Worries About ‘Convenience Casinos’ in Florida

 

That these cafes are cash machines — and take in as much as $100,000 a week — is no secret to robbers.

And so, at 1 a.m. on April 19, three armed men tried to rob the place at a time when more than three dozen people were playing slot machine-type games on the cafe’s computer terminals. A security guard shot and killed one of the men; the other two fled and were being sought. A woman hiding in the cafe bathroom told a 911 operator that the robbery was happening in “the casino, in Apopka.”

The shooting death in a place that some customers call a casino has brought fresh scrutiny to Florida’s quickly multiplying “Internet sweepstakes cafes,” which now total nearly 1,000 statewide and are estimated to gross more than $1 billion this year, according to industry analysts, state legislators and their aides, and lawyers in the gambling industry.

It has also renewed calls by several county sheriffs for a statewide ban on the cafes’ games. They say the businesses are magnets for crime because they usually have large sums of cash on hand. Since nine sweepstakes cafes have opened in Seminole County, crimes at those addresses have increased 14 percent, according to data compiled by the sheriff’s office.

A bill was brought before the State Legislature this session that would have prohibited the games. Its proponents cite a host of concerns — worries about crime, compulsive gambling and morality. But the bill was rejected after an aggressive lobbying campaign by the companies that franchise some of the cafes. It did not help, industry critics say, that two state legislators own Internet sweepstakes cafes themselves.

Labeled by critics as “convenience casinos,” the cafes offer computerized “sweepstakes” games to customers who buy Internet time or phone cards. “Points” can be redeemed for cash, and jackpots are as high as $15,000, employees said. Lawyers for the owners have likened the slotlike and video poker games, with names like Cobra Cash and Fruit Paradise, to the Monopoly prize cards offered by McDonald’s restaurants.

The cafes operate in a legal gray zone in Florida and a dozen other states. Several Florida sheriffs have raided the cafes, arguing that the computer games, operated via the Web, are nothing more than a vaguely disguised form of illegal gambling.

In January, the Seminole County Commission passed a law banning the Internet cafes, but a federal judge issued a temporary order that stopped the county from enforcing the law while its constitutionality was considered.

“I just want clarity,” said Sheriff Jim Coats of Pinellas County, whose department has written to cafes ordering them to shut down within 30 days or face prosecution. “The Legislature ought to make the law clear. If someone goes in there and utilizes these machines and pays by cash, where does that cash go? No one knows. We need regulation.”

Florida is already awash in state-sanctioned gambling. There is a popular state lottery. There are eight Indian casinos. And there are nearly two dozen thoroughbred, harness and greyhound tracks and jai alai frontons — some with slot machines and all offering high-stakes poker games.

And in the last five years, the emergence of convenience casinos has put places offering jackpots next to neighborhood coffee shops and dry cleaners. The explosion of the games has led to complaints that they are addictive and prey on some of the state’s poorest residents.

“Florida now has the most diverse gaming industry of any place in the country, including Vegas, where the lottery and Internet sweepstakes cafes don’t even exist,” said Marc W. Dunbar, a Tallahassee lawyer who represents gambling companies. “We have every kind of gaming here, everything. And we have this massive underground industry in the state — there are so many places for people to get their fix.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 6, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the location of the Fun City Sweepstakes cafe. It is in Palm Harbor, Fla., not North Port.

View the original article here

Worries About ‘Convenience Casinos’ in Florida

 

That these cafes are cash machines — and take in as much as $100,000 a week — is no secret to robbers.

And so, at 1 a.m. on April 19, three armed men tried to rob the place at a time when more than three dozen people were playing slot machine-type games on the cafe’s computer terminals. A security guard shot and killed one of the men; the other two fled and were being sought. A woman hiding in the cafe bathroom told a 911 operator that the robbery was happening in “the casino, in Apopka.”

The shooting death in a place that some customers call a casino has brought fresh scrutiny to Florida’s quickly multiplying “Internet sweepstakes cafes,” which now total nearly 1,000 statewide and are estimated to gross more than $1 billion this year, according to industry analysts, state legislators and their aides, and lawyers in the gambling industry.

It has also renewed calls by several county sheriffs for a statewide ban on the cafes’ games. They say the businesses are magnets for crime because they usually have large sums of cash on hand. Since nine sweepstakes cafes have opened in Seminole County, crimes at those addresses have increased 14 percent, according to data compiled by the sheriff’s office.

A bill was brought before the State Legislature this session that would have prohibited the games. Its proponents cite a host of concerns — worries about crime, compulsive gambling and morality. But the bill was rejected after an aggressive lobbying campaign by the companies that franchise some of the cafes. It did not help, industry critics say, that two state legislators own Internet sweepstakes cafes themselves.

Labeled by critics as “convenience casinos,” the cafes offer computerized “sweepstakes” games to customers who buy Internet time or phone cards. “Points” can be redeemed for cash, and jackpots are as high as $15,000, employees said. Lawyers for the owners have likened the slotlike and video poker games, with names like Cobra Cash and Fruit Paradise, to the Monopoly prize cards offered by McDonald’s restaurants.

The cafes operate in a legal gray zone in Florida and a dozen other states. Several Florida sheriffs have raided the cafes, arguing that the computer games, operated via the Web, are nothing more than a vaguely disguised form of illegal gambling.

In January, the Seminole County Commission passed a law banning the Internet cafes, but a federal judge issued a temporary order that stopped the county from enforcing the law while its constitutionality was considered.

“I just want clarity,” said Sheriff Jim Coats of Pinellas County, whose department has written to cafes ordering them to shut down within 30 days or face prosecution. “The Legislature ought to make the law clear. If someone goes in there and utilizes these machines and pays by cash, where does that cash go? No one knows. We need regulation.”

Florida is already awash in state-sanctioned gambling. There is a popular state lottery. There are eight Indian casinos. And there are nearly two dozen thoroughbred, harness and greyhound tracks and jai alai frontons — some with slot machines and all offering high-stakes poker games.

And in the last five years, the emergence of convenience casinos has put places offering jackpots next to neighborhood coffee shops and dry cleaners. The explosion of the games has led to complaints that they are addictive and prey on some of the state’s poorest residents.

“Florida now has the most diverse gaming industry of any place in the country, including Vegas, where the lottery and Internet sweepstakes cafes don’t even exist,” said Marc W. Dunbar, a Tallahassee lawyer who represents gambling companies. “We have every kind of gaming here, everything. And we have this massive underground industry in the state — there are so many places for people to get their fix.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 6, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the location of the Fun City Sweepstakes cafe. It is in Palm Harbor, Fla., not North Port.

View the original article here

A Levee Breached, and New Worries Downstream

But now the risk is flowing downstream.

Waters released into the 130,000-acre floodway by the corps will soon re-enter the Mississippi near New Madrid, through two 5,500-foot stretches blasted out over two days at the lower end of the basin, and the crest will continue to roll on, with the river expected to match or beat its previous record heights at many points along the way.

For the people responsible for trying to manage the unmanageable river, each success is replaced by new worries.

“We’re just at the beginning of the beginning,” said Maj. Gen. Michael J. Walsh of the Army Corps of Engineers and president of the Mississippi River Commission.

His decision to inundate the 130,000 acres within the spillway’s basin almost certainly saved the town of Cairo, Ill. The river had reached a record 61.7 feet at Cairo before the explosion and was predicted to rise more than a foot further.

The river fell to 60.1 feet by Tuesday afternoon. But, General Walsh warned, the floodway only offered temporary relief and the water levels upstream could soon rise again. “The crest will come back up,” he added. “We’ll see where we go from there.”

The people whose land was under all that water watched with wonder and dismay.

“She’s coming across here now, ain’t she?” Ed Marshall, 57, a farmer, said as he arrived Tuesday to get an early sense of the damage with his insurance agent atop the interior levee that forms the western boundary of the spillway. “There’s nothing I can do about it. It’s in God’s hands.”

Mark Dugan, 59, used binoculars to find the top of his recently remodeled farmhouse poking out, like an iceberg, from the fast-moving water. A shed had been washed into a stand of trees.

“We just question the way they did it,” he said of the Army Corps of Engineers. “Actually we even question the fact they did do it.”

Gov. Jay Nixon visited the emergency command center here on Tuesday, declaring, “It’s a lot of water out there, folks.” He was not talking just about the river, but also about communities farther inland, where days of rain had saturated and covered the ground.

Mr. Nixon pledged to commit resources to restoring the area. “It goes beyond rebuilding the levee,” he said. “It’s about rebuilding the farm economy here.”

Carlin Bennett, the presiding commissioner for Mississippi County, said his community’s biggest fear was that the plan to use the spillway would ultimately have little effect: “You blow the levee, it ruins us and you don’t get any relief up or downstream.”

Meanwhile the surging river, and the flooding it is almost certain to cause, moved south. More than 40 percent of the nation’s waters drain into the Mississippi, and relentless rainfall is creating formidable challenges.

“We’re going to fight this river all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico,” said Col. Vernie L. Reichling Jr., who commands the Memphis District of the corps. He estimated that the corps had already spent $5 million fighting the flood in his district. “I don’t see this letting up,” he said, adding that he expected to be fighting the flooding into next month.

While the main defenses along the Mississippi are expected to hold up under the onslaught, flooding is likely as water backs up into the rivers and tributaries that feed into the Mississippi, and tests “non-federal” levees that line those waterways.

“The water can’t drain into the Mississippi because the river levels are so high,” said Jeff Graschel of the Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And while the federal levees are high and strong, “anything that’s non-federal is a different story,” he said.

A. G. Sulzberger reported from Sikeston, and John Schwartz from New York. Malcolm Gay contributed reporting from Cairo, Ill.