June 3, 2016
The scheme recently revealed to have used Dover Downs Hotel & Casino slot machines to wash drug money was doomed from the start.
The effort made a man, now in custody, a celebrity on casino cameras for his flamboyant playing habits and eventually linked him to a ring of heroin peddlers in Kent and Sussex counties, casino and police officials said. The capture proves the house always wins.
Operation Duck Hunt was a Delaware State Police investigation that concluded in May targeting the heroin distribution ring. Thirteen people were indicted and during the investigation police confiscated 1.75 kilograms of heroin, a cache worth $1.2 million on the street.
Salman Choudhary was one of those arrested and is accused of funneling the ill-gotten cash through real estate and local businesses in an effort to legitimize the drug money. But police said he also brought large sums of cash to Dover Downs hoping to essentially exchange bills that’d make the IRS curious for ones that could be written off as gambling winnings.
The casino’s 2,400 slot machines are connected to a single mainframe which can track how much money is put into individual devices, and when a gambler uses his rewards card — as Sutor said Choudhary did — how much money an individual is spending and making also can be tracked.
“He came in and started playing slot machines with a lot of cash. Now, we don’t have people standing over their shoulder counting how much money they’re placing into the machine. We, like all casinos, have a computer behind the scenes,” Sutor said. “It got the attention of our state regulators.”
If a player feeds a machine more than $10,000 in a single day, the law requires a casino to file a Currency Transaction Report. Sutor said Choudhary came often and the casino was required to file multiple CTRs over his playing habits.