According to Wynn Las Vegas dealer Kanie Kastroll, who testified at the tip hearings before the state labor commissioner last week, chips dropped in the toke boxes at the side of a table game are dumped into a larger, locked box in a podium in the pit area and then the podium box is taken into a count room where the total amount of tips is determined by management personnel without any dealers involved in the counting or accounting process.

Adding more mystery as to whether the tokes are being accounted for properly, Kanie Kastroll, another tables games dealer who has been at the Wynn since it opened, testified that for the last three years she’s kept a daily record of the tip distribution report “for myself and everybody else in case we need it for reimbursement purposes.” The 41-year-old dealer, who also was elected in May as vice president of Local 721 of the Transport Workers Union, the labor organization that represents the nearly 600 dealers at the Wynn, said she called her daily tally the “Toke Error Report” because surprisingly there were a lot of errors in management’s reporting of the tokes.

“Up until June 26, 2009, and I started it Sept. 1, 2006, I found there to be an error 57 percent of the time,” she told a questioning Lawrence Litman, the attorney who represents Meghan Smith, Kastroll’s fellow dealer at the Wynn until she quit in late July 2007. “And of that 57 percent, 17 percent of those days there was more than one error. The most common error was in the case of toke shares. One plus one plus one should be three, but sometimes the (Wynn) report would say two when the calculator said three so you’d ask yourself where is the missing share of tokes going?” Litman followed, asking if she ever established where the missing tokes went and she said no. He also asked if she had some idea who would get the distribution of shares.

“I don’t know,” she replied, “because we’re not doing the paperwork. Could be a fund or an individual. That’s my concern, the accountability of it.” Litman then asked if she knew of instances where CSTLs were being paid incorrectly. “At one point, there were a lot of CSTLs getting paid vacation tokes,” Kastroll testified. “There were three CSTLs meeting with management recently (and) they still were being paid with tokes even though they didn’t have any time on the floor. Two are on the Wynn rebuttal list. They were in the office being coached by (Wynn Resorts principal attorney) Mr. (Gregory) Kamer.” During a break, Kastroll was asked how it was possible there was a 57 percent error rate.

“That’s the question I have,” she said. “If your profession is accounting or payroll, you’re only job is to get the numbers right down to the penny. There’s no gray area, it’s black and white or black and red in their terms. So, to have a 57 percent error rate is extremely high for an accountant or a payroll person.” Another issue that feeds the suspicion mill is the record of what goes on in the count room from which dealers are excluded. Wynn Resorts provides storage space in the dealer’s lounge for the daily toke records and makes available a videotape of the counting that dealers find totally useless. Baldonado was asked about the tapes and what he discovered about them.

During last week’s testimony before the state labor commissioner, it was said that customers at the Wynn Las Vegas Resort would lay down tips for the dealer because they could distinguish dealers who wear uniforms from management employees who wear suits and ties.

“My discovery was that certain boxes had been emptied and there was no record of them being mucked (or sorted),” he said. “The camera angles were bad. There were two or three cameras. Even the best angle couldn’t determine
what the toke count was and you couldn’t tell what color certain chips were. It’s just not a clear picture of what’s going on down there.” Likewise, Kastroll said the tapes were a joke. “It was a really grainy video, it wasn’t even color I don’t think and I had a real hard time seeing from the angles,” she said during a lunch break on the third day of testimony. “ There were multiple angles, but each one of them was bad because of the body position of the guy counting the money.

It was very hard to see difference in value, denomination or grand total of the monies because as dealers when we usually count racks of money, when they bring a fill to our table, we’re counting it from less than a foot away, right under our noses and in front of our eyes. That’s how we verify money. To verify money from across a room and through a video camera, that’s just ridiculous. How are we supposed to verify anything? “The other issue is even if we counted the money, how do we know the accuracy of the division of the monies because we are not involved at all in the paperwork aspect of man-hours and division of monies.” She also mentioned incidents where there were “obscure sheets” of daily toke records that had amounts — $6,000, $4,000 and $1,500 – in certain places on the sheet, but then they weren’t reported elsewhere on the same
report.

“I called payroll and asked if they’d please explain and give me a simple answer, but they went around and around with me,” Kastroll testified. “I still have no answer from the house what these mystery monies are.” In addition, Baldonado added fuel to the controversy over the toke chip count and the denominations of chips. “I’ve heard from certain dealers that they’ve dropped yellow ($1,000) chips and supposedly they dropped 50 of them (on a shift) and when they counted them only 30 came out,” he said. Other dealer suspicions that could account for low toke totals at the Wynn Resort center on the comingling of tokes from the Wynn Resort and the Encore, both owned by Wynn and his Wynn Resorts Limited.

Not only are the unmarked and unnumbered toke boxes for each casino the same – solid brown metal boxes with identical measurements and the same locks on top – but so are, according to dealers, the toke collection boxes in the podiums that are taken to a count room where the possibility exists that numbers from chip counting could be mixed up or transposed between casinos. Further confusion in the toke totals could occur if the chips aren’t mucked properly, as Baldonado noted for the record, which would make a determination from which casino the chips came from impossible. Kamer, the Wynn attorney, had a list of 15 witnesses ready to be called, but had to regroup
his defense after the first witness he called was dismissed without saying a word.

John Hinchliff, general manager of the McCormick and Schmick’s restaurant in Las Vegas and chairman of the Nevada Restaurant Association, sat patiently in the witness chair for about 15 minutes while attorneys on both sides argued about Hinchliff’s unspoken testimony that required a decision by Labor Commissioner Michael Tanchek. Attorney Leon Greenberg said the NRA chairman had no knowledge of the casino tokes policy and for that reason he should be excluded from giving testimony, but the Wynn attorney disagreed, bringing in the importance of Nevada Revised Statute 608.160 – it says it’s unlawful for anybody to take all or part of any tips given to their employees – that is at the heart of the tip-sharing issue.