Firsthand Account: Ace High

From a Swiss Avenue poker-playing eyewitness:

I was at Ace High earlier tonight when sometime before 11pm, Dallas SWAT announced their prescence with authority…well kinda. They started pounding on the front door as loud as you can imagine, but didn\’t get through at first. So my first instinct was that the place was being robbed. While Barney Fife and company were dicking around with the door, there was plenty of time for all 20 or 30 folks to pour out of the back door and into the back alley. Pretty much complete chaos and every man for himself at this point. Come to find out that all of the fences are really high back there in the alley, so it was a bit anti-climactic…bummer.

After a few brief moments of scampering around and watching a few people make valiant attempts at scaling these walls, SWAT came out the back door and started waving their M-16s around as the\’ve been known to do when bringing poker players to justice. Considering that just moments earlier I thought this might be an armed robbery, I was actually kinda relieved to assume the face-down-on-the-pavement position and receive my zip-cuffs. As I laid there, one of the cops actually razzed me a bit asking why I wasn\’t long gone since they\’d had so much trouble with the door. I don\’t why he was messing with me, since by my estimation, not a single person escaped.

Not a whole lot of drama after they had us all bound, lined up, searched and ticketed (for \”gambling\”). Nothing too unreasonable, once the gun barrels were lowered. A&E camera crews weren\’t there this time, although there was a camera from a news crew, but he wasn\’t well labeled and I didn\’t feel like hanging around to ask him who he was with (although I\’m now dying to know).