Don’t Push Your Luck!
Keeping Tabs Weekly, Spring 2020
In the summer of 2019, J. T. Metzger experienced what he described as a “supernatural” event in Las Vegas, Nevada.
“She didn’t know the Sinatra song,” he told Keeping Tabs Weekly, “but Lady Luck was with me the entire night.”
Metzger, an accountant from the Chicago suburb of North Aurora, arrived in Sin City for the long Independence Day holiday in July 2019. He checked into the Ellis Island Casino just east of the Las Vegas Strip with two thousand dollars “to lose,” as he put it, and there, he said he met a showgirl in a red silk costume “who was a much more appealing lady in red than that stupid song from when I was a kid.”
She introduced herself as Lady Luck (“She said she didn’t have a middle name,” Metzger joked), and she proceeded to accompany the accountant to every table he visited for the bulk of that Thursday night. From the Bellagio to Caesars Palace, Metzger played everything from slot machines to craps to Texas Hold’em, each time with Lady Luck smiling and nodding or frowning and shaking her head to guide his bets.
By midnight, Metzger had almost $11,000 cash in his jacket pockets.
“She was amazing. I offered to buy her drinks everywhere we went,” he said, “but she only wanted water.”
Security footage from the MGM-Grand Losers Most Wanted Bar shows Metzger at a table by himself with both a martini and a water.
“Mr. Metzger’s companion,” said Wiliam Hartford of the Julian & Julian Law Associates of North Aurora, “whom we believe to be in the employ of one or all five of the primary casino owners, excused herself from the table for all of five minutes.”
That, Hartford alleged, is just the footage the MGM chose to release.
By the time the two of them reached Caesars Palace, however, Metzger said Lady Luck had taken issue with his impatience.
“It was late, and I was tired,” he explained. “It felt like we’d been nickel-and-diming our way down the Strip. I wanted to score big and call it a night. Yes, she’d been right every time she helped me out. So, I thought her advice was rock-solid. But every time I tried to play for bigger bucks, she told me no.”
Frustrated, Metzger suggested to his companion that she was probably “in on it” and was looking for a big cashout from him herself. She went silent on him after that, he said, and though she still hung around, she stopped offering him direction on how to play the tables.
That, Metzger said, was how he was open to an opportunity like the Ento.
The Ento, a well-known Vegas high roller from California who flies himself into Vegas once a month, was in Caesars Palace that night, and Metzger spotted the successful poker player with an unexpected vulnerability: an exposed money clip.
“I saw him taking out the clip,” Metzger admitted. “He was headed to the counter to change out his cash. I could see the bills even. Three minutes later, he’d have changed it out, and this wouldn’t have happened.”
He turned to Lady Luck, he said, and asked her directly: “If I grab this guy’s money, are the odds in my favor that I can get away?”
Lady Luck, Metzger claimed, answered with one word: “Yes.”
The Ento, known along the Strip for his eccentric responses, laughed loud and hard when Metzger approached him from behind and grabbed the money clip from his hand. As a result, Metzger fled the casino before security could respond and rushed out into Caesars Palace’s famed entryway. There, before he reached the fountains, he was struck by an arriving town car and knocked down.
The clip slipped from his grasp.
“I was up and a good twenty yards away before I realized I didn’t have it anymore,” he explained to Keeping Tabs Weekly. “I don’t know what I was thinking—I went back for it.”
Security was able to detain Metzger when he returned, and the Enforcement Division of the Nevada Gaming Control Board chose to release him without charges, privately citing “drunken hallucinations” of an alleged accomplice offering gambling tips. Casino managers say no footage from any cameras show Metzger in the company of anyone else.
Metzger doesn’t care what they say about Lady Luck; he doesn’t even care that the casinos took back his eleven thousand in winnings (though he has retained an attorney to attempt to recover it). Instead, what he cares about most is “not playing my cards right.”
“I should’ve asked her, ‘Can I get away with this guy’s money’?” Metzger conceded. “I was scot-free until I went back for the money clip. I think dealing with the supernatural is a delicate thing. I just asked the wrong question.”
Vegas casino officials called the incident closed and said Metzger’s talk of Lady Luck is “the same story a thousand other losers who come to town tell their spouses afterward.”
When his money clip containing almost forty thousand dollars was returned to him, the Ento relayed to reporters a confusing account: “Last month, meteorologists in San Diego, where I hail from, saw a storm cloud about 8 miles long by 8 miles wide. But it wasn’t a storm cloud. Know what it was? Ladybugs. Millions of ladybugs. They called it a bloom of ladybugs. And I was in the sky that day in my Cessna, headed for Vegas. A little voice in the cabin with me told me to climb, so I did, and I missed that bloom by no more than a thousand feet. So, I’ll tell you this: luck be a ladybug that night. I just about had a heart attack. The whole thing almost convinced me not to come this time.
“So, that was how I knew to ask: ‘Is anything exciting going to happen if I come back in July?’” The Ento smiled as he added, “You see, I asked the right question.”
