Daily Archives: March 8, 2010

Casino Nirvana in Arkansas

March 8, 2010 12:45 pm

I was interviewed for this piece last week, and it’s interesting to see how it all came together. I’m glad I’m not the only one who didn’t think that this proposal made no sense. From Arkansas Business:

If a proposed constitutional amendment allowing Texas businessman Michael J. Wasserman to build casinos in Arkansas sounds like a license to print money, you don't know the half of it.

When Arkansas Business sent Wasserman's proposed amendment to gambling experts, they were gobsmacked by the proposal, which they described as so tilted toward the casino operator that it would be unprecedented, if not completely unrealistic.

via Casino Proposal Termed ‘Nirvana’ for Businessman – ArkansasBusiness.com.

Read the article–it is quite a fanciful proposal for casino legalization.

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Evolution of MO blacklist

March 8, 2010 11:41 am

Interesting article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch over the weekend about the evolution of Missouri’s casino blacklist:

For years, the crimes that barred gamblers from Missouri casinos read like Mafia movie plots.

Men with ties to Kansas City's notorious La Cosa Nostra ran illegal betting rings, threatened witnesses and skimmed money from Las Vegas casinos, according to FBI testimony. And the state, seeking a Mob-free gambling industry, banned each from Missouri's riverboats.

But that was more than 10 years ago. The blacklist is dealing from a new deck, and blackballing a different kind of professional: the public servant.

via Public servants are big fish in gambling blacklist net – STLtoday.com.

In general across the US there’s been a shift towards using it more for gaming-related offenses–cheating and the like–than organized crime affiliations.

If you’d like some cautionary reading, you can browse Nevada’s list of excluded persons or New Jersey’s exclusion list.

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