This is the true story of Jose Vigoa — a Cuban immigrant living in a trailer he called the roach coach, declaring an income of ten thousand dollars a year — who spent two years robbing five of the biggest casinos on the Las Vegas Strip while thousands of cameras watched, and never once showed his face.

September 1998 to June 2000. The MGM Grand. The Desert Inn. Mandalay Bay. New York–New York. The Bellagio. Nine robberies. Millions in cash. The biggest string of casino heists the city has ever seen — and for almost two years, not one camera on the most heavily surveilled street in America caught him.

He arrived on a boat from the Mariel boatlift in 1980 and carried cocktails at the Showboat. Then cocaine, then seven years in federal prison. He came out in 1996 into a city that had built the Mirage, the MGM Grand, Luxor and the Bellagio while he was gone, and got none of it. By 1997 he was a house painter earning $10,041 a year.

What turned him wasn’t a plan. It was an armored truck parked outside a casino in Henderson, with one guard inside reading the sports page.

He claimed he was robbing the fat casino owners who exploit their workers. But the people standing between him and the money were never the owners — they were a 56-year-old former schoolteacher earning nine-fifty an hour, an aging Marine, a father of five killed on his sixth wedding anniversary, and a twenty-three-year-old who wasn’t even supposed to be working that route.

Then, at 6:26 on the morning of June 3rd, 2000, he walked into the Bellagio and did the one thing he had never done on any job before. He didn’t put on a mask.

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CHAPTERS

00:00 — A Minute Inside the MGM Grand
01:16 — A Waiter
03:45 — Seven Years
07:25 — The Machine
12:14 — The People He Was Fighting For
19:07 — Henderson
22:22 — The King of Las Vegas
26:01 — The Mask
30:53 — The Hunt

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SOURCES & FURTHER READING

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WFHp8KWDd6zwFK2kHHqi3nMDY8XhfoFBgZFMaoARI7w/edit?usp=sharing

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