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A TV repairman from Tulsa figured out how to make Las Vegas slot machines pay him on command, and it took the casinos five years to catch up.
The 2012 Destination America series Cheating Vegas opens its look at Tommy Glenn Carmichael with the crudest tool in his arsenal: the top-bottom joint. Before the “monkey paw” and the optical “light wand” made him a legend among casino surveillance teams, Carmichael was just a repairman who had reverse-engineered an old Bally slot machine in his living room. What he built from that teardown became the foundation of a cheating career that spanned decades.
- Carmichael, a former television repairman from Tulsa, Oklahoma, learned the top-bottom joint in 1980 after a friend showed him an older Bally slot machine and the device used to beat it.
- The tool consisted of two metal pieces — a wire fed through the coin slot and a second piece pushed up through the payout chute — that, when bridged, completed a circuit and forced the payout hopper switch closed.
- His run with the purely mechanical rig ended in 1985, when police arrested him with the device at a Las Vegas restaurant, resulting in his first prison sentence.
Reverse-Engineering a Bally Machine
Carmichael’s introduction to casino cheating wasn’t glamorous. A friend handed him an aging Bally slot machine and the top-bottom joint that went with it, and Carmichael did what any repairman would do — he took it apart. Dismantling the machine let him study exactly how the payout hopper switch triggered a coin dump, and once he understood the mechanics, he adapted the tool to work across the mechanical slot machines that still dominated the Las Vegas Strip in the early 1980s.
Mechanism of the Top-Bottom Joint
The device’s simplicity is what made it so effective for as long as it was. A top wire went in through the coin slot; a bottom piece was fed up through the payout chute. When Carmichael bridged the two inside the machine, he completed an electrical circuit that forced the payout hopper switch closed, and coins dumped uncontrollably until he broke the connection himself.
Two pieces of bent metal, one through the coin slot and one up through the payout chute — bridge them together and the machine thinks it owes you a jackpot that was never there.
Building a Route Across the Strip
Carmichael started small, working the top-bottom joint for modest payouts before expanding his operation to casinos up and down the Strip. The device eventually earned him thousands of dollars, and for a time, mechanical slot machines simply had no defense against it — there was no microswitch or electronic coin counter yet to flag the forced circuit. It’s the kind of low-tech exploit that shows up again and again in documentaries about scams that outran the systems built to stop them, the same territory covered in this breakdown of money-laundering scams rated for realism.
The 1985 Arrest and What Came Next
Carmichael’s mechanical-era run ended in 1985, when police arrested him with the top-bottom joint in hand at a Las Vegas restaurant. The arrest sent him to prison, but it didn’t end his career — casinos were already moving toward computer microswitches and electronic coin counters that made the top-bottom joint obsolete, and Carmichael responded by developing the monkey paw and, later, the light wand, an optical tool built to fool the new generation of sensors. That evolution is the real arc Cheating Vegas traces across its episodes, and it’s the kind of true-crime escalation that fits alongside other casino and cartel-economy documentaries in InfoSearched’s documentary coverage.
The top-bottom joint only worked for as long as casinos ran on gears and switches instead of code, and once Carmichael got locked up in ’85, that window closed for good. What didn’t close was Carmichael himself — he came out of prison and went straight back to building better tools for the machines that had replaced the ones he’d already beaten.
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