If you ever consider robbing a casino on the Las Vegas Strip, please do not compound the idiocy of your crime by doing it in blackface.
People watch Ocean’s 11 and whatever that stupid Kevin Spacey movie was where the kids were counting cards at the blackjack table and think taking down a casino is some easy feat.
It’s not.
According to authorities, a 26-year-old white man named Cameron James Kennedy is learning this the hard way. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that Kennedy was charged Friday in federal court with robbery and faces 20 years in prison for allegedly holding up the New York New York casino on the Strip.
According to the criminal complaint, Kennedy—who was already under federal supervision for a previous crime—cut off his ankle bracelet, used makeup to appear black and robbed a cash cage at the casino in the early-morning hours of Jan. 10.
According to the complaint, he told the cashier to give him all of her “hundreds, and don’t mess around.”
He then took his $23,000 and fled the casino in a taxicab, authorities say.
There is so much to unpack here.
The first mistake was robbing a casino on the Strip. Why would anyone do that?
Let me be clear that I don’t think you should be robbing casinos at all, but if you are going to try it, don’t try the Strip. You’d be better off going to one of the local casinos, like Texas Station or the Fiesta.
Actually, scratch that. Those are patrolled by the North Las Vegas Police Department, and they don’t have anything to do, so they will be on you with a quickness.
But seriously. Red Rock. The Gold Coast. The Orleans. Hell, the Southpoint. Anything but a casino on the Strip, where Las Vegas Metro is out in full force all day and all night long.
Plus, those Strip casinos have a lot of armed security. You could get killed.
Even worse than choosing to rob a casino on the Strip is choosing to rob a casino on the Strip while wearing blackface.
Although the cashier told police she wasn’t fooled by the makeup (she said the guy’s skin tone was “off” and “blotchy.” She has to be black. That sounds like something a black lady would say), the suspect was initially reported to be a black man.
Now, you know good and well that they are for sure not going to let a black man get away with robbing a casino. They are going to do everything they can to find him and kill him throw him under the jail.
Then there is the great escape from the scene of the crime in a taxicab, of all things.
A taxi. You rob a casino and leave in a taxi? Seriously? Was this planned out at all?
Eventually, Kennedy ended up being ID’d and getting caught because people he knew turned him in.
He was arrested just 15 days after the Ocean’s 29,023,984,203,842,038,424 heist.
The lesson here, kids, is don’t ever try to rob a casino on the Las Vegas Strip. And if you are going to rob a casino on the Las Vegas Strip, don’t do it in blackface. And if you are going to rob a casino on the Las Vegas Strip while wearing blackface, don’t flee the scene of the crime in a taxicab.
And if you are going to ignore all of the advice in the preceding paragraph and rob a casino while wearing blackface and then flee in a cab, don’t go over to people’s houses within hours of doing it wearing the same clothes and still having traces of the blackface makeup on your face.
Don’t be an idiot.