Griffin Book," which was an album of photographs of suspected card counters, and they circulated these books to the casinos that employed them. The success of the agency was legendary; it is said that at one point 50 percent of the casinos in Las Vegas used Griffin Investigations to round up card counters and other super-successful professional gamblers. Along with other achievements, Griffin was responsible for bringing the infamous MIT Blackjack Team to its knees in the 1990s.
The students from MIT were Griffin Investigations' arch nemesis. This team of card counters won hundreds of thousands of dollars of real money over the course of many years from hapless casinos. The book, "Bringing Down the House," tells about the adventures of this group of card-counting students, and it also tells how the Griffin agency brought about the group's demise. By the end, Griffin had photographs, names, addresses and phone numbers of all the prominent members of the MIT Blackjack Team, which closed the book — the Griffin Book — on that chapter in the history of casino gambling.
The reputation of Griffin Investigations is not completely untarnished, however. James Grosjean and some other professional blackjack gamblers sued for false arrest and defamation of character after being detained due to information supplied by the Griffin agency. The gamblers won a huge verdict that forced Griffin Investigations to file for bankruptcy, thus ending a notorious chapter in blackjack history. Beore leaving the scene, however, Griffin Investigations transferred much of the information in the Griffin Books to online databases. The Golden Age of Griffin may be over, but their legacy lives on.
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