Norman Leigh and his roulette expedition part three

Continuing on with the final part of this three part series and Leigh came across this system while scouring a bookshop in Charing Cross so it was not his idea, he merely copied it with a few modifications. In today’s more enlightened times, it is doubtful whether a man like Leigh could have convinced twelve seemingly intelligent individuals to go on a caper like this (but then again). But back in the sixties, the overwhelming majority of people had next to no experience of this kind of thing and had certainly not read anything to do with the game of casino.

But the determination of Leigh was something that I have always admired and especially after reading his book. If you can accept the fact that some of the events have been enhanced for literary effect then the book is a very enjoyable read. After getting hold of his system in a local bookshop, Leigh’s next step was to recruit a team.

This was the clever part about what Leigh actually did in my opinion, he knew full well that the system would require a fair degree of starting capital and he also knew that a bigger team would accelerate any winning run should they have one. A single person using the Reverse Labouchere could actually have taken weeks if not months to get wiped out but could also have taken a long time to encounter one of the progression “mushrooms” as they called them in the book.

Leigh systematically interviewed every team member after placing an advertisement in a Bournemouth newspaper and then placing further advertisements in national newspapers for what he called “a limited number of vacancies of a clerical nature in a group to be formed on the Cote D’ Azur”. The entire operation from the planning to the wording of the advertisement in the newspapers to the training and then the execution of the system was almost military in its professionalism.

It was this military like team play that really spooked the casinos in France, they had never encountered anything like it before. But forming a team and attacking the casinos systematically is something that I can relate to and anyone who has read my book “Princes of Darkness:The World of Highstakes Blackjack” would know what I was talking about. Each team member walked away with almost twelve thousand dollars profit (£4,230) which was a substantial sum in 1966 but their greatest achievement was to scare the French authorities so much that the French government actually got involved at one stage.

As soon as Leigh’s book was published, he was receiving offers to take his system to Las Vegas from numerous people but he declined, to that you can draw your own conclusions. But I take my hat off to a very intelligent and determined man. A man that had the guts to take on an industry and stand tall under what must have been intense pressure and very close scrutiny and come out standing tall, Norman Leigh….I salute you.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Killer Roulette”