This was actually Ian Fleming’s first James Bond Novel released in 1953.
In the novel, Bond goes toe to toe with Le Chiffre, in Baccarat at the casino in Royale-les-Eaux, France (a fictional town in Northern France, a place I am not unfamiliar with…Northern France that is).
Bond, sharp dressed, smoking cigarettes, and with heaps of Game, many times I thought I was reading about myself.
The music thumps, the lights flash, the shot glasses wait for willing lips. But the bouncers are reduced to kicking at the curb, hoping somebody, anybody, will round the corner. Friday nights are slow lately in Rosarito Beach’s party zone, and everyone knows the drug war is to blame.
Hundreds of corpses discovered in and near Tijuana. Some of them headless, others dissolved in barrels of lye. People hear that, and they stay away.
It may not be surprising to hear that as bodies accumulate in Tijuana (843 homicides in 2008, compared with 376 in the much larger city of Los Angeles), Rosarito Beach’s hotel occupancy rates spiral downward. On Feb. 20, the U.S. State Department issued a 12-paragraph “alert” on the perils of travel in Mexico, especially near the border.
Most of Baja’s drug-war deaths have been registered in Tijuana, about 12 miles north of Rosarito. And perhaps the most notorious case — the January arrest of a suspected cartel associate who authorities say has laid claim to dissolving 300 bodies in vats of lye — took place near Ensenada, about 50 miles to the south. A 2007 spate of armed robberies and carjackings against Americans played out along the same geographical lines. But Rosarito has seen plenty of its own trouble too.
In February 2008, Daniel LaPorte, 27, of San Diego and a 28-year-old woman named Libey (also known as Libe) Craig, of La Mesa, Calif., were killed in an apparent soured drug deal that also left three Mexican nationals dead on the outskirts of Rosarito Beach. Authorities said all of the dead had drug-related arrest records except LaPorte, a suspected marijuana smuggler whose remains were found in a barrel of chemicals.
Since September, at least eight Rosarito Beach police officers have been killed, more than two dozen have resigned, and the town’s main street, Benito Juarez Boulevard, has been the scene of at least two shootings. In one, a drive-by assailant shot and killed a 15-year-old boy and three others in a pet store.
Two men have been convicted for their part in trying to pull off a £229m heist at the Sumitomo Mitsui Bank in London.
In one of the biggest attempted bank thefts in Britain, they used hi-tech equipment to try to steal money from the accounts of big businesses.
Hugh Rodley, 61, of Twyning, near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, and sex shop owner, David Nash, 47, from Durrington, West Sussex, were foiled only at the last minute by the complexities of inter-bank money transfers.
On the early evening of 16 September 2006, two men arrived at the reception desk of the Sumitomo Mitsui Bank in London. One asked for the bank’s security supervisor, Kevin O’Donoghue.
He had a distinctive European, possibly Belgian, accent but the receptionist thought nothing of it. After all, this was the London branch of a major Japanese merchant bank with global interests and investments.
Hugh Rodley
Hugh Rodley, involved in the heist, is a self-styled lord of the manor
What she did not know was that the two men led upstairs by security chief O’Donoghue were expert hackers – and they had come to the bank to implement the first stage of the most audacious, and potentially lucrative, cyber snatch in history.
Police do not know how long the gang had been planning the operation. And those now convicted are certainly not those behind the plan.
When questioned, Kevin O’Donoghue, 34, from Birmingham, claimed that he had been coerced into helping and that his family had been threatened. He later admitted a charge of conspiracy to steal.
CCTV images showed him laughing and joking as he showed the two Belgian cyber-thieves to a terminal in one of the trading offices.
Jan Van Osselaer from Belgium and Gilles Poelvoorde from France, who admitted a charge of conspiracy to steal, had come prepared.
They used a USB memory stick to instal “keylogger” software on various workstations that recorded every button pressed by users.
‘No kingpin’
A few days later, they returned and downloaded the data from the keylogger programmes. They now had the usernames and passwords of every bank employee who had used the infected computers.
But Kevin O’Donoghue had made some mistakes. He had tampered with some of the CCTV cameras – even cutting the wires on one – in an effort to cover the gang’s tracks. Other employees started to wonder why he had started enquiring about creating extra access badges.
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The Rest is Up to You…
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK
The Guide to Getting More Out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
The view from the floor-to-ceiling windows in our room at the new Wynn Encore provides a distressingly clear picture of what’s going on in Las Vegas these days. To the south, there’s a casino project that has ground to a halt, half built, its steel skeleton an outline of a multibillion-dollar dream gone hungry. Across the street, there’s a Modernist chapel, a lonely vigil of virtue on the Strip — people seek salvation elsewhere in this town. Look west toward the mountains and you can trace the Vegas real estate developers’ dash toward the horizon with building projects. Now as far as you can drive, there are foreclosed homes and empty new developments offering come-ons to prospective buyers.
The Encore, which opened officially in January, stands like a luxurious monument of defiance to the recession. It is not; it cannot. Wynn Resorts boss Steve Wynn has cut room rates to as little as $169 a night — the original projected rates were something on the order of $350 — but he won’t cut service. That act of defiance means the Encore is a pretty astonishing value for any visitors in the mood to treat themselves to a Las Vegas fling in these tough times. The $2 billion, 2,034-room project adjoins the Wynn — the hotels are connected by a retail alley — completing Steve Wynn’s most recent move to reposition the Las Vegas mind-set. The man who brought you exploding volcanoes (the Mirage), pirate ships (Treasure Island) and over-the-top light shows, not to mention a zillion dollars’ worth of fine art (the Bellagio) has now fully assembled his antidote to overstimulation, which began with the Wynn Las Vegas in 2005. Here is a different kind of sensibility — dare we say classy? — a resort with gaming, rather than a gaming resort.
At ground level, the Encore, like its older sibling, is still all business, though Wynn had his decorator, Roger P. Thomas, nod to the Las Vegas of the past. The casino floor is dominated by a color that the company says used to be standard in casinos in the bad old good old days — just call it whorehouse red. But it works here, with the brilliant red chandeliers, the whole effect muted a bit by judicious use of off-white fabric. The other delicate touches are cast, oddly enough, by natural light streaming in from either end of the casino floor. And not only through windows — the main entrance to the Encore casino takes you through a lush, plant-and-tree-filled atrium over three stories tall. There’s a certain amount of whimsy at play here too: for instance, the brightly colored butterflies inlaid into the mosaic floors. It makes the contemplation of losing at the tables almost pleasant.
