Casino News Today

CASCADE LOCKS, Ore. — A lawyer, doctor, bank and pharmacy are gone. The Gorge Gas and Mart is closed. The Gum Oak Restaurant, closed. Scenic Winds Motel, closed. Big D auto service, closed. An Internet facility, closed. Whisky Flats Mercantile, closed.

“In the 1960s we had about 60 licensed businesses,”‘ said Charles Daughtry, port manager in this former timber town in the scenic Columbia River Gorge. “We now have about 12, and half of them are for sale.”

About 100 miles to the south, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs are having their own troubles. Reservation unemployment is about 26 percent. The tribal lumber mill is closing. The tribes are millions of dollars shy of what leaders say they need to provide basic services.

The Warm Springs tribes and many Cascade Locks residents also have this in common: They see building an Indian casino on the banks of the Columbia as their salvation.

It is an ironic twist in history. Cascade Locks sits on part of 10 million acres ceded by the Wasco and Warm Springs Indians to the U.S. government in 1855. In exchange, the tribes got government services, fishing rights and a 640,000-acre reservation, Oregon’s largest, that begins about 65 miles east of Portland.

And now, many here hope the Warm Springs tribes will be permitted to build an off-reservation casino on a sliver of the land they gave up.

But building the casino in this town of 1,100 is not a sure thing.

Environmentalists say it would blight the federally designated Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, an 85-mile strip of river where the town is located. Some residents have the same worry.

Leading the opposition are the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, which have a flourishing casino about 65 miles southwest of Portland and are worried a Warm Springs casino in Cascade Locks would siphon off some of the lucrative Portland market.

At federal hearings that have just begun on the proposal, emotions have run high.

Cheryle Kennedy, tribal chairwoman of the Grand Ronde, noted the Warm Springs have a casino on their reservation, and she argued allowing another in Cascade Locks would violate Oregon’s long-held policy of one casino per tribe on tribal lands.

The Warm Springs tribes say they will close the small casino if they can build at Cascade Locks.

“We do not oppose the Warm Springs people,” she said, bringing hoots and groans from the overflow crowd at the hearing — Warm Springs tribal members and residents of Cascade Locks alike.

Three years ago, Gov. Ted Kulongoski and the Warm Springs tribes signed an agreement that would allow Oregon’s first off-reservation tribal casino.

The Warm Springs say revenues from the casino on their reservation are insufficient to help them out of poverty. They are hoping a casino in Cascade Locks would draw gamblers from Portland, which is 45 minutes away by car.

Kennedy contended the Grand Ronde is an “affected tribe” with a stake in the decision.

Only three off-reservation casino applications have made it through the legal labyrinth since the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulation Act. But the Warm Springs tribes, and Cascade Locks, have their hopes up. The off-reservation application for Cascade Locks is one of six the Interior Department recently allowed to proceed. Most of those rejected were judged to be too far from reservations to provide jobs for tribal members.

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Michigan — In just two short years, unprecedented change has come to the sleepy Saganing Indian Reservation in Arenac County. A new tribal community center was first to open and now the Eagles Landing Casino stands in a nearby farm field.Members of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe once only dreamed of such development on their Saganing lands. Today, they celebrate what they’ve accomplished.

“Finally, we’ve found a way to do things here in Saganing that have been really needed for so long,” said Lorna Call, tribal sub-chief.

Read the story about the Saganing casino at mlive.com/bctimes.

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Boston –It’s true - politicians really do speak a different language than the rest of us. So when House Speaker Sal DiMasi says this in a letter to House members:

“Do we want to usher in a casino culture - with rampant bankruptcies, crime and social ills - or do we want to create a better Massachusetts for all sectors of the society?”

What he really means is this:

“Do you really want to cross me on this one?”

That’s fine. It’s the nature of politics for those with more power to apply pressure to those with less. And we don’t doubt the sincerity of DiMasi’s increasingly high-pitched argument against Gov. Deval Patrick’s casino proposal. He appears to legitimately fear the impact of casinos on society.

But this is not a debate that should be waged in private offices and back corridors of the State House, with the threat of payback implicit and the outcome sealed before a final vote is ever taken.

The time has come instead for a clean, honest floor debate - and an up-or-down vote. Because to put it off any further is to invite more well-deserved cynicism about the process.

And for the record, if any House lawmaker flips on casinos out of fear (real or imagined) about their political clout - that they won’t get a coveted committee assignment, or they’ll simply be left standing outside the “in” crowd - then they aren’t doing the job they were sworn to do.

In the end, lawmakers need only consider two things when they are finally allowed to vote - what is in the best interests of the constituents they were elected to represent, and of the commonwealth as a whole. In our view, that means a vote in favor of the solid revenue-generating and jobs-producing plan that Patrick has proposed.

If history is a guide then tomorrow’s public hearing on the casino plan - what seems like the zillionth such forum - will feature no small amount of grandstanding and a few raised voices. And it’s unlikely to change any minds.

But as long as a fair vote follows quickly (and House members put their constituents ahead of themselves, what a concept!) the taxpayers of Massachusetts will have been served.

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A top lawyer and TV commentator who became addicted to gambling is suing seven casinos for not spotting her problem and banning her.

Arelia Taveras said she received high-roller treatment including limousines whisking her to New Jersey’s Atlantic City casinos, soon after she began visiting them “to relax”.

Ms Taveras said she was even allowed to bring her dog, Sasha, to the blackjack tables.

But her gambling spun out of control, she said and she would go days at a time at the tables, not eating or sleeping, brushing her teeth with disposable wipes so she did not have to leave.

She says her losses totalled nearly a million dollars (£530,000) and is now chasing the longest of long shots – a £10.5 million racketeering lawsuit against six Atlantic City casinos and one in Las Vegas, claiming they had a duty to notice her compulsive gambling problem and cut her off.

“They knew I was going for days without eating or sleeping,” Ms Taveras said. “I would pass out at the tables. They had a duty of care to me. Nobody in their right mind would gamble for four or five straight days without sleeping.”

Experts say her case will be difficult to prove, but it provides an unusually detailed window into the life of a problem gambler.

“It’s like crack, only gambling is worse than crack because it’s mental,” said Ms Taveras, 37, a New Yorker who now lives in Minnesota. “It creeps up on you, the impulse. It’s a sickness.”

She lost her law practice, her apartment, her parents’ home, and owes the taxman £30,500. She said she was so depressed she even considered swerving into oncoming traffic to kill herself.

Ms Taveras, who admitted dipping into her clients’ escrow accounts to finance her gambling habit, was disbarred last June, and faces criminal charges, but is trying to work out restitution agreements in order to avoid a prison term.

Her lawsuit names Resorts Atlantic City, Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort, the Tropicana Casino Resort, the Showboat Casino Hotel, Bally’s Atlantic City, as well as the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

As a young lawyer, Taveras made a name for herself representing the families of victims of American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed in New York City’s borough of Queens in November 2001, killing 265 people.

Her practice had 400 clients and earned her more than £260,000 a year. She appeared on TV and radio to discuss legal issues, wrote a guidebook for women dealing with deadbeat dads in the court system, called The Gangsta Girls’ Guide To Child Support, and was a regular contributor to Hispanic culture websites. In 2000, the New York Daily News named her one of “21 New Yorkers to Watch in the 21st century”.

Ms Taveras spent nearly a year in clinics to treat her gambling addiction and now works at a telephone call centre in Minnesota.

The casinos deny any wrongdoing, maintaining in court papers that Ms Taveras brought her problems on herself.

Joe Corbo, president of the Casino Association of New Jersey, said casino workers were given extensive training on spotting problem gamblers and referring them to help, including a self-exclusion list the state maintains.

Gamblers can voluntarily bar themselves from casinos, either for a few years or for life. While they are on the list, casinos cannot solicit them.

Paul O’Gara, a lawyer specialising in Atlantic City gambling issues, said it would be difficult for Ms Taveras to prove that the casinos knew she had a problem.

“How are you supposed to know whether this was a woman who was just having a good time, or had money and was just lonely, as opposed to someone who couldn’t control themselves?” he said.

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