Columnist Jeff German: Computer whiz had slot win codes

Saturday, Oct. 11, 1997 | 7:05 a.m.

WHEN all is said and done, Ron Harris likely will be remembered as one of the biggest threats ever to Nevada's casino industry.

Harris has been accused of betraying the public's trust as a lab engineer at the state Gaming Control Board to steal jackpots in casinos around the state and in New Jersey.

Today, two years after Control Board Chairman Bill Bible urged Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa to prosecute Harris "to the fullest extent of the law in the most expeditious manner possible," the errant computer whiz remains free on bail while waiting to be sentenced.

Last month, after changing his August 1996 guilty plea in Nevada from four counts of slot cheating to racketeering, his long overdue sentencing was put off until January. Banned from Nevada casinos, he faces 20 years in prison, but his lawyer is seeking probation.

Those inside the Control Board blame the attorney general's office for stalling justice in this case, a charge Del Papa vehemently denies.

"This guy should have been in jail a long time ago, and he should be in jail for a long time," says a well-placed Control Board source.

Del Papa agrees that Harris deserves to be incarcerated, and she predicts he indeed will get a "substantial prison sentence."

She says her office always considered Harris a threat and did everything it could to make a case against him.

"This was not an easy case," she says. "This guy was a computer genius. There was very complicated high-tech knowledge here."

Harris has yet to even stand trial on similar charges in New Jersey, Del Papa adds.

New information, meanwhile, has surfaced that shows Harris posed a far greater threat to the casino industry than anyone could have imagined.

A top-secret Control Board report shows that during a 1995 cheating scam involving Harris in New Jersey, authorities there discovered a CD ROM containing the "source codes" (software files) of hundreds of electronic games sold to casinos by Nevada's biggest slot manufacturers.

By law, manufacturers are required to file the software with the board whenever they obtain approval for a new game. The codes are regarded as trade secrets and are supposed to be kept in the board's strictest confidence.

There is no greater threat to the industry than to allow such carefully guarded proprietary information into the hands of criminals.

The 1995 Control Board report confirmed the worst fears agents had about Harris.

Agents discovered that his access to these trade secrets helped him develop a program to cheat the most popular video poker machine in the world, International Game Technology's Player's Edge Plus.

In 1995, the board estimated that there were 30,000 IGT poker machines in Nevada and as many as 100,000 worldwide. The CD ROM confiscated from Harris contained a "cheating shopping list" of 900 locations where the Player's Edge Plus was in operation.

Once sure that Harris had cracked the IGT machines, the Control Board broke the bad news to company officials and instructed them to retrofit their poker machines with new computer programs.

The report indicates agents had no idea how badly the poker system had been compromised. But today, the board says it is satisfied that IGT has corrected the problem. IGT officials weren't available for comment.

Even more disconcerting to agents in 1995, the report says, Harris had the capability of developing this kind of cheating program two years before the CD ROM was discovered in New Jersey. Such a program, which can help predict when a jackpot will occur, could have been written as early as January 1993.

"This cheating software," the report says, "has the most potential for damage in an organized assault on our licensed locations due to the shear numbers, the inability to track significant wins over time ... and the lack of surveillance in restricted locations which may contain many of these devices."

The report concludes: "Another concern is that (Harris) could sell some of this subversive technology to slot cheating rings."

Agents had heard rumblings but could never prove that Harris had sold the trade secrets or his cheating program to any criminal enterprises.

Though the report was given to the attorney general's office in October 1995, Control Board insiders say the scam against IGT never was fully pursued.

Instead, Harris was charged with a different form of cheating, what is commonly called "gaffing" in the industry. Gaffing doesn't predict the outcome of a machine, but rather alters it to work to the player's advantage.

The four counts Harris pleaded guilty to last year involved gaffed machines owned by another slot manufacturer, Universal Distributing.

Despite the board's concerns about Harris, the investigation veered off course in 1996 as Harris pleaded guilty to the slot cheating counts.

While on the hot seat, Harris had leveled allegations of misconduct against his accusers at the Control Board.

For awhile, Deputy Attorney General David Thompson, who had been assigned the case, bought into what Harris was claiming. He put it on record by debriefing the slot cheat and interviewing potential corroborating witnesses.

Months later as the broadened investigation stood at a standstill, videotapes of the debriefing were leaked to ABC News, which earlier this year ran excerpts on "Prime Time Live."

The ABC broadcast led to a public rift between Del Papa and Bible, who was miffed that the raw allegations (which never were substantiated) had been fed to a television network.

Shortly after the Harris tapes aired, one of Del Papa's former investigators, Mike Anzalone, charged that his own office had forced him off the Harris investigation because he refused to pursue Thompson's "conspiracies theories."

Thompson could not be reached for comment.

Anzalone, it turns out, isn't the only one who has questioned why Del Papa hasn't pushed harder to put Harris in jail.

A source inside the Control Board's new-games lab now has stepped forward to corroborate Anzalone's story.

"It didn't seem that the attorney general's office was interested in Harris," the insider says. "They were trying to smear all of us rather than look at the real problem."

Del Papa, however, defends the investigation.

Anyone who says certain things weren't pursued doesn't know what they're talking about," she says. "We pursued this case very aggressively."

Until Harris hears his fate in court in January, that question will remain open for debate.