Confessions of a Slot Machine Queen

I took a break from the blog to in order to complete final revisions of my book, CONFESSIONS OF A SLOT MACHINE QUEEN, and get it ready to go to press. It will be released in two weeks. I have to admit that anticipating the book’s release is stressful. My goal in writing it was to raise important issues about the casino industry so that people will be informed, or at least feel compelled to ask questions about the social and economic impacts casinos will have on their communities before they let their local and state politicians talk them into using gambling to generate new revenue.

But this is also a very personal narrative and I have worked long enough as a literature professor to know that writers cannot control how their work will be received. Once the book is released, it takes on a life of its own. And each reader will interpret the work differently, although there might be a general agreement about whether or not the author achieved her goal. So now the work begins; I’m putting a name and a face to a problem that is plaguing thousands of people, many of them women.

When I first started working on this book I found few resources for women gamblers and there was almost nothing dealing with African American women gamblers. That has changed somewhat, at least online. Marilyn Lancelot, who describes her experience with a gambling addiction in her memoir titled Gripped by Gambling has created a website for women gamblers.

Hopefully more women will share their experiences.

Atlantic City in the New York Times; gamblers and lawsuits

Since I last posted on my site, I’ve been busy working on the final version of my book, CONFESSIONS OF A SLOT MACHINE QUEEN, and preparing it for publication. If things go as I have planned, the book will be released in March, 2010.

Occasionally, when I read a new article about casino gambling and witness the almost obscene way in which we, the people of this great U.S. of A, are being deceived into believing that gambling is in the interest of the greater good, that is, it presumably generates much needed revenue for social programs such as aid to the elderly and disadvantaged, I feel a great sense of urgency. I want to move things ahead with the hope that my story of how I became addicted to slot machine gambling might persuade voters to think twice about allowing casinos into their communities. Take a look around the next time you go to a casino and see who is being “served”: they’re overwhelmingly elderly and disadvantaged, depending on where you go.

As the anti-casino gambling activist Bill Kearney has told me on several occasions, once a casino has landed (or docked) in a community, it’s too late. We have to work to keep them out, to stop the expansion of casinos from sea to shining sea.

Which brings me to what I want to mention today: a feature article in the business section of the Sunday, October 25, 2009, issue of The New York Times. It’s all about the decline of casino gambling in Atlantic City, New Jersey (“Can Atlantic City Raise the Stakes?”, by Julie Creswell).

It’s not that people are gambling less; they are gambling closer to home. Why make the trip to Atlantic City or to Las Vegas (which was the cover article for the August 24, 2009, issue of Time magazine), when you can gambling practically in your own back yard, which is literally the case in Detroit, where there are three enormous casinos in the downtown area, each within 2.5 miles of each other.

It really doesn’t take an expert to conclude that we are at a point of saturation insofar as casinos are concerned. It also isn’t surprising that more and more people are becoming addicted to gambling. They’re losing their homes, their livelihoods and sometimes their lives. The number of suicides among compulsive gamblers is rising at an alarming rate.

Many of the scholars who study gambling addictions insist that the casino industry needs to be held accountable for what it promotes as a harmless form of entertainment. In fact, if the recent lawsuit filed against MotorCity Casino by Italo Mario Parise and his attorney, Frank A. Cusumano, accomplished anything, it might be that perhaps more people will think about the negative impacts gambling is having, not only on people like Parise, who apparently had the money to gamble with, but the people in Detroit who are grasping at straws when they put their last few dollars in the slot machines.

My October 18, 2009, post is an article about Bill Kearney and his efforts to get the casinos to send statements to patrons as a possible safeguard.

By the way, there are numerous references to “Casino Capitalism” in Michael Moore’s new documentary. I find it interesting, though, that he didn’t implicate the casino industry, which is capitalism in its most pure form, pure consumption that doesn’t produce anything―just a bit of harmless entertainment, or so we are being told.

Monthly gambling statements in Pennsylvania now a longshot – pressofAtlanticCity.com : Atlantic City

Monthly gambling statements in Pennsylvania now a longshot – pressofAtlanticCity.com : Atlantic City

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WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT A FEW NATIVE AMERICAN CASINOS

During the first few months of my two-year descent into casinoland, I knew something weird was happening to me. I had begun to wonder if whatever was drawing me back again and again to a place I didn’t like so that I could engage in an utterly mind-numbing and potentially devastating activity―sticking hundred dollar bills into slot machines―had as much to do with the space of the casino as it did my lack of will power or my addiction―or whatever.

Anyway, I decided to do a bit of research about casino gambling. It was my way of trying to move back from the brink of self-destruction. In fact, my research became a good reason to keep right on gambling. Now I was going to the casino to conduct research for a book on gambling. That’s what I kept telling myself. Of course, what I was really doing was avoiding the problem: my rapidly growing addiction to slot machines. Since at that time I gambled mainly at Ho Chunk Casino near Baraboo, Wisconsin, I began by reading about Native American casinos.

In December, 2002, TIME magazine did a two-part special report on Native American casino gambling. The report was quite an eye-opener. Some of the more profitable casinos, like the two Grand Casinos in Minnesota and the Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods casinos in Connecticut, were either developed and managed or financed, not by Native Americans, but by outrageously wealthy white men like Lyle Berman and Solomon Kerzner and their partners, and an elderly billionaire from Malaysia, Lim Goh Tong.

According to TIME, Lyle Berman was at the forefront of Native American casino development and management when he joined with the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians in 1990 to build the Grand Casinos. His company, Lakes Entertainment, Inc., managed the Mille Lacs casino for seven years–to the tune of 40% of the profits–and then turned it over to the Ojibwes.

The Mohegan Sun was the brain-child of a South African, Solomon Kerzner. Kerzner also developed the South African Sun City Resort–an exclusive, whites-only retreat during apartheid and the subject of much controversy among entertainers from the U.S. who protested South Africa’s racist regime.

A shrewd gambling operator, Kerzner managed to wriggle out of a bad deal in the 1980s that sent a partner, the Transkeian Prime Minister George Matanzima to jail for fraud. Since then Kerzner has developed and managed numerous hotels and casinos, earning him millions of dollars annually in fees.

The Mohegans, which were formally recognized as a tribe by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1994, worked out an agreement with Kerzner and his partners that reportedly will rake in more than $800 million, half of which will go to Kerzner.

The Malaysian billionaire was Lim Goh Tong. Tong founded the hugely profitable Genting Highlands Hotel Resort and Casino, which he built on a mountain near Kuala Lumpar, Malaysia. Tong helped bankroll Foxwoods which was the largest casino complex in the world until it was eclipsed by the Las Vegas Sands in Macao. Located just ten miles from the Mohegan Sun, Foxwoods was receiving more than 40,000 people a day and boasting annual gross revenues of more than $1 billion until the recession slowed things down a bit.

Lim Goh Tong worked out a deal to receive about 10% of its net profits until 2018 . He celebrated his 90th birthday in April, 2007 and died shortly thereafter but his family is still around to reap the rewards, about a billion dollars after taxes, over the life of the agreement.

With backers like these, it’s no wonder that some of the tribes that had to invent their history and dig deepest into their ancestry to prove to the Bureau of Indian Affairs that they are indeed Indian–like the Mohegans and Foxwoods’ Pequots–are getting richer by the day, while other less well connected tribes remain impoverished and dependent on federal funds, their people trapped on reservations that offer almost no opportunities for education and economic advancement. The enormous revenues generated by casinos, and especially slot machines, have yet to trickle down to those who are most needy.

Casinos in Mississippi

Last time I mentioned that Iowa played an important role in the expansion of casino gambling across the country. I also mentioned a boat named the Diamond Jo that moved into Dubuque after the first boat, the Diamond Lady, sailed off to greater profits in Mississippi. Today the Diamond Jo, which was a small riverboat with only slots gambling when I went there with a friend in 2005,  is now a land-based casino with plenty of slot machines, table games and live entertainment.

Prior to the devastating Hurricane named Katrina, gambling in Mississippi was confined to several barges docked at the Mississippi riverfront. Hurricane Katrina destroyed almost all the casino barges along the gulf coast. She also gave them a rebuilding boost.

During the aftermath of the hurricane, Mississippi lawmakers changed a law requiring casinos to float on water and allowed them to be rebuilt on land within 800 feet of the coast. This allowed them to expand. According to an August, 2007, article in The Progressive magazine, seven casinos have reopened in Biloxi since Katrina. One of them, the Beau Rivage Resort and Casino, was quickly rebuilt in 2006 in time for a Labor Day opening and cost $550 million. Twenty more casinos are expected to open within the next three years, thereby turning Biloxi into a $4 billion gaming market.  The current recession has slowed things down a bit: in July, 2009, revenues from casino gambling in Mississippi were down by 20 percent. Still, the people who own and operate casinos continue to get rich at the expense of very poor Mississippi communities.

Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate among black people in the country. Unhealthy and obese young black women are giving birth at alarming rates to premature and low-weight babies who don’t make it pass their first year. Poor or non-existent health care is blamed, the result of cuts in social and outreach programs that were made before Katrina struck. Many of those programs are essential for teaching impoverished people how to take care of their health and to do the basic paperwork required to receive federally financed health care services, including pre- and postnatal care.

These people live in the shadows of the casinos. The millions of dollars the casinos have raked in since Hurricane Katrina have yet to trickle down. In July, 2007 casinos in Mississippi reported an all time record of $97.3 million in revenues.  Some of that money is coming from local residents. They say they go to the casinos because there’s nothing else for them to do. They also admit spending more time and money in the casinos than they did before Katrina struck, money that many of them can’t afford to lose.

Thousands of people along the Gulf coast are still languishing in trailers the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) provided them as temporary shelters. Many of them are ineligible for the Community Development Block Grants that Congress approved for Mississippi because they aren’t homeowners. Insurance companies aren’t covering damage for many of those who had homes because their policies excluded losses caused by hurricanes.

The people interviewed by Tim Shorrock  for The Progressive all echoed the same concern: adequate and affordable housing and child care centers is what Biloxi needs, as are better health care facilities for Mississippi’s elderly and disabled residents. Biloxi’s only African American city council member, Bill Stallworth, told Shorrock that housing is the only way to stop the encroachment of casinos and condos; it’s the only way to save the area for the people who live and work there, including casino employees.

Next time I will write about some of the wealthy people behind this great expansion of what was once an illegal activity.

Sailing the Mississippi

One day, in the early summer of 2005, during the beginning of my odyssey into casinoland, a friend called and asked me to go with her to Dubuque, Iowa, to try the riverboats there. I didn’t want to go that far to gamble. I didn’t really want to go gambling at all.  But I wasn’t doing anything else that day, so I suggested that we try Potawatomi Casino in Milwaukee. My friend said no, that Potawatomi was a rip-off joint and that nobody ever wins anything worth making the trip.She wanted to go to Dubuque, Iowa, because someone told her a woman went there in May, 2005,  and won $750,000.

I thought that such a big win was unlikely in a place like Iowa where hard-working farmers are more inclined to tend their wheat and cornfields and feed their cows and pigs than slot machines. I was wrong—about Iowa, that is. That’s where it all began, this proliferation of casinos across the American landscape.

In March, 1989, the Iowa State Legislature passed the “Excursion Gambling Boat Act” that brought riverboat gambling to the state as a remedy to the economic problems it had been suffering for more than a decade, the result of  a rapidly declining population and the loss of manufacturing jobs in the farm and heavy construction equipment industry.

State legislators hoped to increase tourism by allowing the boats, replicas of 19^th century steamboats, to cruise the Mississippi river. Their public relations strategy revolved around capitalizing on Mississippi River lore and the legacy of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, who was born a little further  south, in Florida, Missouri and grew up in the river town of Hannibal.

Tourists would come to Iowa in droves to experience a bit of 19^th century culture while cruising along the river in replicas of boats that once transported passengers, cargo–and slaves–to destinations further south. Of course, the fact that Clemens witnessed at least one coffle of  black women and men in chains being forced onto a riverboat down at the docks in Hannibal and might have transported some himself to the deep South during his career as a riverboat pilot would be omitted from this history of  19^th century river lore.

There also would be no mention of the fact that his family owned a slave named Jennie whom his father sold to a trader to pay off some of his debts and who probably was taken away in chains on a brightly painted and gingerbread decorated steamboat headed for a cotton or sugar plantation way down South. Slavery is unspeakable history and the excursions were meant to be family fun. The kids could enjoy the scenery and the pleasant river breezes while their parents gambled, thereby helping generate the new revenue the state so desperately needed without giving a thought to that other revenue generating industry that kept much of this country’s economy afloat for several centuries.

On April 1, 1991, a fully outfitted riverboat casino, the Diamond Lady, was docked in downtown Bettendorf, Iowa, thus inaugurating legalized riverboat gambling in the United States. The following year the owners of the Diamond Lady packed up their boat and their profits, most of which came from local residents, not tourists chasing after Huckleberry Finn, and left. They had made big promises to the people of Iowa: new jobs, a riverfront complex, a Mark Twain amusement park, hotel, and so forth. Instead, they left over 600 Iowans unemployed in their wake as they sailed on down the river to even greater profits in Mississippi, which even after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, remains the gambling mecca of the South.

The floodgates that were opened in Iowa in 1991 widened as neighboring states joined this new and high-tech gold rush, dropped the requirement that riverboats cruise and eliminated wagering and loss limits. Now all the new prospectors had to do was convince lawmakers and the public that casino gambling was a new form of entertainment that will help boost the economy, dock a boat at a riverfront and sit back and count the money that began pouring in. By 1994, when another riverboat, the Diamond Jo, floated into Dubuque, land-based and riverboat casinos were popping up all over the Midwest.

An audience of one

Since starting this blog, I’ve felt ambivalent about how much energy I should invest in it. After looking at many other blogs that try to take on serious issues, I have the feeling that if you’re not a well-known and well placed journalist or political commentator, you’re essentially writing for an audience of one, yourself.  That’s why I have not posted anything here for quite some time.  What’s the point in continuing if I can’t generate responses from people who share my concerns?

Still, there’s always the possibility that a few people might be interested enough in what I have to say about gambling problems among black women to pass the word along. I  hope so, because I continue to have difficulty finding black women who are struggling with this problem, although I know they are out there and are looking for someone with whom they can share experiences.

In fact, a few days ago I found an article in the March 15-21, 2000 edition of the MICHIGAN CHRONICLE that deals with what the paper called the “new faces of problem gambling (“Black women are the new faces of problem gambling” by Lolita Standifer).  According to the article, “They are college-educated, professional African American women wearing business suits. They can be found at casinos, feeding coins into slot machines or video poker hoping to feel the joy of winning one more time. She is an addict but more difficult to identify.”

It’s precisely because this form of addiction is  is hard to detect that it’s  insidious. Unlike alcoholics or drug addicts, gambling addicts can hide their addictions deep within the labyrinth, inside the casino, until it’s too late.  Especially for slot and video poker players, it doesn’t take long to lose control, placing at high risk everything they’ve worked for.

Lolita Standifer interviewed a gambling addiction counselor, Larry Cole, for the article.  He said, “When I worked for the [gambling] hotline, the majority of the callers were black women. . . A lot of them had children.  Some told me they had a friend with a gambling problem and they were talking about themselves, and some said they were introduced to gambling through a friend or churches that would take trips to casinos.”

There was a time when most black churches strongly opposed gambling. Now they have bought into the common belief that it’s just another harmless form of entertainment, when in fact, the casino industry is just as predatory, maybe more so, than the credit card and the subprime mortgage industries. Yet there is very little outcry, mainly because casinos pay wagering taxes to the states where they operate. It’s part of the deal.  Next time, I will explain how casino gambling, and especially slot machine gambling, ended up being one of the most lucrative forms “entertainment” on the planet, at least for the people who own and operate the casinos.

Detroit

Whenever I come to Detroit, my hometown, I’m saddened. It was always an ugly city to me. It’s even more so now, with all the foreclosed homes, the littered vacant lots, the businesses that have long been shuttered. Now there’s talk that General Motors might move its headquarters from Downtown Detroit to the suburbs. That’s one more business to flee. What will be left is what I call the new BIG THREE: the three casinos, Greektown, which is within walking distance of GM’s world headquarters, the MGM Grand and the MotorCity casino. I find it sad that a city that once manufactured real tangible goods, automobiles, now is relying on a single and predatory industry, casino gambling to boost its economy. There is a bright light, though. Detroit has a new mayor, Dave Bing. He has an enormous job ahead of him, not the least of which is to clean up the mess left behind by the previous mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick.  Kilpatrick has served his jail time and has now gone away from Detroit. Good riddance.

The Sunday, May 17, 2009 edition of The New York Times Magazine is titled “The Money Issue, ” with Suze Orman on the cover. Among the articles I found interesting is “What Does Your Credit-Card Company Really Know About You?”  The answer? Just about everything! Likewise with the casino industry. People who sign up for rewards or players cards give casinos a great deal of information about themselves. The casinos use that information to “reward” gamblers for losing their money, giving them perks like lavish meals and hotel rooms, even when they know they are bankrupt. I mention this because in April, President Obama asked Congress to “outlaw anytime, any-reason rate boosts and late-fee traps” and to increase scrutiny of the credit card industry. A bill called the “Credit Card Holders’ Bill of Rights,” was recently passed by the House.  As I read this I wondered, where is the consumer protection in the casino industry? I keep hearing stories about people bankrupting themselves in casinos even when the people who are “serving” them know that they are addicted.  It’s easy to do so. The companies that cash checks and process credit card advances in casinos charge exorbitant fees. They earn millions of dollars, but I don’t hear anyone in Washington questioning these transactions, even though these companies and the casino industry are as predatory as the credit card and sub-prime mortgage industries.

Renee Cunningham-Williams

Renee Cunningham-Williams might be the only researcher in the country specializing in gambling addictions among African Americans.  At least I wasn’t able to find anyone until I stumbled across an article about her that was posted on the Washington University in St. Louis website.  Gambling among African Americans is so far below the public radar that it makes me nervous, especially when you consider that many of the slots-only casinos are being built in cities, like Pittsburgh, that have large populations of black people. I’m from Detroit and have a special interest and concern about addictions among black people there. The city has three enormous casinos, each within 2.5 miles of each other. Two casinos, the MGM Grand and the MotorCity are in impoverished, desolate neighborhoods. The MotorCity casino is within walking distance of a Senior Citizens residential community.  Senior citizens are among the more vulnerable groups and are very heavily marketed to by casino marketing and advertising agencies.