Word: wheeling
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...eleventh French casino to be raided and the seventh to be closed in the past two years. Police are seeking to halt a croupier crime wave that has robbed French gambling palaces of uncounted millions and besmirched France's longtime reputation for honest dealing at the roulette wheel. As gambling police explained it, the once honorable profession of croupier, traditionally passed on from father to son, has been taken over by organized crime. Even France's major croupier school has been infiltrated by gangsters. Croupier school graduates figured prominently among the 20 dealers who were tried...
...management is almost as old as roulette, which was supposedly invented by Philosopher Blaise Pascal in 1655. A crooked croupier merely palms a $100 chip or two from the stacks of losers' chips that he rakes to the side of the roulette layout after each turn of the wheel. Since the croupiers' dinner jacket pockets are traditionally stitched shut to prevent just such finagling, nimble-fingered dealers tuck stolen chips inside their shirts or cuffs...
...Interior's gambling police, hopes that the jailing of the 60 croupiers now awaiting trial will have a deterrent effect on future croupier capers. If not, the centuries-old call of the croupier, "Rien ne va plus!" (No more bets!), that rings out as the spinning wheel comes toward its heart-stopping halt, may prove to be the death knell of the French casino industry...
...four-wheel-drive Toyota bucked and rattled over a rutted road, past a desolate landscape of brick red clay and wind-sculpted termite hills, it was hard to imagine how anyone could live in this barren wasteland. Even tough acacia trees wither and die in the unceasing glare of the Ogaden's hostile sun. Suddenly the car rumbled to a stop. "Look over there," said the guide, Mohamed Heeban, gesturing toward a clump of thornbushes along the bank of a dried-up stream. "That is Karraro, the city under the trees...
...along with journalists and fans from just about everywhere, gather for the 13th Olympic Winter Games. A crew of 200 translators fluent in two dozen or so languages has been brought in to smooth the competitors' way. A Panzer division of vehicles -buses, cars, vans, snowmobiles and four-wheel-drive mountain climbers-has been assembled to transport people and supplies...