Behind an unmarked door, the secret surveillance bunker in the bowels of Maryland’s largest casino was humming with activity. A manager on the gambling floor at Maryland Live had called in some suspicious behavior from one of the table-game pits, and the surveillance supervisor was blurting camera numbers like a quarterback calling an audible. Radios were crackling, and automated announcements were piped into the room every time a secured door opened on the massive Arundel Mills property. But the focus was on the bank of 42-inch monitors at the front of the room. The surveillance team was quickly trying to determine whether a customer’s odd behavior indicated cheating or . . . something else. “See that?” a surveillance operative asked. “I don’t know,” another one said, staring at the screens on the wall. The eyes in the sky never blink at Maryland Live, where officials are nearly as obsessive — and surreptitious — about spycraft as their neighbors at the National Security Agency. And for good reason. Every month hundreds of thousands of gamblers stream into the casino, leaving behind more than $50 million in revenue. Protecting that gold mine from thieves, cheats, drunks and other threats: a security force of 200 officers and a separate state-of-the-art surveillance operation. At Maryland Live, they’re always watching, pan-tilt-zooming, searching for wrongdoing in a place where somebody, somewhere is probably doing something they shouldn’t — usually at the expense of the casino’s bottom line. More than 1,200 cameras in and around the casino are […]

Source www.washingtonpost.com