In the shimmering world of Las Vegas, where fortunes are wagered with the flip of a card, one man’s brazen spree of chip-grabbing audacity has earned him a permanent exile from paradise. Neal Ahmed Hearne, whose slight-of-hand antics once fluttered across the felt landscapes of fifteen famed Vegas casinos, made history—but not in the way any gambler hopes.
By order of the Nevada Gaming Commission’s ironclad decision, Hearne’s name has been etched into the notorious annals of Nevada’s “black book,” a compendium of forbidden figures barred from the sanctified halls of gambling’s grandest institutions. He now stands as the 37th individual enshrined in infamy, cast out from casino life, as the echoing chips fall where they may.
This resident of North Las Vegas, notable for his heists totaling thousands in casino currency, faced the music when the five-member commission decreed his fate with unanimous resolve. The solemn gathering, akin to a tribunal of fate, extended an expected, though perhaps unwanted, invitation to Hearne—offer a defense, they beckoned. But no pleas nor protestations echoed through the chamber: Hearne took his silence as a companion and did not attend.
The deliberation stirred the air with contemplation and jurisprudence as Commissioner Brian Krolicki posed to the chamber a query that drew the boundary between punishment and precedent: how ought one qualify for this draconian ledger? Does the mere swiping of chips land one in these pages, he mused, or is there a tally that must be reached? His questions plucked at the strings of policy, seeking the symphony of order the commission hoped to sustain.
Senior Deputy Attorney General John Michela, as a maestro presenting his score, elucidated that Hearne’s misdeeds sang a tune familiar to the commission. Indeed, others with a proclivity for pilfering poker plaques had danced into the black book’s fold. Moreover, Hearne was no mere fly-by-night—he was a symphony of qualifiers unto himself: a felon by the court’s reckoning, conviction tainted with moral turpitude, and a man already judged unworthy of the casino’s lustrous embrace by prior adjudication. A trifecta of transgressions when even a single note would suffice for banishment.
Amidst the quietude of the proceedings, the ghost of evidence flickered on the screens—a specter of surveillance footage portraying Hearne at Aria’s blackjack chapel, his hand quick as lightning, his bounty a clutch of chips, his departure swifter than a thought as players and dealer alike could but marvel in stunned spectacle.
The shadow of Hearne’s ignominy followed closely behind that of Shaun Joseph Benward, an illusionist of Mississippi fame whose roulette ruses had merited similar exile not a winter past. Yet, even as the black book grows, time’s passage obscures once notorious names. The attorney general’s vigilant eye will turn, now and again, to sift through the relics of reprobates, purging spirits departed from this chronicle of casino outcasts.
