Electronic bingo gambling has infiltrated Alabama, and some say the attorney general is to blame for the recent explosion of machines and facilities across the state.
Eric Johnston, president of and general counsel for the Southeast Law Institute in Birmingham, which deals with moral issues affecting public policy in the state, said Attorney General Troy King’s 2004 findings on electronic gambling machines (see story, page 5) are a large part of the industry’s growth in Alabama.
“I believe that Attorney General King’s informal opinion was the catalyst that credited this exponential expansion of electronic bingo gambling, all or most of which is unconstitutional and illegal,” Johnston said.
King refuted that notion.
“Is gambling out of control in Alabama? Yes,” he said. “Is it because of my findings? No.
“The reason we are seeing gambling expand is because the state law is loose,” King explained. “There are no resources to try to stop it, and when (they) do try to stop it, the penalties are lax.”
Still local jurisdiction after local jurisdiction points to King’s 2004 findings as its justification for allowing electronic bingo gambling.
“The first significant evidence of this was the Houston County Commission decision (in February 2008) that they had authority to open a casino with unlimited electronic bingo capabilities,” Johnston explained. “Their resolution quoted from Attorney General King’s informal opinion. Following Houston County were the other operations or expected operations including Etowah County, St. Clair County (Ashville and Argo), Walker County, city of Triana, etc.”
Ashville Mayor Robert McKay said King’s findings helped him decide what type of gambling machines he plans to bring to his city. “If the machines in Macon and Walker and Greene counties are bingo machines, those are the kinds of bingo machines we want,” he said. “If they shut it down statewide, I would shut my mouth.”
Joe Godfrey, executive director of Alabama Citizens Action Program, said if King had “made a strong stand and taken action” instead of releasing the informal opinion, then “we would not have this problem we have today.”
“I believe that his informal opinion has done great damage,” he said.
Because of the attempts to use King’s findings to expand gambling and his thoughts that electronic bingo gambling can be legal if it follows certain criteria, Gov. Bob Riley has gone a different direction in his recent attempts to curtail gambling.
In late spring or early summer 2008, “there was a group from Walker County that came down here (to Montgomery),” Riley said. “Legislators, pastors, concerned citizens came down here and said there was this epidemic in Walker County now and they had no way to control it.” (Visit www.thealabamabaptist.org to read about electronic bingo gambling in Walker County.)
After meeting with this group, Riley said he called King and asked him to explain what was happening with electronic bingo gambling in the state. From there, Riley had his legal staff review King’s information.
Along with explaining how each jurisdiction wanting to allow electronic gambling must have a constitutional amendment legalizing it, King’s findings explained that to be legal the electronic “bingo” players must be playing against other players, not the house; there has to be a winner each game; and the card on the screen has to have five grids with 75 balls in play.
“A couple of people spent a tremendous amount of time with this and said the attorney general is wrong,” Riley said.
Pointing to the Code of Alabama, several lower court rulings and the 2006 state Supreme Court ruling, he said, “Every court case that my attorneys have looked at has said this is absolutely wrong.
“Once I was convinced of that, then I said that if I truly am going to enforce the laws of the state, then I have no question,” Riley explained. “Up until then, I had relied on what the attorney general’s opinion was for the past few years.
“The attorney general’s ruling has allowed businesses to operate on his opinion … and I think his opinion is wrong,” he said. “He and I have a fundamental disagreement about whether or not this is legal.
“If this is illegal and it is going on during my administration and I have the capacity and ability to do something about it, then I think the people of Alabama expect me to do what is right,” Riley said. That is the reason he established the Task Force on Illegal Gambling on Dec. 29, 2008, through Executive Order #44. (Visit www.thealabamabaptist.org for the full story on the task force.) “We built a task force to go out and look at these operations and determine if that is legal.”
But instead of asking King to lead the task force, Riley named David Barber as commander. Barber is a retired district attorney for Jefferson County who successfully fought gambling efforts in his jurisdiction for years.
“It serves no functional purpose to put someone on [the task force] who is going to consistently disagree,” Riley said, explaining why he passed over King. “We believe [this is illegal], and we are going out and doing an investigation. If it is legal bingo, then no one has anything to worry about.”
King wants to bring this issue to a vote of the citizens, while Riley says there is no need to vote. Riley wants a “clear, definitive ruling from the Supreme Court that takes into consideration the attorney general’s opinion and the law.”
“It has been voted on by the people,” he said. “It is the law. It doesn’t need any interpretation as far as I’m concerned. The law is not ambiguous. … There is no question whether a slot machine is legal. The question is, ‘What constitutes a slot machine?’”
And this is what Barber and the task force are attempting to answer.
“Our (the task force’s) purpose is to make a case or get involved in an existing case to get two questions before the state Supreme Court (Is it bingo? Is what they are playing on a slot machine?),” Barber said. “What happens from there is up to the Supreme Court.”
While Riley prefers the ruling be that the machines are illegal, he said his ultimate goal is to finish this with a once-and-for-all ruling either way.
“I have made it clear,” Riley said. “I don’t support gambling. I don’t believe in gambling. I don’t believe you can create an economy on gambling. … I don’t believe in a philosophy of something for nothing.”
King said he also opposes gambling and agrees with Riley that gambling is “bad public policy” but disagrees that all forms of electronic gambling machines are illegal under current state law.
“I’ve never voted for gambling. The social costs of gambling outweigh any [benefits] from it,” he said.
But “when I became attorney general, I put away my ability to enforce the law the way I wish it was [in order] to enforce it the way it is.”
“What [the law] says is that it is illegal for the state to have a machine that can be adapted to a slot machine (not just if it looks like a slot machine),” he said. The 2006 state Supreme Court ruling the governor has referred to “dealt only with the sweepstakes machines,” a particular type of machine that was being used at Milton McGregor’s Birmingham Race Course.
King also disagrees with the governor’s choice of going to the courts instead of working with legislation.
“I’m not comfortable that our response to illegal gambling should be that we find a court somewhere to do what the Legislature should do,” King said. “I don’t think activist judges are good. … I don’t think the law should be interpreted through a court, but the law should be changed. … I think it is wrong to go to the court and ask them to do what the Legislature won’t do.”
King, who said he is still considering a run for governor in 2010, maintains his 2004 findings are not the cause of the infiltration of gambling machines in the state.
“It would be worse without [the findings],” he said, noting at least 30 raids and busts have taken place across the state because of the findings. “We have at least slowed it.”
King said it was the Alabama Christian Coalition that asked him in 2004 to provide guidance to the electronic gambling issue in the state. “For the first time in history, we undertook that,” he said. “We went out to visit all of the gambling locations to see what is going on.”
What King found after touring and researching machines in Greene County, at McGregor’s VictoryLand facility in Macon County and at three facilities run by the Poarch Band of Creek Indians was “machines with bells and whistles but with a bingo card in the corner.”
“When you put money in the machine, bingo balls start falling,” he said, explaining the machine is playing bingo.
Godfrey argued that is not the case.
“What is happening with these machines is that the person is not playing the game of bingo,” he said “It is not the same thing, regardless of what the attorney general says. I disagree.”
“Bingo requires a person to mark a card in some form. They have to actually play the game for it to be bingo.”
Instead “the game is playing the game,” Godfrey noted. “The person puts money in and hits a button and watches the machine play the game.”
King said the issue is confusing but as long as the machine is not able to be turned into a true slot machine, meaning there is no game of bingo connected to it, then it is legal. The hard part is knowing which ones are adaptable and which ones aren’t, he said. “There are machines that are legal and some that are illegal.”
And it is “a huge drain of resources” to try to diagnose each machine, which is why enforcement has not been as active as it should have been, he explained. “No one is providing resources to the vice units across the state.
“Is it frustrating to have my findings used against me? Yes,” King said. “But I think at the end of the day, we have to have something to use … a blueprint for law enforcement. … The alternative of taking it off the table and throwing Alabama in a greater confusion isn’t the right thing to do.”
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Attorney General Troy King’s 2004 findings on electronic gambling
For facilities operating under a valid constitutional amendment, Attorney General Troy King described bingo’s evolution from using buttons to cover numbers on paper cards to “video consoles where the bingo game is simulated using computer chips.”
Using electronic gambling machines from Greenetrack and VictoryLand as examples, King’s review said the game must incorporate traditional bingo features and cannot be affected by spinning wheels and graphics.
He also said players must compete against each other and machines must be linked to allow such play.
“It cannot be concluded, as some have, that just because the game is being played on video consoles, it is not ‘bingo,’” King explained.
“Just as no one would contend that e-mails are any less a form of correspondence than are letters written with a quill pen, but instead represent a technological evolution in correspondence, similarly, bingo games that are depicted on a video console can still be bingo — albeit a technologically advanced form of bingo — but bingo nonetheless.”
King said that as a matter of law, machines that operate in the manner described above are permissible under the broad language of Amendment 743 relating to Greene County and Amendment 744 relating to Macon County.
King said his office would work with authorities to ensure that the machines being played in these facilities “are of the type commonly known as bingo and none other.”
To read the full review, visit http://www.ago.state.al.us/news_template.cfm?Newsfile=http://www.ago.alabama.gov/news/12012004.htm.
Source: “A.G. King Announces Findings of His Gambling Review,” news release published Dec. 1, 2004.
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