Boyd and Sharon Cox thought they were simply buying an antique roulette table when they responded to a newspaper ad several years ago.

What they ended up with is a one-of-a-kind piece of gambling history that has been talked about and written about but never actually seen by modern-day gaming regulators and insiders.

"This is the bigfoot, the UFO, the D.B. Cooper of gambling stuff," said Jim Edwards, a senior agent and 32-year veteran of the Nevada Gaming Control Board Enforcement Division.

In gambling parlance, it is a gaffed wheel. In layman's terms, it's rigged to cheat.

Edwards and several other agents joined the Coxes on Monday at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, where X-rays were taken to reveal the inner workings of the device.

"It's the only one known to exist," Edwards told the Reno Gazette-Journal.

The Coxes bought the wheel from an antiques collector in Sonora, Calif., in 2000 and have kept it in storage while they tried to figure out what to do with it.

"All he would say is that it belonged to an old guy who had it stored in his garage for 60 or 70 years," Sharon Cox said. "When he died, his family sold it to this guy."

They paid about $7,500 for the wheel and table, and an extra $1,000 to have them restored. That's when things became interesting.

"He called us and said the legs have been hollowed out and there are batteries inside about the size of orange juice cans," Sharon Cox said. "That's when we said 'Oh my God, this is a gaffed wheel."'

The Evans DeLuxe Roulette Wheel was built in Chicago or Detroit in the late 1920s and sold for the princely sum of $250. Typical roulette wheels of the era sold for about $35.

Besides being antique enthusiasts and part owners of Antiques & Treasures on West Street in downtown Reno, the Coxes have spent much of their adult lives in the gambling industry. Boyd Cox is president of Sierra Nevada Gaming Supply. Sharon is a casino host at the Peppermill, after starting her career as a roulette dealer under the tutelage of the late Sam Boyd in Las Vegas.

She recalled as a young dealer a gambler who suggested she "hit a button" and make the roulette ball land in a certain spot.

"I just laughed and told him, that's a myth," she said.

Once they had possession of the table, the Coxes contacted the Gaming Control Board to let officials know about it.

To find a rigged machine from the early 1900s is unprecedented, Edwards said.

While gambling has been legal in Nevada since 1931 and operated illegally for many years before that, whenever authorities found a rigged game, they destroyed it, often with axes or sledgehammers

The table the Coxes purchased has three buttons - one that could be used by the dealer, one by a player with obvious inside knowledge and one by the pit boss.

Edwards said its highly unlikely such a rigged game would exist in any modern casino.

"It just wouldn't be worth it for them to lose their gaming license over a rigged device," he said.

Last month, with the permission of the federal Department of Homeland Security, the wheel was taken to Reno-Tahoe International Airport and X-rayed there. However, the machines at the airport and the proportion of the wheel didn't match. So arrangements were made to have X-rays taken at the school of medicine's family center.

Monday's X-ray session, which focused mainly on a mechanical, metallic device built into the wheel, didn't immediately reveal any answers as to how the rigged machine worked.

Boyd Cox speculated it could have created a magnetized area of the wheel that would attract or repel a roulette ball, but no definitive answer could be reached until the wheel is made operational.

He said he plans to contact Paul Tramble, who he described as "the premiere roulette builder in the world," to perhaps get the wheel in working order.

Ultimately, the Coxes plan to sell the wheel and they hope it can find a place in a museum, perhaps the "Mob Museum" being promoted by Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman.

"It's a really unique thing, a piece of history, and we'd love to see it displayed somewhere," Boyd Cox said.