Robert A. Nersesian

The Back Room

Robert Nersesian entered the room where casino hospitality ends and made the cameras, guards, gaming agents, and police officers inside it answer in court.

Twenty Minutes

The state had cleared James Grosjean. The casino kept him anyway.

In February 2001, Grosjean was walking through the Imperial Palace on the Las Vegas Strip when a security guard ordered him to stop. He kept walking — the ordinary reflex of a man who has done nothing. The guard seized his arm, pushed his face against a wall, and handcuffed him. Beneath a ceiling of cameras, Grosjean was taken off the public floor to a security office and searched. The search produced the working inventory of a professional gambler in the age of the blacklist: two pairs of pants worn one over the other, a fold of hundred-dollar bills, chips from a scatter of casinos, and two sets of identification, one under a name that was not his.

He had been stopped because he resembled a man Nevada Gaming Control Board agent Paul Stolberg was pursuing. Agents already at the casino could not reach Stolberg, so they asked Imperial Palace security to delay Grosjean without disclosing that the state was involved. When an agent finally reached Stolberg, the mistake was confirmed and the instruction came back: wrong man, let him go. The door stayed shut. The agents wanted a longer look at what the pat-down had produced, so they posed as casino employees while they examined the belongings of a man they had already been ordered to release. Roughly twenty minutes passed before Grosjean walked out.

Robert Nersesian and his law partner, Thea Sankiewicz, brought the civil action. Casino guards and state gaming agents had occupied the same room, but each actor remained accountable under the law governing that actor. In the fall of 2004, a Clark County jury awarded Grosjean $99,000 in compensatory damages against the casino on his federal civil-rights claim, then returned to the courtroom and added $500,000 in punitive damages — more than double what Grosjean had requested.

On July 30, 2009, the Nevada Supreme Court, sitting en banc, decided the appeal. Imperial Palace argued that because its guards had acted at the request of state agents, the casino should share the qualified immunity that protects public officers. The court refused. A private, for-profit corporation does not acquire the government’s immunity by helping government agents detain someone. The court left the $99,000 compensatory judgment intact and ordered a new trial limited to punitive damages. In 2010, Nevada’s Board of Examiners approved a $65,000 payment to resolve Grosjean’s remaining claims against the state.

The Nevada Supreme Court drew the rule clearly. A casino may end a player’s game and order him to leave, but when its employees detain him they answer under the same rules as everyone else. A security title carries no public officer’s immunity, and acting beside state agents does not create one.

"Who Ya Gonna Sue?"

The Imperial Palace was the second door that closed on Grosjean. The first had closed ten months earlier, in April 2000, at Caesars Palace.

Grosjean and fellow professional Michael Russo had noticed a three-card poker dealer repeatedly exposing his hole card. They watched what the dealer showed and played the information. They did not bend a card, introduce a device, or alter the game. Grosjean won more than $18,000 before Caesars closed in. Gaming agents accused both men of card bending and arrested them for felony cheating at gambling. Russo spent about twelve hours in jail. Grosjean was held for more than four days. The charges disappeared without reaching trial, but making them disappear cost the two men $23,000 in defense fees. Their photographs, meanwhile, remained in a private intelligence database beneath an accusation someone else had written.

Fresh out of jail and looking for recourse, Grosjean and Russo asked prominent Las Vegas criminal-defense attorney Richard A. Wright whether they could sue. Grosjean later wrote that the lawyer’s answer arrived with a laugh: "Who ya gonna sue?" The question condensed the accepted wisdom of an entire legal community. Sue the largest casino on the Strip? Sue the state’s gaming police? Over the months that followed, Grosjean wrote, one answer took shape: everyone.

Nersesian’s casino practice began in the mid-1990s after a construction worker described being mistaken for someone else by casino security, handcuffed, taken into a back room, and threatened before the error was discovered. Nersesian identified claims for false imprisonment and battery, filed the case, obtained a five-figure settlement, and began developing a field of law that had received little attention from the local bar.

Nersesian’s position was direct: a gambling capital becomes more trustworthy when security guards, casino managers, gaming agents, and police officers remain answerable to ordinary law. That principle became the foundation of his casino-rights practice.

On the night of October 18, 2004, Grosjean sat alone inside the Eighth Street office with the Imperial Palace surveillance tape running in a VCR and the three volumes of his deposition stacked on a table. Trial started the next morning. The casino’s cameras had recorded everything to protect the house. By morning, they would be witnesses for the other side.

The Game Before the Accusation

The trouble Nersesian litigates is older than any of his clients. In 1962, the young MIT mathematician Edward Thorp published Beat the Dealer and proved what the pit had long suspected: blackjack has a memory. The cards already played change the composition of those that remain. A player who tracks that change can press a bet when the shoe grows rich in tens and aces and retreat when it thins, shifting the odds slightly away from the house. Card counting uses information exposed by the game itself. No deck is marked, no machine introduced, no confederate planted, no rule secretly broken. Nevada’s courts and regulators have recognized the technique as legal for decades. From the casino’s side of the felt, it remains intolerable.

The law gives Nevada casinos a remedy suited to private property: the door. A casino may stop the play, issue a trespass warning, and have the player arrested if he returns. New Jersey limited that power in 1982 when its supreme court sided with Ken Uston, the team-play evangelist who counted in wigs and false beards, and barred Atlantic City casinos from excluding skilled players. Nevada chose the opposite rule. In 2016, a divided Nevada Supreme Court reaffirmed in Slade v. Caesars Entertainment that casinos retain a broad common-law right to exclude, subject to laws against discrimination.

That rule makes the legal boundary unusually clear. The house can bar a skilled player. It cannot lawfully detain him by relabeling skill as cheating. Under NRS 465.101, a casino with probable cause to suspect a violation of Nevada’s anti-cheating statutes may detain a person reasonably if the required notice is posted. Counting cards, winning, and using an alias do not by themselves violate that chapter under Nevada precedent. A desire to identify or exclude an expensive customer therefore supplies no detention privilege. When security converts that commercial preference into an accusation of crime, ordinary claims for false imprisonment, battery, conversion, and defamation come into view.

Casino security often begins with its own characterization of the player: cheat, trespasser, or suspicious patron. The property controls the cameras, employs the witnesses, and supplies the initial account to police. Nersesian tests that account against Nevada’s gaming statutes and the legal distinction between prohibited devices and lawful advantage play.

He knows the games well enough to prevent their vocabulary from controlling the case. A changing bet spread may reveal a changing count. A promotion specialist may follow the written rules precisely. A private guard may have no right to compel identification. A chip retains cash value regardless of the casino’s view of the person presenting it. Nersesian also draws his own line: he turns away actual cheaters. Nersesian begins by identifying the conduct a court must examine—who blocked the exit, who touched the patron, who withheld property, who summoned the police, what justification was offered, and when that justification disappeared.

The Book

Every surveillance economy needs a memory, and for four decades Las Vegas rented one. Robert Griffin arrived in the city in 1963, the year after Thorp’s book changed blackjack strategy. In 1967, he and his wife, Beverly, began compiling the names and photographs of counters and cheats barred from Las Vegas casinos. The Griffin Book grew into the industry’s shared blacklist, a subscription catalog of the unwelcome. At its height, roughly half the major casinos in America purchased Griffin intelligence. The agency helped expose the famous MIT blackjack team after an investigator obtained the students’ names and photographs. Players learned that they could be expelled from casinos they had never entered. An "associate" could make the Book by standing too close to the wrong gambler.

The Book changed the players it watched. Lawful gamblers used wigs, glasses, and aliases to purchase a few more hours at the table before the shared surveillance network identified them. Casinos then cited those disguises as evidence of suspicion. The system manufactured the conduct it later treated as sinister. The second identification in Grosjean’s pocket at Imperial Palace belonged to that economy, and Nevada precedent had already recognized the use of an alias by a professional gambler as lawful.

The Book placed mathematicians who beat games through observation beside felons who used wire, wax, or marked cards. As the label passed from casino to casino, repetition made it seem authoritative. Griffin intelligence stood behind the cheating accusation at Caesars in April 2000. In summer 2005, Nersesian put Griffin Investigations and Caesars before a jury on claims including false imprisonment, defamation, and battery.

The verdict came in for the players: $100,000 in compensatory damages. Caesars settled before the punitive phase. Griffin, which had circulated the two men as cheats, held out, and the jury assessed punitive damages for defaming them without evidence. The award was modest. On September 13, 2005, Griffin Investigations filed for Chapter 11 protection and cited the lawsuit. The bankruptcy petition read like a closing argument. The company’s largest creditor was its own defense firm, owed $106,868.15. The next largest were the two gamblers it had libeled, owed a judgment of roughly $105,000. Farther down the schedules, Beverly and Robert Griffin appeared as creditors of their life’s work for personal loans of $74,000 and $50,000.

The blacklist survived in different forms. Casinos increasingly drew intelligence in-house, using proprietary databases, analytics, and facial-recognition systems rather than treating an outside dossier as unquestioned gospel. The lawsuit nevertheless changed the cost of the accusation. Repetition could no longer manufacture truth, and a property that acted on shared intelligence had to own the consequences when the intelligence was false. The injury traveled as far as the database.

Casino Detentions on Tape

Casino litigation begins with an evidentiary imbalance. The property records the floor from many angles, logs every hand, and controls access to its surveillance archive. Retention periods can be short. The patron usually leaves with memory, injury, and perhaps a receipt written in the casino’s terms.

Nersesian learned to move quickly for the recordings and then built a practice on them. Visitors to the Eighth Street office have described stacks of labeled discs rising like an obsessive record collection, each one preserving casino surveillance of an encounter between guards and a guest. At the busiest point, he and Sankiewicz kept roughly fifty casino cases moving at once and filed a new suit about every other week. He selected cases the way a surveillance director would fear most: for the video. He taught players to use the house’s microphones as well. A question worth asking once — am I free to leave? — is worth repeating clearly inside a wired security room. Where the law permits it, a recorder in the player’s pocket can preserve the answer.

The value of a second recording became clear in a case a few minutes south of Baltimore.

On the night of February 21, 2014, a young card counter named Justin Mills was playing blackjack at Maryland Live!, the giant casino at Arundel Mills. Casino personnel appeared at his shoulder and asked him to come with them. He walked a few steps, paused, and a security supervisor took his arm and placed him in a hold. Mills was moved through the casino into a secured back hallway closed to the public. Between two and eight casino employees gathered around him, along with two Anne Arundel County police officers working secondary employment for the casino. Security personnel stood between Mills and the doors.

A device in his pocket had quietly recorded the hallway.

It captured an officer saying that Mills was being detained so the casino could identify and ban him. It captured the officers acknowledging that they were not accusing him of wrongdoing; the casino simply wanted his identity. And it captured the ultimatum, spoken with the authority of a police station but in service of the pit: "You can’t leave here unless we I.D. who you are." Produce the passport or be taken to the station for fingerprinting. No citation was issued. No police report was filed.

Nersesian brought the federal suit, and the defense attacked the recording first, counterclaiming that Mills had violated Maryland’s wiretap act by recording his own detention. In May 2017, U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett rejected the counterclaim: the recording was lawful, and it was evidence. Two months later, the court held that card counting through mental acuity is legal in Maryland. The officers lost qualified immunity because they had abandoned any investigative purpose and served the private interests of their secondary employer. The casino and its supervisor, having directed the officers’ conduct, could face liability as state actors. On false imprisonment, the court entered summary judgment for Mills. No reasonable person in that hallway could have believed he was free to leave. Liability was established before a jury was seated; only damages remained. The casino and the officers settled on confidential terms on the eve of trial in September 2017.

Nevada had already supplied an earlier warning. In 2008, Chad Johnson went to Las Vegas police the morning after an encounter with Imperial Palace security and showed them his bruises. A security manager was charged with misdemeanor battery — the first criminal charge, by Nersesian’s count, in more than one hundred casino-assault matters he had handled since 1995 — and the criminal case ended with $351 in restitution and an anger-management course. The civil courtroom spoke in larger figures. A Clark County jury returned a $250,000 verdict for Johnson against the casino and its former security chief after security falsely claimed that Johnson had been the aggressor.

The decisive evidence in these cases is often a sentence with a timestamp: the suspect has been cleared; no crime is alleged; the patron still cannot leave. Once the stated justification expires while the confinement continues, casino policy becomes a record of detention.

Surveillance was built to protect the house. The camera shows whether the patron threatened anyone, whether chips were taken, how many guards closed around him, and how long the door remained shut. The same system preserved evidence of the guards’ conduct. Patrons now may carry recordings of their own.

The Wider Map

Nersesian has litigated similar casino detentions in several jurisdictions.

In Tsao v. Desert Palace, he represented a player who had received a trespass warning at Caesars Palace and then continued receiving the casino’s own invitations: free nights, promotional mail, VIP offers, the full seduction. She accepted one of those offers and returned. Security handcuffed her and took her to a room to wait for police. The Ninth Circuit considered the conflict between Caesars’ repeated invitations and the force security used after Tsao returned. It described card counting as legal and emphasized Nevada’s limits on the force a private person may use during an arrest.

In Arizona, guards at the Mazatzal Casino handcuffed a group of advantage players, interrogated them, and seized money and property. The casino operated on sovereign tribal land, where ordinary state tort claims faced an immediate immunity barrier. Nersesian sued tribal officers and employees in their personal capacities for conduct alleged to exceed their lawful authority. In Pistor v. Garcia, the federal courts allowed those claims to proceed. The tribe’s sovereignty remained intact; the individual officers still faced claims directed at them personally. The claims resolved in a $211,000 settlement.

Professional gamblers Gina Fiore and Keith Gipson had their bankrolls seized by a federal drug agent while changing planes in Atlanta on their way home to Nevada. Nersesian filed the Fourth Amendment action, prevailed at the Ninth Circuit, and argued Walden v. Fiore before the United States Supreme Court on November 4, 2013. The Court held that Nevada lacked personal jurisdiction over the Georgia agent, leaving the legality of the seizure unresolved in that forum. The case nevertheless placed the treatment of lawful gambling bankrolls before the nation’s highest court.

Sometimes the back room opens before a complaint is filed. Nersesian has described taking a late-night call from a woman in Tunica while casino guards and a police officer surrounded her and the property withheld tens of thousands of dollars in chips. The casino’s stated offense was card counting. Nersesian put the legal distinction on the telephone: counting cards is legal. The officer turned to the casino and told it to cash the chips so the woman could leave. The matter ended in minutes because one lawyer knew which accusation the facts could not support.

Several public outcomes established the financial consequences of unlawful casino detention. In Switzer v. Virgin River Hotel & Casino, two card counters were held for about seven minutes without physical injury, and a Clark County jury found for the players and reached the punitive phase. The matter resolved for $199,999, including a jury line item of roughly $300 for the casino’s refusal to cash their chips. The casino waived confidentiality and its right to appeal. In Lockhart v. Venetian, a federal jury awarded $200,000 to a hotel guest seized and removed by security staff.

Nersesian once described investing $80,000 of his practice in a case involving a card counter—a father of two who had never been arrested—who was jailed overnight for declining to give a gaming agent his name. The trial court dismissed the case, but the Ninth Circuit reversed and directed entry of a liability judgment. "I still proved my point," Nersesian said. He has also said that modern barrings are often handled with a tap on the shoulder and a trespass warning. Casino security symposiums have invited him to explain how to stay out of his files.

The same insistence on lawful limits carried him outside the casino. When the government attempted to ban a book by classifying it as false commercial speech, Nersesian joined the ACLU of Nevada, the Association of American Publishers, and PEN American Center as counsel. The argument was that political and autobiographical writing receives the Constitution’s strongest protection. A casino hallway and a printed page look nothing alike. In each setting, the question was whether the state could lend its power to an institution that had no lawful warrant for using it.

The People Behind the Casino Cases

Nersesian came to Las Vegas with Thea and their three children in the early 1990s. He had graduated from Wayne State University Law School, practiced in Michigan courtrooms, and gained admission to the Nevada bar in 1986. Las Vegas was supposed to be a pleasant place to raise a family and, eventually, to wind down.

He brought a broader civil practice with him. Nersesian represented automobile dealers and manufacturers in technical warranty and product disputes, including Mercedes-Benz USA in the Ninth Circuit; handled administrative and employment litigation; and pursued First Amendment claims. Through those cases, he learned how large institutions retain records, distribute decisions, describe their own conduct, and defend a chain of command. Casino cases required the same record analysis, but the decisive evidence often came from the corporation’s own surveillance tape.

He also discovered why the casino field had been empty. The damages in many cases looked too small to interest plaintiff lawyers facing in-house surveillance departments, insurance carriers, and experienced defense firms. An hour in a back room does not generate the medical bills that ordinarily finance contingency litigation. Most lawyers, like many police officers, also assumed that card counting was illegal, so the client arrived pre-convicted. Author and professional blackjack player Richard Munchkin has described the conditions that assumption protected in the 1970s and 1980s. Players were thrown against walls and photographed against their will, while police dismissed complaints. One teammate was handcuffed to a chair as a guard held pliers and threatened his eye. Calls to lawyers went nowhere.

Nersesian filled that vacancy by taking cases involving patrons who were surrounded, searched, struck, or confined. He financed cases with modest damages using fees recovered in stronger matters. Roughly two dozen juries have found casinos liable in cases he handled, alongside settlements the properties preferred to keep confidential, and by 2011 his office was receiving casino calls several times a day. He uses the handle Casino Nemesis and still describes himself as an ordinary lawyer. The money is good, he has said, but the work is about "bringing thugs to justice."

"These people are not chattel, and they have not done anything illegal," Nersesian said of advantage players.

He wrote the law down so players and lawyers would not have to reconstruct it from scattered cases. In Beat the Players: Casinos, Cops and the Game Inside the Game (2006), Nersesian catalogued barrings, identification demands, chip seizures, detentions, and the relationship between casino security and public police. The Law for Gamblers followed in 2016 with practical guidance on security-room questioning, identification demands, trespass notices, and transporting a bankroll without inviting forfeiture.

In a first-person essay for The New York Times, Nersesian recalled running along Manhattan’s closed and crumbling elevated West Side Highway, above the traffic, on abandoned ground once surrendered to automobiles. Long before the casino cases, he was already interested in who controls a public space, who may remain there, and what freedom survives when an institution’s customary use falls away.

Nersesian has said that he enjoys craps but plays rarely because probability and thrift both counsel against giving money to a casino. Thorp taught players how to find an edge. Nersesian made the legal response to that edge the subject of his practice.