Marie Brand und das Spiel mit dem Glück (2019)

A retailer is puzzled when two boys buy the same gaming machine from him in quick succession, pay with small change, and then immediately disappear each time. Suspecting that something is wrong, he follows them. This leads him to a car parked behind the neighboring casino with its trunk open. Inside, he finds not only the small change lying openly in boxes, but also the driver, who appears to have been shot. Detective Chief Inspector Marie Brand and her colleague Jürgen Simmel arrive at the crime scene to take over the case. The dead man is Sigmar Calser, the owner of the casino, who runs twelve gaming venues in Cologne alone and more in nearby towns. The two boys say they saw a man wearing a hood by the car who took a bag from the back seat. Marie Brand reviews the surveillance footage but cannot identify the suspected culprit in it. Alongside his son, Calser was managing director of Calser Casinos. Oliver Calser is able to use a computer to determine how much cash is missing. It amounts to more than 230,000 euros. At all the other casinos, a security company collects the money; only here in Cologne had Calser insisted on continuing to do it himself. Someone who would have known about this is Lothar Emmerich, a former co-founder of Calser Casinos, who illegally enriched himself by rigging slot machines and even went to prison for it. Another suspect is Calser’s second son, Michi. He had fallen out with his father because his girlfriend’s gambling addiction had destroyed her, and he could no longer bear his father’s business as a result. He now works for an addiction-support service, helping others affected by addiction. Although he has an alibi for the time of the crime, provided by the friendly couple Müchen, they too are opponents of Calser Casinos and even sued Michi’s father, so the alibi does not seem very credible. Another suspect comes into the picture when Marie Brand finds evidence that Jutta Lehmann, one of Calser’s employees, has a gambling addiction. Although employees are theoretically not allowed to gamble, she does so secretly anyway. Brand had already seen this on the surveillance videos, but only recognized it after receiving another clue. When questioned, Jutta reveals that she has massive debts her husband knows nothing about, because she managed to hide them very cleverly and always brought home some money in winnings as well. Recently, however, she had noticed a “milker” at the casino, someone who skillfully takes over machines from other players just when they are about to pay out a win. Until then, she had been able to take advantage of these moments herself, but since the milkers arrived, she has remained mired in debt. Brand and Simmel quickly identify the Janev brothers as these “milkers.” They tell the detectives that after his release from prison, Lothar Emmerich was supposedly still active as a slot-machine cheat. The detectives follow up on the lead and arrive just as Emmerich is attacked by an unknown man. Simmel immediately gives chase but cannot catch him. Brand, however, finds the stolen bag of casino money in Emmerich’s caravan. The suspect admits that he had been working on a way to cheat the slot machines again, but with the electronics used nowadays, he can no longer “pull it off.” The stranger had just put the money bag in his caravan. He did not murder Calser. Since Calser’s phone was also in the money bag and Brand analyzes the messages, Jutta Lehmann remains a focus of the investigation. She had been having an affair with the victim, and Calser was the father of her child—a fact no one else had known. When Brand and Simmel go to see her, they find her dead on a bench. Everything is meant to point to suicide, which Brand immediately doubts. She tries to connect the two deaths and concludes that the answer lies with Oliver Calser. His father had stood in the way of the casino sale he was planning, so Oliver got rid of him. Jutta Lehmann wanted hush money, since the existence of her child would otherwise mean the inheritance had to be divided three ways. After the pistol used to shoot his father is found in Oliver Calser’s possession, Calser is arrested.