Gambling and Its Discontents
Shiflett, Dave
40 March 1999 The American Spectator Columbia, South Carolina hose who doubt the existence of dark powers might reconsAer their position after a midafternoon visit to Fast Freddies, a poker...
...In New Jersey, calls to gambling hotlines jumped from 1,20o a year to 32,000 a year after casinos were introduced...
...At the end of it, the guy in the bar was a lot worse off than his partner...
...The industry's political muscle was on full display after the Clinton administration proposed in 1994 to fund new welfare programs by placing a 4-percent federal tax on gaming revenues...
...Stanton is particularly disheartened by fellow religionists...
...But most analysts agree it was poker that did Beasley in, despite heroic measures by gambling foes such as Spartanburg resident Henry Lord, Jr., head of the Carolina Family Alliance...
...Freddie himself insists he would like to offer nourishment to clients who 41 spend their rent and food budget on electronic blackjack and keno, but South Carolina law forbids such "inducements" to gambling...
...But that didn't move the public...
...As late as 1988, explains Robert Goodman, author of The Luck Business, casino gambling was illegal in all states except Nevada and New Jersey...
...That number might be higher should such a stunt be attempted today...
...Then the unimaginable happened...
...But I've told Tom that if he can find any mistakes in the report, we'll reject the entire study...
...He is also seriously outgunned...
...Credits won, however, are not the same as credits paid out...
...We can't find the moral strength to ban it...
...Fahrenkopf dismisses class action suits as hopeless...
...Gambling, I'm afraid, may become the lifeblood of the state party...
...Louis Bay in Lott's native Mississippi somehow never took place...
...The Margolis study, says Fahrenkopf, showed that Atlantic City's higher crime rate is not the result of gambling, but population increases...
...Both Black Hawk and Central City, Colorado, brought in gambling to revive their economies, and have experienced increased street crime and congestion, both of which were expected...
...The difference between alcohol and gambling," Grey points out, "is that government has endorsed gambling, protects gambling, and in some cases subsidizes it...
...A GLirrERING PANACEA So far, Grey is not having much luck getting through...
...Player behavior is such that credits won are readily replayed, which eventually results in more opportunity for losing...
...But that's not a problem in most non-Protestant religions...
...His compulsive personality is enslaved by a technology allying the desire for fast and easy money with our national talent for staring mindlessly into a video screen...
...All of which raises two questions: Why this dramatic expansion, and is it good for America...
...All told, the public costs of a problem gambler are said to range from $13,000 to $30,000 per year, critics argue, though again the industry charges exaggeration even as it posts signs in casinos offering help for those with self-perceived gambling disorders...
...Chairman Stephen Wynn hosted a 1995 fund-raiser for Bob Dole (take: S5oo,000) and Mirage gave Lott's PAC an additional $10,00o this year...
...The Tehran drunk would have an easier time finding a political support group...
...This is not to pass judgment on owner Fred NfIcCary, a likable and civic-minded fellow who has placed his establishment near a public housing project and two rescue missions...
...Ingram, as it happens, was convicted in 1984 of conspiring to bribe a sheriff...
...Despite what you might hear, there really are laws restricting gambling in South Carolina...
...A survey of lottery wagering in 43 Massachusetts found that in relatively poor Chelsea, the average expenditure was $455 a year, while in wealthy Weston it dropped to around $30 per person...
...Now they are spending huge amounts of money protecting their gains...
...The fourth, ex-mayor Sawyer, who had supported legalizing boats in Chicago, announced in early 1995 that he planned to bid for a boat of his own...
...When Governor David Beasley threatened to shut down South Carolina's video poker industry, a small group of poker providers, including Fred McCary, overthrew him...
...former White House chief of staff Ken Duberstein...
...George Washington's continental army was clothed and armed by lotteries, a revenue source that also provided building funds for Harvard College...
...Forty-seven states now allow one or more forms of legalized gambling— Hawaii, Tennessee, and Utah being the exceptions...
...Rival tribes then ponied up a $270,000 Democrat donation, and the decision was overridden...
...Fahrenkopf's segment of the industry (hotel casinos) employs, directly and indirectly, more than 700,000 people who pay over $20 billion a year in taxes...
...Then it was opened by lotteries...
...It was like a feeding frenzy...
...This has been a boon for those in the helping professions...
...40 March 1999 The American Spectator Columbia, South Carolina hose who doubt the existence of dark powers might reconsAer their position after a midafternoon visit to Fast Freddies, a poker den rising in one-store splendor amid a field of used cars across the Congaree River from downtown Columbia...
...But that woman was insane...
...In fact, the probability of winning back the wagers made on most machine models ranges from 85 percent to 92 percent...
...Thirty-one governors wrote in to condemn the idea...
...A zo-percent tax on the net revenues of video gaming machines in South Carolina would provide up to $10 million for local school districts to use as they see fit," Collins said in an advertisement...
...and William Sittmann, former special assistant to Reagan...
...Collins and his colleagues are also fully enjoying their new status as king makers...
...Grey can be reliably called gambling's most dependable public critic...
...In Las Vegas, where churches have long benefited from casino chips tossed into the Sunday offering plate, outrage has erupted because of a ruling by the Gaming Control Board that chip-giving is a violation of the law...
...That's just the national level...
...And while the vast majority of Americans support gambling, at least as a public choice, it's a fairly good bet that most are unaware just how powerful a political force Gambling Inc...
...Yet Grey and his somewhat ragtag army of associates can reasonably argue that gambling has firmly established itself as a major gorilla in the political jungle, one that continues to grow...
...In other words, Fast Freddie and his colleagues have human desire on their side, and in the society of free choices that's about the only ally you need, give or take a few million for political donations...
...One can hardly enter a store or gas station without finding an electronic gaming machine—and an ATM machine in case you forgot your money belt...
...In a perfect world, I'll admit, there wouldn't be any gambling...
...In 1975, state Sen...
...Dennis's little proposition blossomed into a huge industry, featuring some 30,000 video poker machines in 6,500 locations...
...The result, therefore, is not an 8o percent payout to players, but closer to 55 percent...
...Beasley's cavalier attitude toward the sacredness of the Confederate flag undermined his standing with one Republican core constituency (rednecks), as did persistent rumors of a Clintonian arrangement with a member or two of the female staff...
...along with Donald Fierce, former counselor to RNC Chairman The American Spectator March 1999 Haley Barbour and a top aide to Speaker Newt Gingrich...
...Strom's offices are up a few flights of stairs in a restored townhouse in downtown Columbia...
...The Jamestown Company benefited from a lottery...
...Unlike their colleagues, however, they cannot count on much help from the government, as the government is very much complicit in advancing gambling...
...Now it's a slum by the sea with casinos...
...They're owned by Prudential, Fidelity, Harvard University...
...Gambling boasted significant victories in the most recent elections, especially in the South...
...True, some of the victories cost the industry a great deal of money, but money is no object, at least for now...
...In 1988, store owner Terry Blackmon was charged with making illegal payoffs, yet his case was thrown out by a judge who cited the pinball law...
...An interesting conversation ensued, yet no money ever changed hands...
...Attorney General Janet Reno found no evidence of political pressure, although Arizona attorney Paul Eckstein has testified that Babbitt "told him in July 1995 that rival tribes were prepared to give $ 5oo,000 to the Democratic Party, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes had directed him to issue the decision that day," according to a Washington Times report...
...Lesieur and Christopher Anderson found that among compulsive gamblers, 22 percent divorced because of gambling, 40 percent had lost or quit a job due to gambling, 49 percent stole from work to pay gambling debts, 23 percent were alcoholic, z6 percent compulsive overeaters, 63 percent had contemplated suicide, and 79 percent said they wanted to die...
...And after a gambling barge called Splash docked near Tunica, Mississippi—called by Jesse Jackson "the Ethiopia of America" —townspeople enjoyed a definite employment and economic boost...
...It's been a proven form of exchange for 35 years...
...Gambling, for example, was supposed to cure the innumerable ills of Atlantic City, though many observers do not believe this has come to pass...
...The list of politicians with gambling-related legal problems stretches from Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, whose 1995 denial of a license to three Chippewa tribes for a casino at a failed dog track near Hudson, Wisconsin, is under investigation by an independent counsel, to a sizable contingent of smaller fry, including former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards...
...Nor do gamblers win as much as advocates promise...
...In a perfect world, I'd take all my machines and dump them in the river...
...It might have to do with people's relationship with God....You don't trivialize your fate in some cultures by leaving it to chance...
...The only people who speak for skid-row gamblers are themselves the object of widespread scorn: Virtue Sherpas from the religious right, a smattering of trial lawyers, and scolds from Common Cause and Public Citizen...
...In particular, he threatened to enforce the much-ignored state law forbidding gambling in any establishment that holds an alcohol license (on- or off-premises...
...But that argument is not going to take his crusade very far...
...And you know what, I'm not ashamed...
...I hit one of them three times with a 9 millimeter pistol...
...Freddie suddenly becomes philosophical...
...The ensuing war didn't actually focus so much on video poker as on Beasley's opposition to a state lottery...
...So far, he hasn't taken me up on the offer...
...One is that a gambler cannot lose more than $50 in one sitting...
...You know, when a couple of guys fell over after taking Viagra there was a great outcry...
...David Beasley in 1998 to declare video poker "a cancer" and pledge himself to its destruction...
...More importantly, he says, the Andersen study disputes the charge that a dollar spent in a casino is a dollar not spent at a local store...
...Freddie says...
...former Mondale for President treasurer Michael Berman...
...Gambling not only provides entertainment for huge numbers of Americans...
...If we hadn't tried, we would have been subjected to criticism for not making an effort...
...You know what the problem is...
...Convenient indeed...
...There's going to be gambling, and these lawsuits and referendums aren't going to stop it...
...Gambling's malcontents seem to recognize that their economic arguments are not changing many minds...
...The American Gaming Association (AGA), he complains, has deployed some heavy Washington artillery besides the famously genial Fahrenkopf: former Democratic congressman Dennis Eckart...
...We're just hoping that when people recognize what gambling does to some individuals and families, their views of the industry are going to change...
...They lose and they want to blame me...
...We are going after all profits illegally obtained over the past five years, multiplied by three, plus attorneys' fees...
...On the national level, so stern a Republican Baptist as Trent Lott, the scourge of discrete sodomy, is a very public pal of the betting interests, as were Newt Gingrich and Robert "Vegas Bob" Dole...
...It provides jobs and pays taxes, which itself translates into political power...
...Coats withdrew the amendment...
...Wes Hayes (R-York), has complained...
...He gives a somewhat more gradual explanation for the industry's growth...
...Local business will suffer because they'll lose customer dollars to the casino...
...If the professor is right, there must be a lot of previously unrecognized Jews and Catholics in South Carolina, currently the most dynamic of all gambling centers...
...Accordingly, some proprietors started paying customers who beat the games...
...He wanted to put us out of business," says Fast Freddie McCray...
...When the customers figured out he had shot his whole clip, they attacked him...
...Frank Fahrenkopf, former head of the Republic National Committee (and, he points out, a Knight of Malta in the Catholic Church), is now an $800,000-a-year lobbyist for the gaming industry...
...Gambling's enormous successes throughout the nation, and especially in the deeply religious South, are a withering rebuke to those who make their living pandering to the fear of religious conservatives...
...His vice leaves him lower than the barroom drunk, who at least gains calories and a buzz in exchange for his servitude, and even lower than the serial philanderer, who enjoys the dual benefits of diversity and human interaction...
...He ran down the street, but his partner stayed in the bar...
...This is all music to the ears of Tom Grey...
...There is no AGA-like structure in South Carolina...
...The American Spectator • March 1999 And like heavy drinkers, many of the hard-core gamblers have a decidedly grim home life...
...I've got over twenty `kids in the car' stories," Tom Grey says...
...At the same time, some places clearly benefit from gambling, and lotteries do provide scholarships to some students...
...The New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement recently reported that Bally Entertainment slipped Johnson $170,000 in 1994 while he was speaker and tossed in another $70,000 after he left...
...They're run by graduates of Wharton and the Harvard Business School...
...Nor, for that matter, are their complaints about political corruption...
...Grey dismisses these as "the best studies money can buy...
...Yet anti-gambling advocates are looking to Democrat Strom to eventually deliver South Carolina, and perhaps the nation, from the gambling scourge—not by sermons or newspaper advertisements, but through the increasingly popular process known as the class action suit...
...Judy Kern Fazio, former director of finance for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the wife of former Democratic congressman Vic Fazio...
...The 1998 election not only put a Democrat in the governor's office, but gave the Democrats a strong issue to run on...
...was denied a place on the House Ways and Means Committee, despite pleading from Fahrenkopf, who pressed the case with a letter to Ways and Means Chairman Bill Archer...
...During a debate with a gambling advocate, he was surprised to learn that his opponent was a deacon at a local church...
...DAVE SHIFLETT is a writer in Midlothian, Virginia...
...Nine years after Dennis's proposition was inked, the state Supreme Court concluded that it had also legalized video poker machines...
...According to Timothy L. O'Brien, a New York Times reporter and author of the just-released Bad Bet, between 1991 and 1996, the industry put at least $4.5 million into national political campaigns...
...They bought the governor, the legislature, and the Supreme Court," says Tom Grey...
...works on the case, while Pete Strom, a youngish 39, explains that the idea for the suit came to him after repeated conversations with gambling "victims" and their families...
...The American Spectator • March 1999 $800,000 a year to assure us that there is indeed a pea beneath one of those shells...
...HOPE scholarships have, according to Fahrenkopf, sent 350,000 Georgia students through four years of college, an assertion that has made opposing lotteries in Alabama and South Carolina an allbut-fatal political choice...
...I've given jobs to my six brothers...
...I have no hope for the referendum," says Glenn Stanton of the Palmetto Family Council, which is associated with James Dobson's Focus on the Family organization...
...former executive director of the House Democratic Caucus Steven Champlin...
...complains Clairmarie Slaveck of Guardian Angel Cathedral...
...They ought to just put a video poker machine on the state flag...
...It is a demographic fact that largest religious blocs among those who prefer to gamble are Catholics and Jews, with WASPs coming in way down the line...
...Though an Election Day exit poll showed 6o percent of voters backing a ban, anti-gambling forces dismiss the likelihood...
...Meanwhile in Missouri, a Hilton employee promised to pay $1 million to inspire the Kansas City port authority chairman to allow a Hilton casino, for which Hilton paid $650,000 in fines and costs, though admitted no wrongdoing...
...The result shook the political world...
...Columnist William Safire, one of the industry's more prominent critics, recently pointed out that gambling is now more American than apple pie, which is no doubt a profound understatement...
...When asked how such losses are proved, Strom provides photocopies of multiple checks cashed at convenience stores and gas stations on the same day, or large withdrawals from Automatic Teller Machines, many of which are stationed near video poker machines, all the better to allow patrons to withdraw their life savings without having to drive to the bank...
...There's no connection...
...Nor can it be argued that gambling always prevails...
...University of Illinois economist Earl Grinols says 52 percent of casino revenues comes from problem gamblers, while a Harvard Medical School study found that 1.6 percent of adults have what it calls a Level 3 gambling disorder, the highest level possible...
...These days, Bugsy Siegel would have a hard time cashing a check in a casino...
...cost the state between $318 million and $483 million per year...
...Ninety-nine percent of our businesses are publicly traded...
...Six years later, it was legal in 23 states and was under consideration in many others...
...When credits won are compared to credits played, the result is consistently above 8o percent...
...It's losers trying to get their money back...
...This allegation —known as the "substitution" theory—is at the heart of charges that gambling is a "predatory" business, but is "invalid," Fahrenkopf argues...
...Yet the video-poker fiend, whose existence Fast Freddie and Big Gambling readily acknowledge, is clearly in the hands of pitiless forces...
...A lottery was established in Illinois while Honest Abe sat in the legislature...
...You know what Ralph Nader said...
...THE WILD WEST In Las Cruces, New Mexico, the former pastor of Immaculate Heart of Mary Cathedral got caught using church credit cards for gambling, which may lend support to an interesting supposition by James Smith, American Studies professor at Penn State at Abington-Ogontz: "There is considerable truth to the stereotypes about certain cultures being more prone to prefer gambling...
...An impressive national lineup, but nothing to overshadow work done at the state level as well, as Robert Goodman notes: In Illinois, this situation took on almost farcical proportions—at one time, former Governor Jim Thompson, former Senate President Philip Rock, former House Majority Leader James McPike, and former Mayor of Chicago Eugene Sawyer were all registered lobbyists for the casino industry...
...I employ people who probably couldn't get a job elsewhere...
...By comparison, Tom Grey's anti-gambling organization boasts an annual budget of $13o,000 a year, not much more than a South Carolina convenience store can expect from a small cluster of video poker games...
...Robert Ford (D-Charleston), an anti-Beasley pol, and offered a huge contribution...
...But no one envisioned the problem recently described by a local police spokeswoman: "We have an inordinate amount of urinating in public...
...The American Spectator • March 1999 What is meant by "illegally obtained profits...
...It was him or us...
...Operators sued to overturn the results, and in 1995 the state Supreme Court ruled that criminal laws must have statewide application, returning video poker to the twelve counties that voted against it...
...Analysts guess as much as $30 million may have been spent dumping South Carolina Governor David Beasley...
...Similarly, after then-Senator Dan Coats (R-Ind...
...Then there are a few unforeseen gambling-related problems...
...The state's Revenue Department announced that some $1.75 billion in bets were placed between July I, 1996 and June 45 30,1997, leaving operators $500 million in profits...
...The door was cracked by religious organizations that offered Bingo," says Tom Grey, head of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling and himself a Methodist minister...
...Strom won't say how much he's going for, other than to say it will be a great many millions, adding that the case is being pursued as a RICO violation...
...Anti-gambling forces were able to wrangle a county-bycounty referendum, and in 1994, thirty-four counties voted to keep the games while a dozen counties voted against poker...
...In this game, the traditionalists roll little besides Snake Eyes, while Gambling Inc...
...The first three of these men had been instrumental in pushing the state's 1990 riverboat bill through the legislature...
...Even private urination causes problems...
...But these suits don't have a chance...
...A local alderman notes that the town has had to build a new sewage treatment plant because "people tend to drink while they're gambling, and the sewage has a particular quality...
...There really are people who won't take responsibility for their actions...
...Yet there is at least one political lesson to be learned at Fred-dies...
...People try to make us out to be Mafia...
...They try to draw parallels with tobacco," he says, "but with tobacco, as with alcohol, you're ingesting a foreign substance...
...That is true about Andersen, Fahrenkopf agrees...
...Just as the milk of human kindness is withheld, so too is any reasonable hope that politicians will ride to the rescue...
...But this isn't a perfect world...
...Henry Lesieur, president of Institute for Problem Gambling, found that 30.4 percent of gambling revenues in seven states and provinces in the United States and Canada came from problem and pathological gamblers...
...Public Citizen, the literary arm of the Nader Empire, reports that Sen...
...In the gambling world, South Carolina is known as the Wild West...
...BIG AS THE NRA The will to risk one's security and property in the hope of larger gain is a basic of the heroic character, and gambling has played an honorable role in American history...
...Most had contracts forbidding the latter...
...Nevada played a key role by accepting gaming in 1931, which was followed by a chain of events, including the approval of a lottery in New Hampshire in 1963, that has resulted in governments running lotteries in 37 states and a strong expansion of casino and riverboat gambling...
...Despite the alleged deficit of dependable gaming stock, there is a great deal of wagering going on in the Palmetto State...
...44 March 1999 • The American Spectator In the Babbitt incident, the license in question had been approved by the local Bureau of Indian Affairs...
...Both Fahrenkopf and Grey agree, however, that gambling is a powerful political force...
...Like the alcohol industry, they argue, gambling relies on a hard core of enthusiasts to keep the lights on and the girls dancing...
...We ran a very hard campaign in the last election...
...As if by magic, an environmental review scheduled for casino building permits near St...
...The South Carolina story provides a stunning example of how even the most loosely organized gambling alliance can shake traditional political establishments...
...The following year, gamblers pumped $2.1 billion into the poker machines, and last year the amount was close to $3 billion...
...But fallen politicians, as the president himself has so clearly shown, are decreasingly likely to provoke public outrage, leaving critics with one card to play: the spectacle of the damaged citizen...
...All of which reminds Grey of another industry...
...The high court upheld the ruling in 1991, and video poker came on with a vengeance...
...The booze, it seems, attacks and kills helpful types of bacteria...
...The same report says Bally and allied organizations gave $25,000 to organizations at Johnson's request...
...Nonetheless, activists draw parallels with other public health crusades...
...Now in the discovery stage, the suit has 36 named plaintiffs, with well over a loo more people possibly joining the action...
...In fact, the party that is allegedly in the grips of the Religious Right is up to its tusks in Mirage donations...
...Generally speaking, payouts of 8o to 97 percent are promised, yet actual payments are more like 5o percent...
...By contrast, the poker bum stumbles out of Freddies with empty pockets, no buzz, and not even a goodnight kiss...
...Similarly, a 1996 Mississippi State University study found that gamblers earning less than $io,000 a year lost about io percent of family income in the state's casinos, while those earning more than $40,000 spent only about 1 percent...
...It will change the public's view of us, that we're not criminals, that we're not doing anything shady," added gambling operator Henry Ingram...
...A 1997 Connecticut Department of Revenue study found that 47 percent of gambling patrons were problem or pathological gamblers...
...Convenience store operators faced the prospect of having to either stop selling alcohol or pull the plugs on their machines...
...There is widespread agreement that poker is probably here to stay...
...Critics also charge that gambling drains money from existing businesses...
...To be on the safe side, the poker forces are losing little time boring their way deeper into the state's social fabric, and just now are begging for higher gambling taxes...
...attorney in Illinois and a former director of the Illinois State Police...
...Hell, I wish I could sue Vegas for all the money I've lost out there...
...You know these trial lawyers will try to sue you for anything—and I was once a trial lawyer...
...Passing himself off as the local rep for a Pittsburgh gambling honcho, a fully-wired Lord approached state Sen...
...It's the same with poker...
...1997—more than two thirds to Republican Party organizations—while industry political action committees put $707,352 into the 1997-98 campaigns for Congressional candidates...
...The high payout rates apply only if players don't continue to bet their winnings, which is not the way most people play," the Montana Gaming Control Division explained in 1990 annual report: All machines in Montana meet the expected payback percentage of 8o percent...
...Their attack is two-pronged: Gambling fails to deliver on its promises of economic revival, and it hurts individuals...
...Yet gambling's profound success here may serve as an indicator of where gambling is heading, for at its heart is a concept very dear to Americans: convenience...
...46 March 1999 • The American Spectator The industry's candidate, Democrat Jim Hodges is himself a poker foe who supports more regulation and a state referendum on banning the game...
...Religious activist Ronald Reno studied attendance figures and reports that in 1994, "Americans made more trips to casinos than they did to games of all four major sports leagues combined...
...At the debates, they wore pictures of that dead baby, like that was our fault...
...Residents of comfortable Amherst spent about $.p...
...Summing up a popular critique, industrial consultant Nelson Rose told U.S...
...Nor is it to condemn gambling in its entirety, an activity that has kept more than one church in the black, many racehorses in oats, and which pays up-and-up fellows like former RNC chief Frank J. Fahrenkopf, Jr...
...has become, and that once established, it is all but impossible to dislodge...
...There were other issues in the race...
...Here they are aided by medical research on compulsive gambling, illustrated by tales of children being left to suffocate in cars while mothers pumped the last crumbs of their paychecks into video poker machines...
...Both Margolis and Arthur Andersen are contributors to the A[merican] G[aming] A[ssociation...
...Worse yet, most of society is arrayed against him...
...News and World Report that "Atlantic City used to be a slum by the sea...
...Critics took to calling video poker the "crack cocaine of gambling" because its quick payoffs and availability have allegedly created unprecedented numbers of problem gamblers...
...It's like the defense contractors buying up ex-generals...
...All of which inspired Gov...
...Then casinos came along and took the door off...
...South Carolina's transformation started out humbly...
...The state party was all but dead," says Columbia attorney Pete Strom, formerly the Clinton-appointed state's attorney...
...They know they could buy the election...
...Similarly, while state lotteries are almost always sold as a way to channel large amounts of money into public education, those dollars tend to replace existing funding, which is shifted elsewhere...
...But gambling is beginning to rank with bimboism as a major cause of failing political careers...
...Yet like most activists, the anti-gamblers hope a prolonged attack on the public consciousness will eventually prevail...
...Elsewhere, a 1995 study of the economic impact of Wisconsin's seventeen tribal casinos by the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and scholars from Georgia Southern University found that costs of compulsive gambling—increased welfare expenditures, lost work productivity, embezzlement, etc...
...There's no way to beat them in a statewide election," said Sen...
...All these charges, to no surprise, are denied by Fahrenkopf, who cites studies by Arthur Andersen and Jeremy Margolis, the latter a former assistant U.S...
...In fact, there is no gaming commission either, merely a set of regulations that are widely ignored...
...It happens that the tub was eventually replaced by ten new casinos which, according to O'Brien, rake in over $700 million a year, though they were built in the northern part of the county (closer to Memphis) and unemployment in Tunica soon rose to nearly 13 percent...
...After tobacco, the next target for trial lawyers will be gambling!' Walter Abbott, a Louisiana-based member of Grey's alliance, calls trial lawyers "the silver bullet...
...During the Jim Crow era, we knew what the right thing to do was, but we didn't do it...
...There is little dispute that they move money out of the pockets of low-income citizens...
...She belonged in a mental hospital...
...That level of spending makes the gambling industry a political force at the federal level on a par with the National Rifle Association and the United Automobile Workers...
...Overall," says Public Citizen, "Big Gambling made $2.8 million in soft money contributions in the 10 months beginning in Jan...
...Many of my clients have lost much more than that...
...It was a tremendous long shot," he later told the Las Vegas Sun, "but you have to try...
...As for widespread economic development, Mirage chairman Wynn once told a group of Connecticut businessmen that they should not count on casinos to revitalize local problem economies: "There is no reason on earth for any of you to expect for more than one second that just because there are people here, they're going to run into your store, or restaurant, or bar...
...In an outer office, Strom Thurmond, Jr...
...All told, Mirage supplied S464,596 to national and $650,000 to local and state candidates in the two years prior to the recent elections, the New York Times reported...
...I have a guy who charged about $700 one day on his Texaco card...
...Fahrenkopf insists that organized crime has been driven out of casino gambling...
...A Mother Jones study found that the industry gave more than $roo million in donations and lobbying fees to state legislators between 1992 and 1996...
...About 28 percent of Christian Coalition voters went for Democrat Jim Hodges because of those stories, says Bill Kincaid, a Richmond-based lobbyist who sides with the anti-gambling forces...
...Meanwhile, former Florida House Speaker Bolley "Bo" Johnson's portrait has been hung in gambling's rogue's gallery...
...Congress has hit the jackpot when it comes to gambling money, and has repaid its benefactors handsomely...
...announced an amendment to repeal the tax deduction for gambling losses, Mirage Resorts gave the National Republican Senatorial Committee $250,000, the third largest soft-money check written during the 1997-98 election cycle...
...Rembert Dennis put into the state budget a provision allowing pinball machine owners to pay winners in cash, calling it a "harmless little gambling proposition...
...Some people like to gamble, and they're going to find a home for their money...
...Freddie was once fined for giving a customer a cup of coffee...
...In Louisiana, there was a fivefold increase in the number of people seeking help with gambling problems between 1991 and 1994, when riverboat and electronic gaming boomed...
...Stanton, who strongly believes that "we are our brother's keeper and we must do what is necessary to protect our neighbors from harm," likens the poker scourge to another dark force in American history...
...To a visitor sitting beside a fully stocked gun cabinet, he describes the hard times he has gone through establishing his business, including a fire fight at his brother's bar, which Freddie has stocked with gaming machines...
...Trent Lott attended a Las Vegas fundraiser which supplied $100,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee...
...Street crime has risen, as have bankruptcies—common in the wake of gambling expansion, critics say...
...HOW MANY, HOW SICK...
...You know what this is about...
...proceeds beneath a shower of Lucky Sevens...
...Ensuing scandal, however, and the persistent belief that organized wagering is morally corrosive kept the games largely at bay...
...Their greatest challenge, he says, is to "to explain to the public that the gambling industry is taking in lots of money and dumping lots of bodies on society...
...Television ads insisted that the Georgia lottery was taking money that should be going into South Carolina's schools via a state lottery—a message that is currently driving the debate for a lottery in North Carolina (where a lottery is "inevitable," according to former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles, who may run for North Carolina governor...
...One of the guys had been a Clemson lineman...
...Over at Fast Freddies, lawsuit questions inspire furious eye-rolling...
...Americans now legally wager somewhere around $500 billion a year...
...The governor threatened to end the fun, which inspired the operators to pump some of their profits into rearranging the political order...
...47...
...The Beasley defeat changed the dynamics of state politics in a profound sense...
...Like most moral activists, such as those who target smoking and excessive drinking, the anti-gamblers have plenty of horror stories and no shortage of compelling statistics...
...Casino owner Donald Trump appears to be in Grey's camp, at least on this issue, telling the Miami Herald, "People will spend a tremendous amount of money at the casinos, money that they would normally spend on buying a refrigerator or a new car...
...She didn't belong in a casino...
...42 March 1999 • The American Spectator Just how powerful...
...As his young son walks in and sits on the floor nearby, Freddie goes on: "I've worked hard to establish this business...
...He wasn't buying gas...
...Fred Collins, the state's premier poker game distributor, led the charge, putting up "Ban Beasley" billboards throughout the state...
...Why all of a sudden should it stop...
...Jim Gibbons (R-Nev...
...I think the bishop would be up in arms...
...Gaming even seems to have a divine sanction...
Vol. 32 • March 1999 • No. 3
