Originally Posted by
Coach McGuirk
Hi guys, I was the person whose room safe was broken into. I was going to make a post in the next day or two but my friend saw my post on the Rio facebook page and went ahead and made this thread. He just told me about creating this thread for me so I guess I'll make this the official forum for the incident.
For starters, let me say that I am well aware that my roommate screwed up big time by allowing this guy to stay in the room by himself. This guy was clearly a broke degenerate "poker player" and I never had a good feeling around him. I was very upset with him right after the incident but I can't change what he did. However, that doesn't change the fact that the Rio fucked up big time by opening the safe for Omar when his name was not on the room. For the record, i had $6500 in the safe and my roommate had $10000 in the safe.
Pretty tired right now so don't feel rehashing that entire night, but I'll give a few important notes. The incident appears to have occurred at approximately 10:30 pm on Thursday night. My roommate was playing craps at the time of the incident, I was in the poker room. My roommate went to talk to me in the poker room around 11:45 and left to go to the room a little after midnight. About 10 minutes later I get a frantic call from him freaking out because Omar's bags were suddenly missing and Omar wasn't answering his phone after responding to several texts until roughly 30 minutes prior. I hustled up to the room immediately and tried to open the safe (I was the only person who knew the code), the code had been changed and it would no longer open. I feared the worst almost immediately when i saw an envelope I had filled with cash in the safe now lying empty on the coffee table. We of course called security right after that and got a security guard up there within a few minutes, however maintenance took close to 15 minutes. Sure enough when maintenance came to open the safe it was empty (btw when all this happened nobody asked to see any identification from me one time).
Me and my roommate spent the next 3-4 hours filing a police report and giving statements to the LVPD as well as filling out an incident report with the casino. While all this was happening my head was spinning because I couldn't figure out for the life of me how the safe got opened, this guy was never even in the room once when I had opened or closed the safe. Later that night as I was talking to the Rio supervisor of security for the night he told me in private that a call was placed from the room at approximately 10:30 pm to hotel maintenance to open the safe. Before he told me this he was very adamant that I didn't tell anyone else about this, he made sure that I wasn't recording him and threatened to sue me if I recorded him without his knowledge.
The few times I have talked to the Rio since they refuse to acknowledge or give any information regarding times or anything that hotel maintenance might or might not have done because it's an active investigation. Apparently the next day another security person on the floor acknowledged to my roommate that the Rio "fucked up, and didn't follow protocol", but I did not personally hear this conversation. So basically all this comes down to the fact that the Rio opened a room safe for a person whose name was not on the room because they did not check any identification.
I apologize for that long winded paragraph but just wanted to rattle off as much pertinent information that I could think of. As to the scumbag who did this, his name is Omar Ghanim, apparently he had one big score at some Borgata tourney. He was begging my roommate for a stake in one of the nightlies and kept making excuses about how his Western Union transfer was being delayed. Standard broke degen stuff I guess.
The police and Harrah's do have all of his information so I suspect he will be caught eventually because I doubt he'll be able to help himself from entering the pit at some point in the future. But if anyone, especially in the Atlantic City area sees this guy in the next couple weeks I would appreciate it if you could let me know. To make matters worse the Rio said they would comp my next two nights and ended up charging me afterwards, 3 days later and they still haven't fixed it yet, waiting to hear back from the front desk manager working that night, lol.........
So yea this pretty much completely soured my trip, wasn't motivated to play any other bracelet events after this, wasn't in the right frame of mind. I'm currently filing a report with the Risk Management people who handle these type of situations. Some people are saying I should try to find a lawyer locally, I'm honestly not sure what the best recourse is at this point.