Thomas Glenn Carmichael was born on May 7, 1950, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
A casino group led by Carmichael cheated millions of dollars from casinos worldwide with their slot machine cheating.
In the Early Years
Carmichael was working at a television repair shop called Ace TV and Sales in 1980 when a friend of his named Ray Ming approached him.
He showed him a slot machine cheating tool called a top-bottom joint. The device was a simple metal and string piece that went into a corner of the machine adjacent to the circuit board and sent a low-wattage electric current to hotwire the hopper where coins are kept.
Having heard about this device, Carmichael moved to Las Vegas immediately to test it out.
The Strip
It was first tested out on a five-cent machine at a Las Vegas casino, and he won $35 worth of nickels. Additionally, he used the tool to win significant amounts of money on many other slot machines.
However, the casinos became suspicious, and when he was eating lunch at Denny’s, police officers broke in to search his car and found the cheating tool. Despite being sentenced to five years in jail, he only served two years.
The invention of more cheating devices
He invented even more sophisticated cheating devices and cheated casinos out of thousands of dollars on his release from jail.
One of his devices was the ‘slider’, or ‘monkey paw,’ which could be inserted into the payout chute of a slot machine and tripped the microswitch to release coins illegally.
In addition to the ‘light wand,’ he invented the ‘blinding light’ that blinded payout sensors, causing coin releases. He was caught again by the casinos, and he was sentenced to more jail time.
Where is he now?
As soon as Carmichael was released, he spent his time developing an anti-cheating device called “The Protector” that he hoped would pardon him for his past mistakes. On February 1 2019, he died in Oklahoma.
