NEVADA — TEXAS
The Casino Heist
What motivated a family to rob a Las Vegas casino?
The caper was a dollar-store Ocean’s Eleven, a low-budget scheme to rob a Las Vegas casino.
Jeff Hopper timed his entry into the Stardust Hotel to coincide with the arrival of the guard stepping from the armored truck parked outside. Tall and baby-faced, Jeff was balding fast, though only 26. His cocaine addiction kept him lean. Today he wore a baseball cap, cheap sunglasses, and a fake beard.
Inside the rundown casino, the rickety air conditioning system struggled to clear the cigarette smoke. A gangster who ran gambling ships in Los Angeles had built the Stardust in the 1930s. For decades, the Chicago mob siphoned cash from it without paying taxes. In the 1970s, Stardust was run by Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, who inspired Robert De Niro’s character in Casino. By 1992, when Jeff entered its doors, the mob had been pushed out of Vegas, and locals considered the once-glittering Stardust a grind joint for infrequent visitors.
Jeff parked himself at the bank of house phones and waited for the guard to collect the casino’s excess cash. He knew exactly how long it would take; he’d watched the procedure for weeks. When four minutes elapsed, Jeff dialed security. ‟There’s a fight at the pool,” he shouted. ‟One guy has a knife.” Following radio instructions, security personnel ran toward the pool.
As the guards departed the gaming area, two Big Gulp cups exploded along a row of slot machines. Jeff’s brother had hidden smoke bombs in them. Smoke spread throughout the casino, and a visitor yelled out, ‟They have a gun! They have a bomb.” Gamblers screamed and ran, bumping into slot machines and blackjack tables.
The armored courier left the main casino cage carrying three heavy satchels filled with $500,000 in cash and $600,000 in checks. Jeff’s brother, Bobby, followed behind him. Bobby, slightly shorter and slightly younger than Jeff, wore wire-rimmed glasses. His hair was much longer, though also starting to recede.
Bobby pulled down hard on the edge of the bags, spinning the courier around. The guard reached for his weapon but saw Bobby’s .45-caliber pistol. He dropped the bags and fell to the floor next to a craps table. Bobby’s friend Wes seized the guard’s weapon. Wes, tall and stocky, looked like an overgrown eighth-grader. Both men wore wigs, fake beards, and sunglasses. They grabbed the bags and ran, exiting the casino via an employee hallway and the loading dock. A brown station wagon driven by Jeff and Bobby’s father, Royal Hopper, 57, awaited them. Jeff had already driven off in a silver Honda.
Those of us who go to Las Vegas go to rob or get robbed, more or less. We go seeking money that isn’t really ours, and for that chance, we’re willing to fork over our money to the casino. The promise of a possible payoff — beating the house — tantalizes us even though we know the odds are stacked against us.
But we don’t all literally rob casinos. The Hoppers intrigued me. How had this family come to stage a casino heist?
I’ve both robbed and been robbed in Vegas, metaphorically speaking, more than a dozen times. Short visits, modest gambling, departures before the blues settle in.
In 1992, Wayne and I visited Vegas for our third or fourth time together. Elvis, showgirls, and mobsters were already gone. But the doors of the Sands, the Dunes, the Aladdin, and the Desert Inn were still open; their implosions were still a few years off.
Young and cash-starved, we accompanied his mom, his 86-year-old grandmother — known to all as Nene — her best friend, and her friend’s daughter. Nene taught me how to play video poker. ‟Always bet the max,” she said, while surreptitiously handing me quarters.
Some things about Vegas haven’t changed after all these decades. It’s still an icy winter pond, like those I grew up around in the Northeast, where boys played hockey and smashed pucks at one another. The surface gleams with fantasia: You can weave a fiction of yourself in ancient Rome. You can attend a concert by a world-famous pop star. You can savor a dinner crafted by one of the best chefs in the world. You can imagine yourself rich from giant gambling winnings. You can get rip-roaring drunk or indulge in the ample opportunities for sex, paid and unpaid. You can sleep during the day and stay up all night, living like a reckless billionaire.
But below the thin ice, below the grandeur and dream-fulfillment machine, is a matrix of desperation and decay: scraggly meth addicts, inebriated college kids carrying each other back to their rooms after a raucous afternoon by the pool in the harsh desert sun, and wandering tourists with blank faces that reveal they’ve lost more money than they can fathom. Most disturbing are the transplants who arrived with big aspirations and now scramble to survive, their eyes deadened with regret. And there are plenty of them.
Though newspapers covered the Hoppers’ caper at the Stardust, little was written about their background. I could only satisfy my curiosity about their motivations when I discovered that Jeff had self-published a memoir.
Jeff grew up with four siblings in poverty near Beaumont, Texas, a city I had visited before I knew about this story during a road trip around Texas in 2022. Beaumont was a grim oil-processing city with a high crime rate and limited opportunity. Along the dead streets in its downtown, tall brick buildings from the 1920s stood empty.
Rats and roaches entered through broken windows and roamed the Hoppers’ home. Classmates made fun of their tattered clothes. Royal repeatedly abandoned and returned to Jeff’s mother. Jeff felt his dad hated him. When Jeff was about ten, Royal said he should have killed him when he was a baby. Jeff’s mom doted on the kids but had neither the money nor the strength to protect them from Royal’s emotional and physical abuse.
Jeff’s youth was a roller coaster of suicide attempts, small-time con games, shoplifting, and drug and alcohol use. One day, Jeff caught Royal hitting his mom, and he started punching his dad. ‟What the hell are you going to do about it,” his father taunted, ‟you little dirty bastard?” Grabbing a knife, Royal said, ‟I should cut your worthless throat — spare the world from another sorry, weak piece of garbage.” The violence ended when Jeff’s mom pointed a gun at her husband.
Jeff started stealing cars at 15. Royal told him that if he was going to be a criminal, they might as well work together. Despite their enmity, Jeff still wanted time with his dad. After Royal was fired from a job as a small-town postmaster for sexual harassment, he asked Jeff to help him kill the complainant and witnesses, but they never carried out the plan. Together, they robbed post offices around Texas, snatching food stamps and postage for resale and blank money orders.
Still a virgin, Jeff met a girl and within a month, she was pregnant. The pair married and began raising their daughter but soon divorced. In his early twenties, Jeff worked at a lumberyard. At night, he got into bar fights and sold ecstasy.
Royal left for Vegas and got hired as a security guard at the Stardust. In September 1991, while he was wheeling a cart carrying $150,000 of cash and chips through the casino, a gunman robbed him and fled the hotel. Police couldn’t identify any suspects, though they suspected an inside job. The thief who got away was Royal’s other son, Bobby.
After the incident, Royal quit the Stardust and returned to Beaumont. When his dad handed him $5000, Jeff left the lumberyard job. During a dinner break during a shopping spree at the local mall, Royal told Jeff and Bobby, in a rare display of affection, ‟I love you guys.”
Royal then asked Jeff and Bobby for help on a ‟big project” in Vegas. Jeff had just heard his supplier would soon be arrested, and getting out of town seemed attractive. Royal, Bobby, Jeff, and their friend Wes planned the second Stardust heist during their road trip west. They made a giant map of the Stardust casino floor on an old carpet. At rest stops, they laid the carpet on the ground. Lego blocks represented surrounding buildings, and Hot Wheels stood in for their cars. Occasionally, other travelers inquired about the setup. Jeff told them it was a strategy game. Some families deal cards and play Hearts; the Hoppers planned casino robberies.
Exiting the Stardust loading dock that Monday in 1992, Royal steered the station wagon to the back edge of the Stardust parking lot, where it abutted a ragged extended-stay hotel called Budget Suites. Royal, Bobby, and Wes got out, dropped smoke bombs into the car, and jumped an eight-foot ledge to the adjoining property. They fell onto a white Ford Granada they’d parked there earlier.
I returned to Vegas a couple of months ago to follow the Hoppers’ trail. The Stardust Resort and Casino is long gone, replaced by the new Resorts World, a massive red structure in the shape of a question mark without the dot or, perhaps, a lucky seven. The original, exhilarating Stardust sign survives in the Boneyard at the Neon Museum downtown, which Wayne and I visited a few years ago.
The site of Budget Suites is now the location of the Resorts World parking garage, but looking out from it today, you can picture Bobby, Wes, and Royal making their escape.
They pulled the Granada beside a van, changed vehicles, and left the property. As they did, Las Vegas police cars and a SWAT team poured into the area. Jeff drove to a vacant parking garage and rejoined the others, who were breaking the locks on the money bags and throwing them into Jeff’s Chevy truck, which had been placed there earlier. Jeff and Bobby drove the Honda to the Las Vegas airport and flew home to Texas. Wes followed later. Royal took the truck with the cash.
Royal drove to California and shipped several boxes. He then returned to his Las Vegas apartment.
That Thursday, Jeff began receiving UPS packages filled with money in Beaumont. When he poured the contents onto his bed, they made a four-inch pile. Beyond the cash, the take included checks as large as $50,000 and other negotiable instruments turned over by gamblers to the casino. Three people had signed over deeds to their homes.
Jeff and his girlfriend, Tina, drove to her father’s farm in Kountze, Texas. Bobby and Wes were already there with their girlfriends. The group drank and danced around a bonfire while celebrating their spending plans: fast cars, boob jobs, and new lives on beaches. They threw the checks and deeds into the fire so the casinos could never collect on them. Before burning their disguises, they donned them again and replayed the robbery like a movie scene. Their lives, full of desperation until now, were suddenly exploding with the infinite joy of hopefulness.
East Texas, where the gang celebrated around the bonfire, is crawfish country. Tall pines and cypresses cover rolling hills. When I was there, coincidentally driving the same road the group did from Beaumont, trucks roared down the road carrying raw timber and finished lumber. The atmosphere was humid with the quiet dignity of the South, more like neighboring Louisiana than the rest of Texas.
Jeff was eager to pay off his child support debt, obtain custody of his young daughter, and build a life in Mexico. But first, spending. On Friday, Jeff and Tina dropped almost ten grand at local stores. Later that day, when Tina went home, police arrested her for cocaine possession.
That night, two FBI agents questioned Jeff about the Stardust robbery. He told them nothing. The agents did not reveal that his father was already in custody.
Las Vegas police had arrested Royal Hopper late Wednesday afternoon. Lingering suspicions about his presence at the earlier Stardust robbery made him a suspect. Detectives tracked the abandoned white Ford Granada and brown station wagon to two car dealers in Arizona who identified Royal as the buyer. Royal’s handwriting matched the signatures on the bills of sale. Authorities also located the shop where Royal purchased the smoke bombs.
It surprised me that Jeff, Bobby, and Wes hadn’t heard about Royal’s arrest. Poking around, I found that while his apprehension made newspapers across the country, it was not covered by the Houston Chronicle or other papers close to Beaumont.
Police found guns at Royal’s apartment. When I checked out the location during my trip to Vegas, I found the building had been subsumed by the construction of the Sphere. This new, mind-bogglingly large entertainment venue looks like a planet transmitting gleaming visual messages across galaxies. It signals the completion of Las Vegas’ transition from a neon-lit gambling mecca to an LED-illuminated entertainment spectacle.
Detectives also discovered a notebook in Royal’s apartment. The impressions left from a torn-out page included lines from a letter saying, ‟…in packing the money for the freezer, you might want to pack between steaks so it looks like meat…” and ‟Count the whole box of money so we’ll know how much we got.”
The FBI quickly realized that Royal’s sons looked like the casino robbers on the surveillance footage and traced them to their hometown in Texas. Tina, eager to get out of her drug possession charges, revealed the whole scheme to the police, and Bobby’s girlfriend confessed to helping hide the money.
For months, Royal, Jeff, Bobby, and Wes kept their mouths shut. All four were held in the same Las Vegas jail. Cops arrested Royal’s brother and Bobby’s girlfriend for hiding the robbery proceeds. Police and the FBI recovered $200,000 of the $500,000 in stolen cash. Prosecutors also charged Royal and Bobby with the earlier Stardust robbery.
In November 1992, the D.A. increased the pressure on Jeff to plead guilty. He threatened to indict Jeff’s mother and sisters if he didn’t turn. Jeff knew they were uninvolved in the scheme and cover-up. He was able to chat briefly with his father during a court appearance. Royal didn’t care if his wife and daughters were arrested. ‟Good,” he said, ‟We’ll all go down as a family. If I go down, we’ll all go down. Nobody talks.”
Nevertheless, to protect his mom and sisters, Jeff pleaded guilty. Then the dominoes fell: first Wes, then Bobby, then Royal and his brother entered guilty pleas. Royal received a 19-year sentence, Bobby, 14, Wes, 10, and Jeff, 5. At his sentencing, Royal said, ‟I realize the impact this has had on my family, those people who love me the most. I admit to being the one to involve my sons. If it wasn’t for me, they probably would not have done this.” The D.A. called Royal a demented person who manipulated his family into misery.
In prison, Jeff found God. After his release, he became a pastor and focused on prison ministry.
The remake of Ocean’s Eleven came out a year before Royal died. Who knows if he saw it or what he thought if he did. Royal Hopper was no Frank Sinatra, no George Clooney, and certainly no Nene.
Copyright © 2024 Lou Schachter • All rights reserved
