The casino is a place where champagne glasses clink, tourists and locals mingle, and people try their hand at luck in a setting that is as much about socializing as it is about gambling. While casinos often add a slew of other luxuries to draw in visitors, such as restaurants, stage shows and dramatic scenery, they still aren’t very different from a public house where gambling is allowed and there is an opportunity to win money.

Gambling is a highly risky business that seems to encourage the worst tendencies in people. Cheating, stealing and scamming seem to be the norm rather than the exception. That is why casinos spend a significant amount of time, effort and money on security. In Casino, the director Martin Scorsese focuses on three main characters, but he lays bare an entire web of corruption that spread out from Las Vegas and had tentacles reaching into politicians, unions, the Chicago mob and a Midwest mafia based in Kansas City.

In addition to a well-tuned security team, modern casinos use elaborate surveillance systems with cameras in the ceiling that watch every table, window and doorway. These cameras can be adjusted to focus on suspicious patrons by workers in a room filled with banks of monitors. Casinos also offer players a variety of gaming options from traditional casino games like blackjack and poker that test the player’s skills against each other to slot machines that allow them to spin a reel while they wait for a winning combination.