Glossary entry
The skim
thuh SKIM
Definition
thuh SKIM
Cash removed from a casino count room before the takings are recorded, and therefore before they are taxed or reported to regulators.
“The skim moved out of Las Vegas in suitcases every month and was divided between four midwestern families.”
This was the largest and most durable earner American organised crime ever built. Casinos financed with Teamsters pension fund loans installed people who could be trusted in the count rooms, and a percentage of the cash was simply never written down.
It ran from the 1950s into the early 1980s and ended with the federal prosecutions that followed the Strawman investigations in Kansas City. Nothing on that scale has been available to those organisations since.