A soft spot, though, was found outside the syndicate. Gavin Prince, a well-regarded Tappacola with a degree from FSU, decided he had no future in jail. He had been second-in-command at the casino and knew most of the dirty secrets. His lawyer convinced Paula Galloway that Prince was not a crook and could help their case immensely for the right deal. He agreed to plead to one count for probation.
According to Prince, each gambling table—blackjack, roulette, poker, and craps—has a cash box that cannot be accessed by the dealer. Ninety percent of the money arrives in the form of cash, which the dealer takes, counts for the benefit of the players and the cameras, stuffs into the cash box attached to the table, and converts to chips. Blackjack tables generate the most cash; roulette the least. The casino never closed, not even on Christmas Day, and its slowest hour was 5:00 a.m. At that time every day, armed guards collected the cash boxes, put them on a cart, and replaced them with empty boxes. They were taken to a fortified room—the official “count room”—where a team of four professional counters—the “count team”—went through each box. Each counter had a security guard standing behind him or her, and a camera directly above. Each box was counted four times. There were usually around sixty cash boxes. Prince’s mission each morning was to remove box number BJ-17 from the highest-grossing blackjack table. He did this by simply taking it off the cart before the cart was rolled into the count room. He never said a word. The guards looked the other way. It was business as usual. With BJ-17, Prince stepped into a small room, one without cameras, and placed the cash box in a locked drawer. To his knowledge there was only one other key and it belonged to the Chief, who visited the casino every day and removed the cash.
On average, the cash boxes from the blackjack tables collected $21,000 a day, though BJ-17 was known to do even more business. Prince estimated the box yielded at least $8 million a year, all of it gone and unaccounted for.
The surveillance tapes of that table were mysteriously erased every three days, just in case someone asked questions, though no one ever did. Who, exactly, might come poking around? They were on tribal land!
Prince was one of three supervisors who rerouted the cash to the Chief’s little drawer. All three were in jail, indicted, and facing lengthy sentences. When he folded, the other two quickly fell in line. All three claimed they had no choice but to facilitate the skimming. They knew the Chief was not keeping all of the money, that it was being used to bribe other people, and so on. But they worked in a don’t-ask-don’t-tell environment where they made their own laws and truly believed they would never get caught. None of the three claimed to know anything about Vonn Dubose.
The casino was closed for three weeks. With two thousand people out of work and dividends in jeopardy, the Tappacola hired some expensive lawyers who finally convinced a judge that they could clean up their act. They agreed to engage a professional management team from Harrah’s.
With Chief Cappel in jail and facing the likelihood of being there for decades, and with the tribe thoroughly humiliated, a recall effort began. Ninety percent of the Tappacola signed a petition calling for his resignation and for a new election. He stepped down, as did his son Billy and their sidekick Adam Horn. Two months later Lyman Gritt was elected Chief in a landslide. After his election, he made a promise to Wilton Mace to get his brother out of prison.
Lawyers for the Cousins sought unsuccessfully to loosen up some of their money. They wanted to retain some big-league lawyers who could dig for loopholes. The judge, however, was not keen on the idea of allowing tainted cash to be spent on legal fees. He said no, and emphatically, and appointed experienced criminal lawyers to defend them.
Though far more serious than the RICO indictment, the capital murder case was easier to prepare. Absent Clyde Westbay, there would be only five defendants at trial, as opposed to twenty or so in the RICO case. Paula Galloway had long since decided to push hard for the murder trial, hope for convictions, and, with the Cousins locked away for either life or death, negotiate aggressively with the remaining RICO defendants. Once everyone was caught and in jail, she and her team believed the murder trial could be set in about eighteen months. The RICO trial could take as long as two years to put together.
In April 2012, some six months after the arrests, the court-appointed receiver began selling assets. Using an infamous and controversial federal statute, he organized an auction for nine late-model automobiles, four boats, and two twin-engine airplanes. Lawyers for the Cousins objected, claiming such a forfeiture, while their clients were still, technically, considered innocent, was premature. It was the same argument defense attorneys had been screaming about for twenty years. Unfair as it seemed, the law was the law, and the auction netted $3.3 million. The first drop in what would become a very large bucket.