Casinos: Why Not?
How underground gambling undermines Maine
By Chris Busby
Mich and I pulled into the parking lot at Bogey’s Bar and Grill around six-thirty on a Friday night in October. I’d gotten a tip there was an illegal poker game going down, a weekly Texas Hold ’Em tournament that was no penny-ante affair.
If so, this would be a particularly egregious violation of Maine’s gaming laws, since Bogey’s, part of the clubhouse at Riverside Municipal Golf Course, is owned by the city of Portland.
The bar is on the second floor, so we went in through the ground-floor entrance and started snooping around for the backroom action, ears cocked for the telltale sound of clinking chips. Nothing.
Upstairs, Bogey’s looked like any other sports pub: a pool table, TVs tuned to the Sox playoff pre-game, football squares for Sunday’s Patriots-Cowboys match-up taped to the beer mirror.
Well, that was something: football squares. Ubiquitous, yes, but also illegal. Even if the bar doesn’t take a cut, it is against Maine law to allow this type of sports betting inside one’s establishment. Portland’s Parks and Recreation Department was committing a crime in plain view.
Perhaps the manager saw me staring, trying to decipher the scrawl that read “2 pts.” Soon after our beers arrived, he took the poster of squares down and put it in front of me. “How much to play?” I asked. “Two points, two bucks,” he said. There were 100 squares in the grid, and of the $200 at stake, he explained, $50 would be won at the end of each quarter by whomever had the combination of numbers determined by the sole or second digit of each team’s score.
I coughed up two bucks and wrote my nickname, Buzz, in one of the few remaining squares. The numbers hadn’t yet been filled in around the edges of the grid, so I’m not sure what combination I bought, and I didn’t find the time to return Sunday afternoon. (That’s how bars profit without taking a cut: patrons who buy squares usually come back to watch the game, eat, drink and, hopefully, collect.)
There were about a dozen people there when we arrived, a middle-aged crowd just chatting, munching popcorn, and staring at the tvs. A couple guys were playing cribbage at the corner of the bar, but no greenbacks were visible. The football squares notwithstanding, I told Mich sotto voce, it looked like a bum lead.
Then, around seven, it was as if a bell was struck that everyone but Mich and I could hear. A couple patrons left, and all but a few of those remaining arranged themselves around two tables pushed together by a window overlooking the empty, night-shrouded golf course. A tall guy with grayish, curly hair and a mustache went over to an old army ammunition box sitting on a shelf by the doorway, and opened the combination lock. He removed a couple decks of cards and inserted an indeterminate number of bills, then locked the box again.
A young Asian man arrived carrying a silver metallic case. He placed the case atop the bar, unlocked and opened it: poker chips.
Game on!
Mr. Chips joined half a dozen other players at the table — all casually dressed white guys — while the mustachioed organizer sat nearby, observing. An hour or so later, the game wrapped up and Mr. Mustache opened the ammo box again. He sidled up next to several players now milling around the bar, but if he slipped them any cash, it escaped our furtive glances.
We figured the gig was over, but after a break of about 15 minutes, out came a green-felted game table, and soon not one, but two separate poker games were being played in the middle of the barroom.
An old-timer we met smoking out on the patio said it’s a $20 buy-in for this game. He
wasn’t a regular player himself, though he’d been gambling all his life. He chuckled at the memory of shooting craps in an alley on Munjoy Hill with other kids back in the ’50s.
Inside, on the big-screen, Boston beat the Indians 10-3. God knows how many Mainers mopped up on that game.
•••
The ongoing debate over whether to legalize a casino or another “racino” in Maine seems irrelevant in light of nights like this. Slots or no slots, Maine already is a casino.
The Pine Tree State is awash in gambling, whether it be legalized (like scratch tickets and lotteries), illegal (like online gambling), or somewhere in between (like the games of chance licensed by the state and rampantly abused by non-profit licensees skimming illicit profits).
The state has the power to make laws restricting gambling, but it lacks the manpower and willpower to enforce them in all but a handful of cases. As a result, illegal gaming thrives from Kittery to Calais, generating uncountable millions of dollars every year for what are, in essence, thousands of small, criminal enterprises operating with impunity in our neighborhoods and downtowns.
Maine still gets all the gambling-related social ills (broken homes, bankruptcies, embezzlement, etc.), but no cut of this action to help address problem gambling and addiction through education, treatment and enforcement.
Many gambling proponents, and some law enforcement officials, believe it’s time to bring underground gaming aboveboard; to take it out of the shadowy, often crooked and dangerous world of bookies and smoky backrooms, and into the light of day; to redirect as much black-market cash into public coffers as possible.
That could be achieved by legalizing some forms of gambling currently prohibited by law, and several steps have recently been taken in that direction. Taken a step further, a variety of gambling activities could be offered beneath one roof, under the watchful eye of the state — in a casino. Why not?
“From a police point of view, at least that gaming can be regulated,” Cumberland County Sheriff Mark Dion said. “The more any black market industry gets to see daylight, the better off we are.”
“It’s just everywhere,” Dion said of illegal gambling. “If you don’t pay attention to it, it’s not there. But it is there.”
Right under your nose
The weekly gathering at Bogey’s is by no means the only underground poker game in town. There are scores in the Portland area, and untold hundreds being played in homes, social clubs, businesses and barrooms statewide, every day and every night.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years as a police officer, and gaming has always been somewhere in the background,” said Dion, who worked for the Portland Police Department before continuing his career with the county.
Portland police officials did not respond to a request for comment.
“We’ve always had information about floating card games,” Dion said. “There’s always been an industry in football cards and the bookies that go along with them. There’s always bars in the city that run pools … We know one business around here, for years we’ve suspected they run a slot machine parlor in their basement, but we can’t get to it, ’cause we have to play by the rules: probable cause, a search warrant. It’s become one of the urban legends of Portland that this slot machine hall exists, but I’ll be damned if we can figure out a way to get to it. It’s a real closed clientele.”
“There are organized poker games every night, run by certain people, and that’s how they make their living,” said Lt. Joel Barnes of the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department. “Guy might be making himself eighty, one hundred, two hundred thousand dollars a year — tax-free money. If it was legit, aboveboard, Uncle Sam could get his cut, everybody’d be happy.”
Similarly, football cards and pools may seem like small-time stuff, but over the course of a season, the profits add up to significant sums for players and organizers alike. And the state doesn’t see a dime.
One football sheet The Bollard found costs $10 per week to play during the regular season, and $20 for the Super Bowl. Between 700 and 1,000 people participate each week, so the pot varies between $7,000 and $10,000, and peaks at about $20,000 on Super Bowl Sunday. The organizer, who declined to be interviewed, is believed to keep about $500 per week, and maybe a grand for the Super Bowl, so after a 17-week regular season and several post-season games, he’s netted over $10,000 in tax-free cash.
Granted, there’s work involved. It’s time-consuming to go through 700 individual cards and determine who picked the most winners. But the risks are miniscule, given that all involved are willing participants in an illegal scheme. In the sprawling underworld of backroom poker games and sports-betting pools, unless someone gets cheated, badly, they have no motivation to blow the whistle. And even if they do alert the cops, it’s exceedingly difficult to prove a crime took place and get a conviction in court.
“No one’s going to admit who’s the house,” said Dion. “They’d say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re just buddies.’ How do you prove it? It’s a he said/she said. And the real big guys that do book, I mean, try to find their book. Now, with computers, you’ve gotta get a search warrant for the freaking computer.”
“I did one search warrant for gambling, and when we got into court, that judge just about ripped me into a thousand pieces,” said Lt. Barnes. “It made me not want to do another one.”
Criminal gambling is a low priority for local law enforcement anyway. “Everybody is voluntarily participating,” Dion said. “I’d rather spend energy on crimes where people are victimized against their will: assault, robbery, sex abuse. The victim is a victim and doesn’t doubt they’re a victim. You go over to the gambling world, well, who the hell is the victim? Does the victim feel victimized? No.”
Illegal sports wagering is so common and accepted in Maine that it can hide in plain sight. For example, you can pick up a copy of the state’s largest newspaper, the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, and find the “Latest Line” of point spreads printed in the sports section daily. If this information is strictly for amusement, then bongs are strictly for tobacco.
“I was at a social function this weekend, and I think I was the only one not playing a football card,” Sheriff Dion noted. “I myself may or may not have some difficulty getting [a football card]. Whether or not I’m going to get a payoff is a different story. But we know what’s going on there. Then we act like it’s some sort of new idea to have a racino or a casino.”
Legalized slots
Cumberland County District Attorney Stephanie Anderson agrees that it’s difficult to get gambling convictions, and said her office handles very few gaming cases.
It’s also quite time-intensive. The high-profile bust of the Portland Eagles club on St. John Street last year was the result of an 18-month undercover investigation.
The Eagles pleaded guilty to three counts of aggravated unlawful gambling, paid a $60,000 fine, and forfeited $23,000 in seized proceeds. But that may just be the ante. Anderson’s office has since indicted several individual trustees and officers of the club on charges stemming from the same investigation. Those cases are still pending.
The Eagles case involves video poker machines. If there’s a form of illegal gambling that best exemplifies the state’s tortured approach to the whole issue, this is it.
Some video poker machines are free-standing, others are small enough to sit on a bar top. It’s against Maine law to have one of these machines in a for-profit establishment, but like football squares, they’re a common sight in many blue-collar bars and pool halls.
Non-profit groups and charitable social clubs can buy a license from the state to have the machines, and about 100 have done so, according to Maine State Police Sgt. Bill Gomane, who heads the office that oversees the licenses. Licensed or not, the machines can’t pay out — that is, players can’t accrue credits or points and redeem them for cash — but everyone’s supposed to obey speed limits, too.
In an age when video and arcade games have become incredibly sophisticated, most video poker machines are relics, offering graphics and gameplay one step beyond Pong. Regardless, roughly 100 non-profit organizations are paying the state up to $700 per year to plug them in.
Ross Furman, owner of Skillful Home Recreation, points out the obvious: these machines do pay out.
Furman has been in the arcade game business for decades. If the local pizza parlor gets a machine from Skillful, the pizzeria and Skillful simply split the take of the quarters or bills inserted in the machine. There’s no set weekly or yearly fee paid to Skillful just to have it there.
The weekly state fee for a video poker machine is $15, and licensees can have up to five machines on their premises. “It’s in there to gamble on,” said Furman. “Why would you pay $75 a week for five units? How you gonna pay for it? Is it gonna come from the sky?”
“Nobody can deny it’s happening,” Lt. Barnes of the Sheriff’s Department said of video poker pay-outs. “If they tell you it’s not happening, it’s just a bold-faced lie, I don’t care if it’s from the top of the government down to the guy playing the machine.”
The Bollard put the question to Sgt. Gomane: Why are these groups paying the state $700 a year for video poker machines if they don’t pay out? “I ask the same question, sir,” he replied.
Mark Reilly, a letter carrier who’s run for a seat on the Portland City Council several times, is the commander of a Portland vfw post that has two licensed video poker machines. Asked the same question, Reilly started stammering. “I don’t know what possesses people to play them,” he finally blurted out.
“I hear through rumor, innuendo and gossip that all the clubs are doing this,” District Attorney Anderson said. But again, it’s hard to prove a case. “The majority of people that are members of these clubs would rather not talk to the police” about pay-outs, she said.
The state has been bumbling its way through this issue since the 1970s. As Maine political columnist Al Diamon detailed in a 2002 piece headlined, “Ooops, Maine legalized slots in 1974,” the state inadvertently legalized the machines when it passed a law banning coin-operated gambling devices with handles. Within a few years, there were close to 400 legal machines in operation.
Furman recalls how it worked. The proprietor “just had a remote control hard-wired to [the machine]. You gave the bartender 20 bucks and you get 20 bucks’ worth of credits and go play ’em off. You knock ’em off and get the dough and go. No money ever went into the machines. It was easy to cash out because it’d fill up big suitcases.”
This loophole closed in 1980, but 27 years later, video poker gambling is still common. “Most slots that you see around don’t take bills,” Furman observed. “All these machines take bills — ones, fives, tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds. So if it’s armed for that, it’s not nickel-dime gaming.”
The remote controls are no longer necessary. Players feed bills into the machine, accrue credits or points, and the bartender cashes them out. Sources say a single machine can generate well over $1,000 of pure profit per week. A local tavern owner said, only half-jokingly, that one machine he had years ago put his daughter through college.
In the early ’90s, Furman helped lead a group called the Maine Gaming Association that tried to legalize the machines in bars and restaurants. The state would get a licensing fee and a percentage of the profits, with the rest going to bar and restaurant owners and distributors of the machines, as well as municipalities, school athletic programs, and the like. Various iterations of the bill earmarked between .5 and 1 percent for Gamblers Anonymous, said Furman.
The mga proposed a system in which every machine would be wired into a central terminal overseen by the state — not unlike the system Maine has now for lottery games. State officials could control when the
machines were on and how much they paid out.
That’s one of the problems with the hundreds of illegal machines out there today: the pay-out percentage can be manipulated on a whim. “Any time anything is underground or not authorized and not sealed and stamped, there’s gonna be hanky panky there,” Furman said. “It might be 82 percent tonight, and tomorrow morning when you go in there it’s 70 percent payback to the player. That’s not fair. That’s dirty pool in my book.”
The gaming group’s proposal initially had strong support in Augusta from the likes of then-State Rep. Dan Gwadosky, who went on to serve as Maine’s secretary of state, and then-State Sen. John Baldacci (you know what happened to him). Baldacci reversed his position and opposed the proposal a few months later. Today, Gwadosky’s title is Director of the Maine Bureau of Alcoholic Beverages and Lottery Operations.
The measure passed in the Legislature, but couldn’t get by the veto pen of then-Gov. John “Jock” McKernan. By the mid-1990s, Angus King, no fan of gambling, was in the Blaine House, and the legalization effort folded.
There are some signs that video poker’s popularity is waning as older players die off and gambling tastes change. Reilly said his post is getting rid of its last two machines. “We’ve got pull-tabs that people play more,” he said.
Criminal cribbage
Of the 500 game-of-chance licenses issued by the state, the majority are for so-called “pull-tabs” — also called “break-opens,” or, as Sgt. Gomane calls them, “sealed tickets.” Sealed tickets are basically scratch tickets, but instead of scratching, you pull open a little cardboard tab to find out if you won. Also, unlike scratch tickets, which can net players millions, the top pull-tab prizes, limited by law, are typically less than $1,000.
That doesn’t make them any less addictive. At the Four Seasons bingo hall in Westbrook, Mich and I watched two young women fill a trash barrel with losing pull-tabs, cracking open all five windows at once, scanning and discarding each ticket in the span of a second.
The state has issued about 300 licenses for beano and bingo games, in addition to the 500-odd game-of-chance licenses out there. Sgt. Gomane said his office has taken action hundreds of times to bring non-profit licensees “back into compliance” with the law, though he also said only about 10 percent of license-holders need to be put back in line. “For the most part, everybody follows the rules and regulations,” he said.
Sheriff Dion said his department is currently investigating a local charity on suspicion it’s illegally diverting bingo proceeds. This case “came out of our investigating another charity for diversion,” he said. (Dion declined to provide further details, citing the ongoing nature of the investigation.)
Licensed bingo and beano games have been plagued by corruption for decades. “In the ’70s and ’80s, it was the biggest racket going,” said Lt. Barnes. “I knew a gentleman that ran a bingo game — he’s since deceased — and he had a license to do it. You could take out your expenses and the rest had to go to charity, but let’s face it: you can make your expenses what you want your expenses to be. He was making a ton of money. He was making thousands of dollars a week.
“I’d say that just in this small state alone, I’m sure there’s hundreds of thousands of dollars a week that people are making” by running illegal gambling operations, Barnes said.
Compared to the hundreds of times licensed non-profits gamble outside the law, Sgt. Gomane said his office investigates “usually a handful” of unlicensed operators each year. “We could use more resources, for sure,” he said.
When state cops do bust an unlicensed game, it can cause a public uproar. This happened most recently in early November, when news broke that police clamped down on a weekly cribbage tournament played by elderly veterans at an American Legion post in Gardiner. The buy-in: $5.
Gomane pointed out that the Legion could buy a license to hold these tournaments, but Legion Commander Bob Mckay told the Blethen Maine News Service the $700 annual fee is too steep.
Similar cribbage crackdowns earlier this year prompted Republican State Sen. (and 2006 gubernatorial candidate) Peter Mills to introduce legislation that would legalize low-stakes cribbage games, minus the big fee. As The Bollard went to press, it was unclear whether lawmakers would allow Mills’ bill to be considered during next year’s “emergency” session of the Legislature.
Gomane noted that state lawmakers tweak the gaming codes just about every year. Last year, for example, they legalized “tournament games,” like Texas Hold ’Em — though, as usual, only non-profits can get the required licenses, and they pay hefty fees for the privilege.
Big Brothers Big Sisters of Southern Maine organized several Texas Hold ’Em tournaments a few years back, when the craze for the game was at its peak, but stopped when they realized the charitable events were against the law. They held their first legal game at The Station, a pool hall and all-ages music venue on St. John Street in Portland, this November.
The state requires a $5 fee for each player, so the buy-in for this tournament was $105. Executive Director Sam Beal said his organization had to gamble before the first card was played. That’s because the state requires payment up front and limits the number of players to the number the nonprofit has paid for beforehand. “If you pay for 50 people and 100 show up, you’re turning up 50 times $100,” Beal explained.
So Big Brothers bet high, counting on 100 players, the maximum allowed by law. Just over 50 showed up on that Sunday afternoon. Of the $5,400 or so at stake, three-quarters was returned to the winners, as the law requires. Of the remaining 25 percent, up to a quarter of that can legally be used to cover expenses; the rest goes to the charity. Beal said the tournament netted Big Brothers “roughly $1,000.”
Granted, the charity lost a quarter as much by having paid for 45 people who weren’t there. “That’s the gamble,” said Beal, “but the state never loses.”
Except, of course, when it doesn’t know a game’s going on in the first place. While Mich took a few photos at the tournament, I wandered around by the bar at The Station, and sure enough, there were two video poker machines. The one that was turned off had a piece of paper taped to it that read “for amusement only.”
Endgame
For a state with a queasy relationship to gambling, Maine sure is raking it in. Gross annual revenues from lottery games and scratch tickets are now approaching a quarter of a billion dollars. Following the lead of neighboring states, Maine recently introduced the $20 scratch ticket, with a lotto-like top prize of $2.5 million.
Critics say casinos prey on the poor, but state gambling profits have grown while Mainers’ discretionary incomes have shrunk due to rising energy costs and other factors. Gross lottery sales in fiscal year 2003 amounted to over $161 million. In fiscal year 2007, sales topped $227 million.
Michael “Mickey” Boardman, assistant director of the state lottery bureau, was asked if the bureau had a profile of the “core player” of its games: their income, education, yearly expenditure on lottery products — basic marketing data. “I’m sure we have some data on that somewhere,” he said. If he found it, it was
not shared as promised.
Maine’s gambling policies are an ethical pretzel that makes people on both sides of the casino debate gag.
In a bitter op-ed piece published by the Kennebec Journal on Nov. 14, titled “We should allow all gambling, or none at all,” George Smith, executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, put his cards on the table.
“Alas, we have seen the faces of corruption in our own mirrors,” wrote Smith. “It is simply unacceptable to say we oppose gambling but must continue the Maine State Lottery because we need the money.”
“The biggest problem I have with the lottery is government involvement,” said Dennis Bailey, the former press secretary for Governor King and current leader of CasinosNO! “I’d be less against it if the government [wasn’t involved]. I guess I’m old fashioned. I think the government should help people, not fleece ’em, which is exactly what a lottery does.”
“Perhaps its [sic] time to simply vote on whether this state is going to allow gambling in all its forms or no gambling at all,” Smith wrote in his op-ed. “It’s sort of like liquor. We recognize its danger but allow it to be sold by private businesses within rather strict guidelines, and try to help those who are unable to drink responsibly. We could do the same with gambling. Recognize its danger but allow it everywhere
with strict guidelines, and be prepared to offer help to those who gamble irresponsibly.
“This would simply recognize the reality of gambling in Maine,” Smith continued, “instead of pretending it doesn’t exist or wasting valuable law enforcement capability on silly things like the veterans’ cribbage game.”
“I’m not a prude about gambling,” said Bailey. “CasinosNO! has never said we’re against gambling. What we said was we’re against expansion of casinos. One of our points is, if you want to gamble, you’ve got all kinds of options. It’s already here. Why do we need more, especially when we know that these casinos bring a lot of problems?”
Chief among the problems casino opponents cite is the increases in crime some communities experience after casinos set up shop. But given the pervasiveness of gambling, both legal and illegal, many cops aren’t convinced there’s a direct connection. “I don’t know how you draw a straight line between a crime and acts of gaming,” Sheriff Dion said. “Keep in mind that gaming is there. It’s everywhere.”
“People say, ‘Ah well, we’ve got the lottery, we’ve got this, we’ve got that, so we might as well have casinos,’” said Bailey. “Well, do some research. The impacts of slot machines are far greater than any other form of gambling. To me it’s like comparing heroin to pot. There’re both illegal, [but] pretty much everyone would agree that heroin’s worse.”
“I don’t think if you legalize gambling it’s going to create a new class of gambling junkies,” said Lt. Barnes. “People think that they’re gonna save these souls [by banning slots] and they’re foolin’ themselves, because if people are gonna gamble, they’re gonna gamble.”
The casino debate is far from over. No sooner did voters emerge from curtained booths this past Election Day, having just cast ballots for or against a racino proposed for Washington County, than they were presented with a citizen-initiated effort to legalize a casino in Oxford County. Look for that question on next year’s ballot.
Meanwhile, another anti-slots group is gathering signatures to put a slots ban on the ballot in 2009.
Voters in southern Maine effectively nixed the Washington County racino, but another racino is in the works much closer to home, and Maine voters have no power to stop it.
In Boston, a proposal to turn the Suffolk Downs thoroughbred racetrack into a full-blown casino and resort complex has the support of Mayor Thomas Menino. With the future blessing of Gov. Deval Patrick — who’s pledged to allow three casinos to operate in the Bay State — casino gambling could be within a two-hour drive, bus or train ride from Portland before a casino is ever built in the woods of western Maine.
And while concerned citizens scan the horizon for the advance of one-armed bandits, a different scourge is already inside the house, rifling through the jewelry box in their bedroom.
Online gambling is a multi-trillion-dollar global industry, and despite federal and state efforts to outlaw it in the U.S., untold thousands of Mainers are sitting at the virtual table alongside 40 million others, 24 hours a day.
The principal impediment to wagering online in this country is the law against using U.S. currency. But local gamblers attest that it’s no more difficult to get around that prohibition than it is to circumvent federal copyright laws by downloading free music and movies.
“The Internet is a whole ’nother world,” said Dion. “The other day, in just general conversation… my friend says, ‘Hey, you know so-and-so?… He made twenty-five-hundred bucks last night on online poker.’ I says, ‘Really? How’s it pay off?’ ‘Oh, it comes in as a check, it comes through the mail.’
“Does he care if we have a racino?” Dion said of this gambler. “Probably not. He’s found his own online.”
“Maybe when it comes to gambling, all we can hope for is to regulate it,” the sheriff mused. “You can’t save people from themselves.”
Postscript: When The Bollard called Portland’s Parks and Recreation Department to ask about the gambling we’d seen at Bogey’s, assistant department director Tom Civiello said he was unaware of the football squares and poker games. In a follow-up interview, Civiello said he’d just told the restaurant manager to take the squares down. He said the manager did not admit to hosting poker games. The city leases Bogey’s to Edward “Ted” Everest, who did not respond to a request for comment we left on his answering machine. Owners of The Station could not be reached, either. The business’ listed phone number has no answering machine. (For more on allegations of hanky panky at the city-owned golf course bar, see “Ex-Riverside Golf restaurant manager sues city,” April 2, 2006.)
