Now We Can All Gamble

April 25th, 2011

How slot machines snuck into the malls
The slots are there along with money laundering, bribery, shootouts, and billions in profits, all with easy access to everyone, including your kids.

In a strip mall
Inside a one-story building on the edge of a strip mall in Central Florida, Joy Baker calculates the sum total of her morning bets. It’s almost noon, and she’s down $5. Not bad. Her husband, Tony, sits a few feet away. “This is the most fun we’ve had in 20 years,” says Joy, who is 78 and retired. “At our age, we can’t hike. He won’t go to the movies. This gives us a reason to get up in the morning.” Tony agrees. “We enjoy this. We will be really upset if the politicians take this away from us.”

On a Wednesday morning
It’s a Wednesday morning in mid-March, and the Bakers are sitting inside Jacks, a new type of neighborhood business that is flourishing in shopping malls throughout Florida and across America. Jacks bills itself as a “Business Center and Internet Cafe,” but it looks more like a pop-up casino. It is about the size of a neighborhood deli. There is a bar next door and a convenience store around the corner. Inside, jumbo playing cards decorate the walls. The room is filled with about 30 desktop computers. Here and there, men and women sit in office chairs and tap at the computers.

They are online
They are playing “sweepstakes” games that mimic the look and feel of traditional slot machines. Rows of symbols such as cherries, lucky sevens and four-leaf clovers tumble with every click of the mouse. “I’m wagering about 60 cents a spin,” says
John, a 50-year-old wearing a Harley-Davidson T-shirt.

The law disagrees
Local law enforcement disagrees. Jacks is located in the town of Casselberry, in the heart of Seminole County, a suburb of nearby Orlando. The cafe owners contend that what they are offering is not gambling but a form of “sweepstakes” promotions, which are currently legal under Florida state law. In January, after consulting with the sheriff’s department, the five members of the local Board of County Commissioners passed an ordinance designed to shut down the mini-casinos.

Internet sweepstakes cafes
The commissioners soon learned that getting rid of Internet sweepstakes cafes is not easy. Shortly after passing the ordinance, the commissioners were hit with multiple civil lawsuits filed in federal court.

A fight, a fight!
The fight over the legality of the pop-up casinos in Seminole County is part of a broader battle that has been fought for six years in counties across the nation from North Carolina to Texas to Massachusetts. Along the way, cops have raided numerous sweepstakes cafes, confiscated computers, and seized safes full of cash. In September, cops in Virginia Beach, Va., raided a dozen game rooms and confiscated more than 400 computers. In March, police in West Valley City, Utah, shut down two sweepstakes cafes, detained 67 people, and seized 80 computers. Lawmakers in North Carolina passed legislation last year outlawing the business model. In February, Virginia did the same. In April, the Massachusetts Attorney General submitted emergency regulations to shut down the businesses. And yet the sweepstakes cafes keep spreading.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 25th, 2011 at 3:44 am and is filed under Economy, Finance, Personal / Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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