Chapter 473: Negotiation (Part One)
– Las Vegas Casino –
Many bosses of the large and small casinos over the city had gathered here for an annual conference. Originally, it would be held at the end of the year, but many casinos decided to bring it ahead of schedule to address the recent events.
Those people from the smaller casinos had also heard, the big casinos had been losing money for two consecutive months!
In Las Vegas, this was simply unheard of!
It wasn’t really losing money, but if you were in the gambling industry and not earning tons of money yet you were actually making barely enough to pay for all the operating staff and site maintenance, that would be too ridiculous.
Two months ago, for a large casino corporation that incorporated a variety of retail shops and hotels, the total monthly profit could reach more than a billion. But over the past two months, the casino portion of the business that should be leading in income was actually losing money? The businesses had to rely on other retail and the hotel profits to breakeven on monthly income, that was just too strange.
Not just one, but all of the biggest casinos in the city had been experiencing this.
After the FBI handed over the unlucky Withers, the problem was still not solved.
The casinos had no choice but to rely on themselves to save themselves, trying to find more clues. Every morning and afternoon, the casino would lose a crap ton of money in operation!
Every casino would lose about 100 million at around the same time period, and sometimes, some might even lose 200 million and have to resort to using the cash in the vault to sustain operation!
This kind of situation was simply unheard of in the past, even if there was a large-scale gambling sniping event.
“The losses are still continuing, does anyone have a good way to solve his problem?” the boss of a big casino in the casino narrowed his eyes and said, breaking the silent atmosphere, “Let’s talk about it. I know all the big dogs are losing money and the smaller ones are scared of becoming the next victims. Let’s not stand idly by and watch each other lose money; this is something that concerns the entirety of Las Vegas. If this gets dragged on, then we will lose at least 30 billion of the usual 50 billion annual profit to someone else! We invested so much money in this world-class city, if it gets leaked that our profit margin is this pathetic, we won’t be able to get more investments. We might even need to use the grey-market income to beef up our financial sheets so our earnings don’t look so bad, and that’s going to increase the chances of us being investigated and exposed. When that happens, everyone will be at even more risk.”
At this time, a guy running a small casino said, “Mr. Peel, in fact, I would just use cheats to stop this kind of phenomenon.”
“Absolutely not!” At this time, an elder angrily said, “Las Vegas is already the number one casino city in the world, and if you get exposed for cheating, it will bring forth a lot of negative press! This is a shameful behavior condemned by everyone in this circle! Don’t forget, there’s still Asia’s Macau; they have been bucking the trend and trying to catch up to Las Vegas all these years. We definitely can’t shoot ourselves in the foot with cheating at a time like this! We are professional, please know the difference between professional and amateur. If you even have to rely on cheating to make money in Las Vegas, then there would be no justice at all in the gambling industry here! This is a matter of our brand that had been nurtured for centuries, and we definitely can’t damage it just for a temporary crisis.”
The others all nodded. The brand effect was indeed very strong, and if they were not careful with how they tackled the enemy this time, it would ruin the brand that they had built.
“But this thing is pretty strange, just how did those guys know what to bet on, big or small? Besides, they’ve never lost once. Every day, there would be 80-or-so people coming in to gamble and they never lose; some of these guys would leave with a couple tens of thousands of dollars. The entirety of Las Vegas loses 300 million to these guys in one day! We’ve already spotted these guys in our surveillance footage and we know who’s part of that organization, but they aren’t really doing anything out of line. And that’s the most awkward part, we can’t sue them for cheating at all, because we still can’t find any evidence on how they cheated to win every single time.”