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In the book, you talk about the magical thinking that comes with gambling. Do you think it fulfills the need to believe in a world that has this mystical meaning?

FB: We don't follow quantum physics. We've read some about it. There's a lot of work done in that area and in other areas that suggests there are dimensions in our experience that we don't yet quite fathom. Part of that is understanding what you're doing, part of it is experiences you've had where you're playing with somebody and you get a 20. The dealer has got to hit on 16 and somehow you know it's a 5. Before it comes, you know it's a 5. Boom. She's 21 and you're out.

You play for a while, you've seen that happen hundreds of times. How did you know before the card turned that it was a 5? So your conviction in this experience is real?

SB: I don't know that you would say we believe in it. I would say we don't disbelieve in it. There is, in the study of gambling, lots of magical thinking of various kinds. All gamblers have all kinds of superstitions and if you don't have any, you make them up on the spot. You know: Everything's gone sour since this guy came to the table.

When you were busted out of the Grand Casino, did you feel betrayed?

FB: In a sense. We went there, I don't know how many times -- two, three dozen times that year. Sometimes twice a week. Sometimes twice a month. We knew everybody. They have this thing in their manuals about how the dealers and the pit people and the floor people are supposed to make friends with the players, especially the regular players -- call them by their names, inquire into their health and how they did. It's all written down in their manuals. It's a strategy to make the player feel at home. Well, it works. We felt like we were at home. We felt like this was our casino, and we always went there. So when this happened it was like the world had been turned upside down. It was very strange.

SB: They had a good restaurant, too.

FB: They did have a very good restaurant.

It sounds as if the veil was lifted.

FB: That presumes that we were unaware of the puppeteer to start with. I don't think we were unaware.

When you go to the casinos, they try to make it a family entertainment. They try to make it nice and sweet, like going to a fair or something like that. You never see anything that looks particularly thuggish. This looked plenty thuggish plenty quick.

We were hauled out, not hauled, but we were walked out into a concrete room. A gray-concrete-walls, folding-chairs kind of thing. Two guys who ...

SB: I think they couldn't quite make it to the police force.

FB: ... and they start grilling and making accusations. At that point you think, well, what I'm going to do is mind my p's and q's and wait until these guys finish and then I'm getting out of here. And we did, and the rest of it happened some time later. It was a year later that they actually really started pursuing a legal case against us.

Your experience in the justice system sounds chilling. What was it like having criminal charges hanging over your head for two years?

SB: It's chilling because it's so nonsensical. Anything can happen at any time. We had sort of stayed away from the justice system altogether for our whole lives. It seems capricious, which is terrifying.

FB: In much more serious cases, you see things on television all the time that this guy's been in jail for 20 years and now they find out that he's innocent. And you think, well, this happened to us and we're relatively well-established, recognized members of the community. Now they're taking us to the Harrison County Jail to book us. You wonder if the jails aren't filled with people who got there by some caprice. It's unnerving to think that it works that way.

One of our lawyers said: "You know those scenes in 'Law & Order' where the D.A. sits and they talk about what they're going to do, what's the law and what's justice and so forth? It doesn't happen that way. Never happens that way. They're prosecutors. What they do is prosecute."

What was your reaction when you found out the charges had been dropped?

FB: I felt greatly relieved. Understand that this is two years before the mast. This is two years with this stuff every morning when you wake up. You wake up every morning and it's there. It's pervasive, like some sort of illness in the family. It's constantly on you. You wake up and for a moment you think, "Oh, I'm a regular guy having a regular life," and then you go "Oh, no no no, I'm under indictment for this thing." It's really horrifying. So when the release came, when the charges were dropped, when the D.A. said we weren't doing anything improper, one felt splendid and relieved.

Do you still gamble?

FB: Very little.

Didn't you lose something like $17,000 when a reporter came to interview you at the casinos?

FB: Daniel Max, the guy from the New York Times magazine, came and wanted to see us "in action." And we did fine as long as he was there, except he left at like 3 o'clock and by 5 I had lost a lot of money. That was the first time I'd been to the casino this year.

We don't go so much anymore. The bloom is off the rose.

Jim Hanas is a staff writer for the Memphis Flyer, an alternative weekly.

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