Rodolfo Rodriguez Cabrera didn’t set out to mastermind a global counterfeiting ring. All he wanted was to earn a decent living doing what he loves most: tinkering with electronics. That’s why he started his own slot-machine repair company in Riga, Latvia. Just to make a little cash while playing with circuit boards.

Born and raised in Camagüey, Cuba, Cabrera always had an affinity for technical pursuits. Once, after winning a student essay contest in 1976, he was given a personal audience with Fidel Castro. When the dictator asked the 10-year-old what he wanted to be when he grew up, Cabrera confidently replied, “An architectural engineer.”

Nine years later, after becoming obsessed with airplanes as a teenager, Cabrera won a scholarship to Riga Civil Aviation Engineers Institute, home to one of the Soviet Union’s finest aeronautical-engineering programs. While working toward his degree, he fell in love with an older Latvian woman, and though he was expected to return to Cuba after graduation to serve Castro’s regime, Cabrera decided to stay in Riga and build a new life designing and working on aircraft.

But soon after Cabrera completed his degree, Latvia broke free from the dying Soviet Union. The newly independent country had no aerospace industry of its own, and thus no aerospace jobs. Instead of fixing jet engines, Cabrera was forced to make money repairing radios and telephones. In 1994 he accepted a gig with a company called Altea, servicing the boxy videogame consoles found atop Eastern European bars, where they offer drunks the chance to waste a few coins answering trivia questions or playing Tetris.

As Latvia became more open and prosperous, slot machines began to pop up in the nation’s bars, clubs, and supermarkets, creating new repair opportunities for Altea. Though he wasn’t much of a gambler, Cabrera was drawn to these devices. He spent hours dissecting slot electronics to learn everything he could about how they worked. The deeper he plunged, the more he came to regard slot machines as his true professional calling. So in 2004, Cabrera used his modest savings to found his own repair company, FE Electronic.

Cabrera was particularly fond of the slots made by Nevada-based International Game Technology, which he considered by far the industry’s most advanced. Like all slots, IGT’s machines are powered by proprietary circuit boards equipped with rows of memory cards; those cards, in turn, contain each game’s unique software. To prevent piracy, the boards are designed to reject memory cards unless they’re accompanied by a security chip programmed with an uncrackable authorization code.

Like any good hacker, Cabrera decided to express his admiration for IGT’s technology by trying to beat it. Using blueprints meant to assist casino service personnel, he figured out a way to solder a half-dozen jumper wires between the memory cards and the motherboards, completing circuits that circumvented the machine’s security. This gave him the ability to load any IGT game he wanted onto the boards. If he was given a used Pharaoh’s Gold machine, for example, he could convert it to a Cleopatra II by swapping in freshly programmed memory cards.

However innocent his initial intentions, Cabrera quickly saw the business potential in this breakthrough. He knew that converting machines without IGT’s OK wasn’t legal. But this was Latvia, he figured, where capitalism is wild and woolly. Surely no one would notice if he made a few bucks on the side by hacking IGT’s tech.

There was a time when casinos only grudgingly tolerated slot machines. In the early years of Las Vegas, slots were relegated to the perimeter of casino floors, where they were expected to gobble up coins from women waiting on their blackjack-playing husbands. The machines’ mechanical gears required constant maintenance, and the games were magnets for cheats. Scammers became adept at techniques like affixing coins to fishing lines or covertly prying open service doors to monkey with the reels.

But a salesman named William “Si” Redd had the foresight to realize that digital technology would eventually transform slots into a revenue powerhouse. In the early 1970s, Redd was the independent Nevada distributor for the Bally Manufacturing Corporation of Chicago, which made the popular Money Honey slot machine. Flush with cash from sales of that game and others like Big Bertha, Redd started acquiring tiny startups that were pioneering videogames, which at the time were considered little more than engineering novelties. One of his acquisitions, Raven Electronics of Reno, was developing a video blackjack machine; another, Nutting Associates of Mountain View, California, had created Computer Space, a primitive forerunner of Asteroids.

Redd planned on using these startups’ know-how to help create video slot machines, which would replace fickle gears with reliable circuit boards. Such machines would require less maintenance and be less susceptible to cheating than their analog predecessors. In the midst of Redd’s buying spree, Bally offered to purchase his distributorship. Redd agreed with one condition: that he be allowed to retain the video-related patents he had acquired. Bally myopically took the deal, and Redd went off to found the A-1 Supply Company—later renamed International Game Technology.

Just as Redd had foreseen, IGT’s video machines were a boon to casinos. In 1971, slots generated 36 percent of Nevada’s gaming revenue; by 1981, with digital slots on the rise, that figure was up to 44 percent. But slots didn’t truly become America’s favorite casino pastime until a Norwegian mathematician named Inge Telnaes came up with the most brilliant gambling innovation since the point spread.

The problem with slot machines, as Telnaes saw it, was that their jackpots were limited by the number of reels they could use. Since players expected each reel to have no more than 10 to 15 symbols, a machine needed many reels to make the odds long enough to justify a huge payout when all the cherries or bells settled into a row. But the more reels a machine had, the more players were reminded of the fact that their quest for riches would likely end in futility; no one wanted to try their luck on a machine with dozens of reels (or, alternatively, hundreds and hundreds of symbols on enormous reels).

Telnaes’ solution to this conundrum was US Patent Number 4,448,419, awarded in 1984. His invention called for slot machine results to be determined not by the spinning of reels but by a random-number generator. The reels on such a machine would display only a visual representation of the generator’s results, lining up when a winning number spit forth or (far more frequently) settling into a losing mishmash of symbols. The patent made possible the development of slot machines that could offer extremely long odds—and thus enticingly massive jackpots—while still appearing to have just a few tumblers. IGT wisely purchased Telnaes’ patent in 1989, thereby guaranteeing itself a steady stream of royalties as its competitors adopted random-number generators, too.

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