Mandalay Bay shooter Stephen Paddock gambled with at least $160,000 in the past several weeks at Las Vegas casinos, according to multiple senior law enforcement officials.
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Obviously, he’d been planning this massacre for some time. What’s in any way surprising about him gambling large amounts of money if he knew he wasn’t going to be around to enjoy it?
I think he had been planning for at least a little while, but for a high-stakes gambler (which he apparently was or had become) $160K in a few weeks is not a big deal. He was well off, supposedly from real estate investments.
This doesn’t sound like a guy who just “snapped”. The media will try to make anger at the casinos the motive, but what is 32 grand to a guy they describe as a “multi millionaire”. For what it’s worth, the 9/11 jihadis hit up bars and strip clubs in the weeks leading up to the attacks.
I’ve been saying for more than 24 hours now that this guy seems to fit the profile of someone who was laundering money for someone — perhaps for clients outside the country.
I am thinking, he was thinking...
I win, I go home.
I lose, I make them pay.
I was on a cruise a few years ago where I shared a dinner table with rational-seeming, educated, at least average intelligence ladies, senior citizens. The last evening, one of them was saying how excited she was that the cruise line gave her a FREE cruise to be taken in the not-too-distant future. One of her friends nudged it out of her.....she had lost $3000 on the slots, and had a pretty healthy bar bill. That's an anecdotal example of just how detached from reality even sane people can become in that environment.