Shohei Series, ‘Baccarat Machine’ — What Other Gambling Scandals Need Hollywood Treatment?

Last week, Variety reported that the planned scripted series about Ippei Mizuhara –Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter who is serving time for stealing millions from the Los Angeles Dodgers superstar and betting it on sports with bookies, who in turn are accused of laundering their money through Las Vegas casinos — is close to finding a network. It appears to be headed to premium cable channel Starz.

If and when it hits the small screen, it will be the latest in a string of real-life gambling scandals and schemes that Hollywood’s screenwriters and dealmakers have pounced on.

A movie starring Awkwafina about the Kelly Sun/Phil Ivey baccarat scheme, tentatively titled The Baccarat Machine, remains in development, as the author of the article it’s based on, Michael Kaplan, recently told the Low Rollers podcast.

Among famous films from the recent(ish) past are 1988’s Eight Men Out (about baseball’s “Black Sox” scandal), 2008’s 21 (about the MIT blackjack team), and 2017’s Molly’s Game (about an underground, celebrity-studded high-stakes poker game).

Among the not-especially-famous films is 2019’s Inside Game, about the Tim Donaghy NBA betting scandal, which has a critics’ score of 43% at Rotten Tomatoes.

In any case, the well is far from dry when it comes to dramatic, diabolical gambling tales that could make for compelling films. Here are five that stand out.

The Crown Casino heist

It’s a simple formula: Put the words “casino” and “heist” together, and there will be an audience for your flick. Even if you can’t get George Clooney and Brad Pitt to star in it.

In 2013, at Crown Melbourne in Australia, a slots player with an accomplice in the surveillance department nearly took the casino down under, scoring $33 million (in Australian dollars). Long story short, someone on the inside streamed real-time footage of slot machines in the high-roller room to an external hacker who was able to hijack the algorithm and then send signals to the player when it was time to give it a spin.

They got away with it for a few days … until they didn’t. That’s how these things usually go.

It takes a deft writer and director to make “smart guy doing smart guy things at a computer” into engaging cinema, but if Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher could create a modern classic out of some college dork starting Facebook, I say hand them this one and let’s see what they come up with.

The Roselli brothers’ roulette cheat

This was another overseas high-tech hustle, but it played out in the pit, not at the slots. Giovanni and Francesco Roselli were on the casino floor with a camera hidden inside a cell phone capturing the roulette wheel, and an accomplice on the outside had software that could take the footage and predict with +EV accuracy where the ball would land.

The brothers smartly went from casino to casino in the early 2000s, in London and across Europe, rather than staying in one place too long, winning an estimated £1.3 million before they eventually got busted.

It’s a perfect three-act story: Scheme hatched and tech perfected, scheme executed, scheme discovered.

Cast a couple of handsome young actors who can pass for Italian, and it’s a guaranteed hit. Simple title, Roulette. Starring Timothee Chalamet and Patrick Schwarzenegger. That formula prints money even faster than the Rosellis did.

The Alabama baseball betting scandal

Not everyone who tries to pull off a gambling scam in a movie has to be smart and tech savvy. Sometimes, it’s even more fun to watch the dummies try it.

Enter University of Alabama head baseball coach Brad Bohannon and Bert Neff, the man placing bets at a Cincinnati sportsbook and allegedly bragging loudly, right there in the BetMGM book, about how he knew Alabama’s scheduled starting pitcher wasn’t going to play.

The sequence of events: big bets placed, starting pitcher scratched due to “back tightness,” big bets win, Neff busted, Bohannon fired (from a mid-six-figure job over some low-five-figure betting).

Oh, and they apparently sent their text messages over the Signal app, so maybe the screenwriter can bend the truth and tie Pete Hegseth into their chat.

This feels like a dark comedy, with audiences rolling in the aisles as a couple of not-so-smart people do some not-so-smart things. You could even cast Jim Carrey as Bohannon and Jeff Daniels as Neff if you really wanted to make clear what kind of characters these are.

Louis Colavecchio and his coins

Louis “The Coin” Colavecchio, one of the most notorious counterfeiters of modern times, was arrested in 1996 at Caesars Atlantic City with 750 pounds of fake coins in his car, the likes of which he’d been using for years to play casino slot machines without risking real money.

A genuine character, Colavecchio eventually wrote a memoir (there’s your handy source material), dated a woman 40 years his junior, did prison time (and called it “the best years of my life”), and later got paid by government agencies as a consultant on counterfeiting.

Call the movie The Coin, see if Martin Scorsese is free, it’s a no-brainer. The studio is sure to make money, as long as people aren’t buying tickets with fugazi funds.

The Chinese snooker match-fixing affair

In 2023, 10 players were suspended or banned by the Chinese Billiards and Snooker Association and the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association for their roles in manipulating games in conjunction with sports betting.

Do you really need to know any additional details? It’s the already seedy world of billiards made seedier. The script writes itself.

Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason are long gone, but Tom Cruise is still around. And before you point out that the real-life players in question are Chinese, we’ll remind you that a white guy played Jeff Ma in 21, so there’s no reason Cruise can’t take his pool cue out of mothballs for this one.