So picture this: January 14, 1995, Bally’s Park Place in Atlantic City, and a man named Reid Errol McNeal has just hit all eight numbers on a keno ticket — 230,000-to-1 odds, a $100,000 payout, the biggest keno win in that casino’s entire history. Anywhere else, that’s a celebration. Here, it’s the opposite. McNeal barely reacts. He doesn’t have identification on him. He refuses a check and wants cash instead. Casino staff, trained to notice exactly this kind of wrongness in a winner’s behavior, get suspicious enough to call New Jersey gaming investigators before McNeal ever leaves the building — and when investigators go looking for him, they find him sharing a hotel room with a man who, on paper, was one of the last people in America who should have been anywhere near a rigged casino game: a Nevada Gaming Control Board employee, sent by the state itself to keep games like this one honest.
To understand how strange that actually is, it helps to know what keno used to be, and how old the honor system underneath it really was. The game traces back to China’s Han Dynasty, to a legend about an official named Cheung Leung who invented a numbers lottery to help fund the defense of his besieged city after he’d already taxed his people about as far as they’d go — a game that, in the retelling, went on to help bankroll things like the Great Wall itself. It ran for centuries on characters pulled from a classical poem rather than numbers, and it spread across the Chinese countryside using carrier pigeons to ferry winning results out to remote villages, which is where it picked up an early nickname: the Game of the White Dove. When Chinese railroad workers brought the game to America in the 1800s, it became known simply as the “Chinese lottery,” and it wasn’t until it reached the gambling halls of New Orleans that the classical characters got swapped out for plain numbers. The name “keno” itself comes from the French quine, meaning a group of five — a loanword picked up somewhere in that long American migration. Nevada legalized gambling in 1931, but the new law pointedly didn’t cover lotteries, which stayed illegal, so keno operators dodged the whole problem by rebranding the game “racehorse keno,” with numbers standing in for horses in a fake race, right up until the federal government started taxing off-track betting and forced one more rename — down, finally, to just keno.
By the back half of the twentieth century, keno had become one of the most beloved slow games on a Nevada casino floor — dedicated keno lounges with their own runners circulating through coffee shops and restaurants, taking bets from people who weren’t even sitting at the game, all built around a genuinely old-fashioned promise: that the numbers drawn were random, and that nobody, least of all the house, had a thumb on the scale. It’s exactly the kind of quiet, trust-based system that works fine for decades right up until somebody with the right access decides to test it.
Ronald Dale Harris was exactly that somebody. He worked for the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s technology division in the early 1990s, and his actual job was reviewing the source code behind electronic games like slots and keno to make sure the software was fair — one of only five people in the entire state trusted with that level of access. Gaming manufacturers were required by law to hand their confidential source code over to Harris and his handful of colleagues specifically so regulators could verify nobody was cheating players. Harris used that same access to cheat the casinos instead. Starting around 1993, he reprogrammed the EPROM chips inside slot machines so that a specific, secret sequence of inserted coins would trigger a payout — a backdoor built directly into machines the state itself had certified as fair. Then he moved on to keno, exploiting a genuine technical weakness of the era: the pseudorandom number generators running these games in the early ’90s weren’t as random as they claimed to be, often leaning on algorithms seeded from prior results, predictable if you understood the code well enough. Harris did. He built a device, using stolen equipment, that let him predict what numbers a given keno draw was about to produce, and handed the winning numbers to accomplices before the games ever happened.
It worked for years, quietly, which is exactly what made the Bally’s win in January 1995 such an unforced error. McNeal’s flat, joyless reaction to nailing 230,000-to-1 odds — no fist pump, no disbelief, nothing but a man who already knew the outcome before it happened — was the tell that gave the whole thing away. Once investigators traced McNeal back to a hotel room with a Nevada Gaming Control Board employee sitting in it, the case more or less built itself. Harris was arrested on both coasts, fired immediately, and eventually pled guilty — first to slot cheating in 1996, later upgraded to racketeering charges that carried up to twenty years. Nevada’s Attorney General at the time, Frankie Sue Del Papa, didn’t sound especially triumphant about the win: “This was not an easy case. This guy was a computer genius. There was very complicated high-tech knowledge here.” A source inside the Control Board itself was a lot less generous about the man who’d embarrassed the agency: “This guy should have been in jail a long time ago, and he should be in jail for a long time.” Harris ultimately served two years of a seven-year New Jersey sentence, and on February 20, 1997, Nevada put him in its own Black Book — the state’s List of Excluded Persons, permanently banned from setting foot in any Nevada casino, the same list that would later catch up with Frank Rosenthal. The regulator who’d once held the keys to every game in the state ended up locked out of all of them for good.
There’s a strange kind of symmetry in what’s happened to keno itself since then. The game that ran for decades on players trusting an old, quietly imperfect random-number system has all but vanished from the Strip — Clark County had only sixteen licensed keno locations left as of late 2023, a drop of nearly seventy percent in just five years. Casino operators didn’t pull the plug because of Ron Harris specifically; they pulled it because a live keno lounge eats up floor space and staffing costs that a bank of video machines can cover with a fraction of the overhead, for a game whose slow pace never generated much revenue per square foot to begin with. “They take up X amount of casino space that could go into machines that have a lower overhead cost,” one downtown casino operations executive put it, matter-of-fact about a decision that had nothing to do with sentiment. But it’s hard not to notice the shape of it anyway: the very qualities that made keno lovable — its age, its slowness, its old-fashioned faith that the numbers really were random — were exactly what let a state employee quietly beat it for two straight years, and exactly what eventually made it not worth keeping on the floor at all.