Casinos and Dominoes

...2) Every drug addict began with the notion that he would not get hooked...

...The P.R.G...

...With the system itself immobilized and held captive, some individual must once again come forward, as in days of yore, to stand up against the desperado...

...aid, with which "we a r e ready to furnish Vietnamese blood [to continue fighting the war]" (June 6 speech at a teacher's convention in Saigon...

...Some form of legalized gambling is now in operation in 35 states...

...every law-enforcement spokesman in the state, including Jonathan Goldstein, the U.S...

...Although the ballot question says nothing about this limitation to a single city, Gov...

...In this context what makes the hijacker and the terrorist exceptional is that, seeing the system would foil other crimes, they attack the system itself...

...In Joseph Sargent's The Taking o] Pelham One Two Three, four men who hijack a subway train demand an equally enormous sum for the passengers' safe release...

...If casinos and other forms of new gambling games are as inevitable as they seem and if they will raise new revenue, clean up Times Square, lessen corrupting payoffs to law enforcement officials, and--we may be told soon--speed mail delivery, it might help to keep in mind these aspects of social dynamics: 1 ) There is no such thing as a free lunch...

...The chief organization backing the referendum calls itself the Tourism Development Council of New Jersey and the furtherance of tourism is being presented as the chief value of the casino...

...The contact between these men locked in mortal combat is in each case so tenuous that the one actual, physical exchange which must occur, the handing over of the payment, becomes a nearly insurmountable problem...

...Legislature this year, State Sen...

...Atlantic City is the opening puff in another round of campaigns to extend gambling along the East Coast and possibly around the nation...

...He fits into the power structure represented by the directors of the cruise line, government officials and ship's captain (Omar Sharif) with whom Fallon drinks Scotch to settle his nerves...

...In others, it is not inaptly described as a 'mug's game,' as practiced by the great majority of backers...

...It also becomes, for each director, an opportunity eagerly seized...

...Fallon is, for all his maverick wildness, essentially an executive...

...Garber, on the other 1 November 1974:110...

...They have also advanced the libertarian argument that opposition to legal gambling is another form of the pernicious paternalism that led to Prohibition and its harmful public policy...

...cop who happens to be on duty in the central dispatchers' room when the hijackers call in to announce what they have done and make their demands...

...This is the first vote on bigtime gambling in an eastern industrial state, and it will have an obvious domino effect...

...and 4) As you sow, so shall you reap...

...The confrontations that Fallon and Garber have with their respective nemeses are strictly a battle of nerves carried out over a two-way radio...

...Organized crime and official corruption are perhaps the only arguments that might brake the apparent public eagerness to vote in casinos this month.They are really only emblematic, however, of deeper concerns about the state's lifestyle and the fear that an outbreak of casinos will not enhance that style...

...And in each film the burden of coping with the calamity falls to one man...

...This is the purest form of hogwash...

...In a curious way even the uncontrollable chain of events set in motion in each film remains a captive of the system supposedly being disrupted...

...There seems to be a genuine desire among the majority of the people for peace and the type of political settlement called for in the Paris Agreement (the publication of which Thieu has made illegal) : a council composed of three parts which will supervise elections for a new regime...

...Byrne, a racket-buster who was swept into office last year as "the man who couldn't be bought," finds himself supporting casinos against the advice of almost WARREN SLOAT iS a ]ree-lance writer whose work has appeared in The Nation, Ramparts and other journals...

...It is a pure luxury and a fitting subject for taxation unless there are strong reasons for allowing luxury to escape...

...Newark has already asked for casinos in its new international airport...

...Juggernaut's man on the job is Fallon (Richard Harris), a flamboyant Royal Navy bomb expert airlifted to the desperate liner to try to defuse the bombs...

...Every other possibility has been so bureaucratized and systemsanalyzed that all the excitement, the crisis atmosphere which high drama requires, has gone out of it...

...the growth the Senator desires would presumably include the Playboy Club located in his district...

...Prior to this year it was believed that New York would be first with casinos," said Mechling, once the Democratic candidate for U.S...

...William V. Musto accused those who were trying to keep casinos off the ballot as "playing God...

...The latter is a setting more suitable to a gamut running from grubby, surly indifference to good-natured incompetence...

...If it seems inevitable that Thieu will, despite continued U.S...

...These schemes are being packaged in typical Madison Avenue style...

...It is in the main unproductive except to the bookmakers...

...What could be a more powerful force for legalized gambling than the argument that it provides something people want, pay out of their own free will, and that can be set up without any resistance from the beleaguered middle-class homeowners who have been taxed so emphatically in recent years...

...The most enticing aspect of gambling as a revenue source is the public attitude, as evidenced in the New Jersey election and in New York, where Seymour Durst, chairman of the Broadway Association's casino committee, has expressed surprise that the only objections to the plan have come from political figures...

...For it is disingenuous to pretend that this referendum, which every poll shows should pass solidly, is only a proposal to place three or four antiseptic casinos in one location...

...In Richard Lester's Juggernaut someone has placed a series of time bombs aboard an ocean liner and then, once the ship is irretrievably at sea, demanded an enormous ransom in exchange for instructions on disarming the bombs...

...The state, they say, is on probation, and should not be violating it openly by consorting with persons of questionable repute...

...Political leaders have suggested that casinos in the sports complex, a racetrack and football stadium now under construction in the Hackensack Meadowlands minutes from midtown Manhattan, would be the best site of all...

...In New York the Broadway Association, made up of midtown real estate interests, has been advocating casinos in the Times Square area to bring in tourists and clean up the Port Said atmosphere...

...Off-track betting in New York, also backed by heavy advertising come-on, did not decrease illegal gambling...

...This is a tragic development...

...In the end Fallon has to sort out all that knowledge which systems people call "input"--technical expertise about bombs, psychological assessment of the bomber, etc.mand come to an absolute decision about which wire to cut...

...The dominos, it appears likely, will eventually fall in New Jersey as well...

...Thomas Mechling, who heads the Bi-state Committee to Oppose Las Vegas Casino Gambling in New York and New Jersey, has been advocating a regional approach to stopping casinos...

...The only telling difference between these films, in fact, is the difference of atmosphere---of raise en scdne.--one would expect between a luxury liner and a subway car...

...At this moment the association is lying back to watch what happens in New Jersey...

...Brendan T. Byrne and his administration have depicted the coming vote as approval for an experiment station to try decorous, suitand-tie casinos of the Puerto Rican variety...

...The state's concern about gangsterism and corruption is based on a long and checkered history of infiltration by mobsters, aided and abetted by county political bosses, and connected with a shabby record of public morality...

...Wayne Dumont, a rural Republican, has predicted that unfettered casino building could raise $200 million annually in state revenues...

...policy to continue massive military assistance to Thieu, though cut back by recent legislation, is a violation of the letter and the spirit of the Paris Accords...

...The former is the sort of place in which one expects to encounter elegant, powerful people making command decisions...

...The hijacker and terrorist therefore take over our means of transportation and lines of communication as purposefully as the gunslinger took over isolated frontier towns...

...For the hijackers in both films, the whole paradoxical point is not to come in contact with your adversary...

...Jess Marcum and Henry Rowan, in a study for the Twentieth Century Fund and the Fund for the City of New York, predict that total revenues to state and local governments, if all forms of gambling were legalized, could add $7.5 billion (in 1973 dollars...

...The Lottery Commission Commonweal: 109 has attempted to create new demand for tickets through a hard-seU advertising campaign...

...CASINOS AND DOMINOES WARREN SLOAT Another effort to turn America into Las Vegas Romantic old Atlantic City, home of saltwater taffy, kewpie dolls and bracing sea breezes, has fallen on hard times...

...Yet even here, where we come as close as we ever can to the conditions of an old-fashioned showdown, modern society still seems to insulate its heroes from its villains...

...The rhetoric is highly colored, but it makes the point as well as any that gambling is proliferating because it is regarded as an untapped source of local and state revenue...

...Opponents of a favorable vote, speaking through "Casinos--No Dice," have questioned the proposal by raising the specter of organized crime...

...The Delaware Legislature fell short of the necessary votes this year to put casinos on the ballot, but there will doubtless be another try in 1975...

...Each film makes the mere accumulating, counting and delivering of the money into a complicated sub-plot, as if Lester and Sargent were both dying for the lone chance this provides to cut to a chase...

...Wright Patman of Texas said earlier this year...

...In an effective address in the N.J...

...In an attempt to reverse the blight, high crime rate and the other familiar urban woes that have descended upon it, a proposal has been placed on the New Jersey ballot in November that would lead to the establishment of state-operated casinos for the queen of the Jersey shore...

...One of the three co-chairmen of "Casinos---No Dice" is William J. Brennan III, who as assistant state attorney general for a few seasons ago claimed that "some legislators are too comfortable with organized crime" and in the midst of protest, proceeded to document it...

...In the very process of being held up for ransom, the system still determines the course of action and channels the energies unleashed against it...

...This is pretty much what happens anyway in two new thrillers about hijacking that have been released...

...The governor and legislature will be under unremitting political pressure to expand the casino franchises...

...A climate has been created to gamble," said Paul Delise, chief of the Organized Crime Control Bureau in the Public Morals Division...

...subsidy, have to go, why do we continue pouring money down the drain...

...Because it now is possible to bet legally on horses, thousands of people who never in the world would have thought of betting on football or basketball or baseball are now betting with the bookies...

...1 November 1974:108 "Today the craze of gambling as an easy road to enrich the public coffers is gaining favor throughout the nation," Rep...

...Deputy Ambassador to France, Phan Thanh Nam, in a recent interview in Paris...

...State Sen...

...It is a foolish occupation or habit...

...He must, in other words, be effective...

...For New York, which has been selling bonds to help meet its municipal current expenses, legalized gambling may be the only source left...

...Proponents of legal gambling also argue that rather than promote organized crime, it will hurt the rackets by drying up one of their principal sources of revenue with legal competition...

...The real issue in the New Jersey election and in the growth of legalized gambling generally is whether it is politic for a society to trade on people's most trivial impulses----whether it is good, that is, to make people into fools...

...Attorney for New Jersey, and his own State Attorney General, William F. Hyland...

...Senate in Nevada...

...3) Chickens come home to roost...

...Like everything else that flies in the world of business, gambling is a growth industry, and it profits not by filling an unstimulated public demand but by creating new customers...

...We are told that a little g a m b l i n g . . , backed by the state _9 . . will help educate children and provide other benefits...

...The catalyst, however, may not be political pressure but the revenue-starvation of many state and local governments...

...Eight states have public lotteries and three have off-track betting...

...There is little evidence that the people of South Vietnam want to continue being someone else's mercenaries...

...In Pelham One Two Three, it's Zachary Garber (Walter Matthau), an unassuming T.A...

...Celebrities have been brought in to make the millionaire lottery drawings into events much like daytime television game shows...

...There is, further, the 1924 argument of the British Select Committee on Betting Duty, which, in accordance with the view that gambling may be made available to fill an "unstimulated public demand," advised unanimously "that betting is a useless thing except insofar as it gives pleasurable excitement for some and for others an escape from the monotony of their daily world...

...Moreover, the last 18 months have shown that this policy has been a failure...

...HIJACKERS AND HIJINX 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN The hijacker and the terrorist are perhaps our only contemporaries who can create the sort of excitement that gunslingers used to create on the frontier...

...This is not just another vote to legalize bingo or have a lottery...

...Although it is unlikely that Thieu will be forced out this year, opinion from many sides sees either 1975 or 1976 as the decisive year...

...The wave of indictments of public officials for bid-rigging, extortion and bribery was one of the factors that led to Byrne's victory...

...Casinos appear to be the coming trend, with betting on sports events, legal at present only in Nevada, still a few years off...

...is still ready to undertake new contacts and negotiations with the Thieu regime (broken off two months ago) and the third force for the formation of a national council, according to the P.R.G...

...A Police Department white paper concluded that offtrack betting led to a 62 percent increase in illegal betting...

...The sociotechnology in which we live is expressly designed to comprehend every audacity and contain every attempt to work outside its appointed channels...

...And so'each film ultimately takes its cue from its surroundings, even in the creation of its hero...

...As a result even crime has to be "organized" to get anywhere nowadays...

...It has failed because it has not been able to provide a real solution to the actual problems that beset South Vietnam...

...No amount of constant tinkedngnincluding a daily lottery, summer bonuses, a sweepstakes and a forthcoming choose-your-number systemnhas reversed the downward trend...

...Who are we to finance the continued existence of a corrupt military dictator when his policies are bitterly disputed by his own citizens...

...Having launched the nation's most successful state weekly lottery in 1970, New Jersey eventually found its sales dwindling as it was imitated by competitors...

...They see that neither our wallets nor our honor may be vulnerable anymore, but our reliance on the system that protects them is...