The True Story Of A Failed Casino Heist

A fake assault rifle. A can of pepper spray. Two ATVs. A motorised skateboard, and a blow-up doll. The inside story of how a twenty-something refugee from Bosnia hatched a brazen scheme to live out his own version of the American dream.

- Davy Rothbart

EARLY ONE FRIDAY morning in July 2006, just before dawn, Adnan Alisic, 26, and his friend Fleka, 24, crouched in the back of a hot green van in a parking lot across from the Casino Arizona on the eastern edge of Phoenix and waited. Beside them, in duffel bags, lay the tools for the elaborate heist they’d planned: pepper spray, road flares, smoke bombs, a replica AK-47, a blow-up doll, gas cans, and maps of the area’s maze of subterranean sewer tunnels. After months of meticulous planning, they were about to embark on one of the boldest and most inventive heists of all time. But as the minutes crawled past, they began to fear they’d missed their target, an armoured truck carrying as much as US$10 million in cash. Maybe it had already come and gone? Then Fleka spotted it. Adnan leaped into the driver’s seat, donned ski goggles and a knit cap, and cranked the van into gear, following the truck. He lifted the fake AK onto his lap and hissed to Fleka, “Come on, let’s do this.”

ADNAN ARRIVED IN PHOENIX 10 years before the heist, at age 17, with his parents and sister, one family among a flood of Bosnian refugees escaping Europe’s worst genocide since World War II. Though at first he spoke no English, Adnan was friendly and sharp-witted and soon found work as a room-service attendant at the DoubleTree Hotel in Scottsdale, where his mother, a schoolteacher in her native country, worked as a maid. After a few years, when he’d saved enough to buy his own wheels, a guy he worked with encouraged him to check out a used-car auction.