Gambling in American History

Bingo has been the quintessential charity game in the United States for most of a century. Expansions of the game (in terms of hours played and prize amounts) led to the court cases culminating in decisions that generated the initiation and widespread proliferation of Native American gambling in the United States. Bingo is also played in many commercial casinos. The game demands vigilance and attention from the players, who may form a collective audience of a dozen or several thousand (or more with satellite connections among several bingo halls).
Bingo is played on two basic styles of cards. A bingo card in the United States has 25 spaces: 5 rows and 5 columns. Numbers are on 24 spaces; the center space has a star or another mark, designating it as a “free space.” The columns are designated as B, I, N, G, and O. Under the respective letters are numbers between 1 and 15, 16 and 30, 31 and 45, 46 and 60, and 61 and 75. In simple games, the object is to get 4 or 5 numbers called to fill a column, a row, or a diagonal line through the center or to fill in each corner of a card. More complex games may require filling in a pattern (for example, a letter T—top row and center N column; filling the outer edge—top and bottom rows and B and O columns) or covering all 24 numbers on the card.
The second type of card, popular in Europe, is called a tombola. The card has 3 lines and 5 columns. Each individual card has 5 numbers on a line, for 15 numbers in all. Eighty-one numbers are used in the game. Each game has 2 winners. The first winner is the one who first calls “bingo” when all 5 numbers of any one line are filled. The second winner is one who gets all 15 numbers on the card filled.
Although casinos and bingo halls may offer guaranteed prizes for winners of certain games, traditionally the prize pool has been taken from player purchases of cards, making the game a pari-mutuel player-banked exercise in gambling. If two or more persons win at the same time, the prize is divided. On big cover-all games, a bingo hall may offer a big prize if the cover-all is reached within a certain number of calls, for instance, forty-five numbers. If it is not, a part of the prize pool may be carried over to another day, and the big prize increased in a progressive manner.
In many Las Vegas casinos that cater to senior citizens, bingo offers a large return to the players. That practice is used as an incentive to draw in customers who are expected to play slot machines and other games between and after the bingo games.
The numbers called at the bingo game usually appear on Ping-Pong balls that blow about in a sealed cage. When a small tunnel to the cage is opened, one ball is sucked up into an area where a caller can take it. The number on the ball is called and then recorded on a board that all can see. The ball is usually held up so that it can physically be seen as well. If a player has a win, he (more appropriately she, as more players of bingo are women than men—quite different than almost all other games) must call out “bingo” before the next number is called. The bingo card is then verified to ensure that all numbers are on it and that it contains the last number called.
The percentage payout varies considerably, depending upon the desires for an operator to get a certain return from the players by setting prizes at a certain level. The bingo game utilized today is an outgrowth of a private Italian game called lotto. This in turn was derived from a national lottery game that began in the sixteenth century. Forms of bingo (called by other names) were played in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. The popularity of the game was developed in the 1920s, when movie halls used it for raffle prizes given to those attending shows.
The American card used today in bingo is traced to the 1920s.  The name bingo had been used as a reference to beans that players used to mark winning numbers.
Bingo has maintained a wide popularity due to its simplicity, its almost “pure luck” form, and the fact that it is a very social game that can be easily set up for commercial or charitable functions.

Bill Bennett and Bill Pennington purchased the Circus Circus casino from Jay Sarno in 1974. They immediately transformed a losing property into a “winner,” as they parlayed the investment into one of the most successful casino companies in the world.
Bennett was born in Glendale, Arizona, on 26 November 1924. Following his service in World War II as a pilot, he returned to Phoenix to run a furniture store. Soon, however, a friend coaxed him into investing in a financial firm. The firm went broke and so did Bennett. Luck was on his side, however, as his friend L. C. Jacobsen was president of the Del Webb Construction Company. Jacobsen was looking for personnel who could help in the company’s newly acquired casino properties. Bennett signed on and worked his way up to a top management post with the Mint Hotel in Las Vegas. In 1971, he cashed in his stock options with Webb and entered into a partnership with Bill Pennington. The two established a company that distributed gaming machines to casinos. In 1974, they found Jay Sarno in deep financial trouble, and they helped bail him out by taking over the Circus Circus casino in a lease option deal.
Bennett and Pennington liked the Circus Circus idea, but the two saw that the property was not being managed properly. They first made plans for a tower of hotel rooms and cleaned up many carnival games that at best would be considered sleazy. Circus acts were moved away from the gambling tables. They marketed the property heavily through radio advertisements and dropped Sarno’s notion that Circus Circus could appeal to high rollers. Instead, they nurtured and developed the idea of marketing the property to middle-class patrons—lots of them.  The new owners placed a much greater emphasis on their slot machine department than it had received previously. The property also began sponsoring many sporting events. Bennett was a stunt pilot, and he rode motorcycles and speedboats. Soon Circus Circus had a hydroplane boat on the professional racing circuit.

Bennett and Pennington also reached out to develop new properties. They built Circus Circus-Reno in 1978, and they purchased the Edgewater Casino in Laughlin, Nevada, in 1983. Later they added the Colorado Belle. In 1983, Circus Circus became a public company. Over the next ten years, the stock outperformed all others in the casino gambling field. Values of shares increased 1,400 percent.
The 1990s were good to Circus Circus, although the company was not always good to Bill Bennett. At the beginning of the decade, the company opened the largest hotel casino in the world. The Excalibur featured a medieval court with the knights of the round table. The facility had 4,000 rooms and was built at a cost exceeding $250 million. In 1993, the Luxor, a pyramid-shaped casino hotel with 2,500 rooms, opened, and the next year a Circus Circus casino opened in Tunica, Mississippi. In 1994, several management changes accompanied lower-than-anticipated revenues at the upscale Luxor property, and Bennett was roundly criticized by an organized opposition at an annual stockholders’ meeting. He decided to step down as chairman of the board, and then to leave the company altogether. He sold his stock for $230 million and promptly purchased the Sahara Hotel for $193 million. He knew the Sahara, as it had originally been a Del Webb casino. Now it was aging and in bad repair. Bennett invested millions more in improvements and in the construction of a new tower of hotel rooms.
Las Vegas needs dreamers and builders like Sarno, and it needs people like Howard Hughes, who will purchase properties others wish to get rid of. But it especially needs persons who take others’ dreams and convert them into reality for stockholders and customers. In the gambling industry, Bennett has not been a dreamer, but he has been one who makes dreams come true.

The Bahamas consist of two islands with population concentrations (Nassau on New Providence Island and Freeport on Grand Bahamas Island) and many smaller islands, the closest ones lying about fifty miles off the Atlantic coast of Florida. The country was under the political control of Great Britain until 1973. Tourism has been the dominant product of the islands for most of the past century. The islands’ resorts now employ over 40 percent of the workforce. Casino properties dominate the tourist offerings.
Prior to the 1960s, there was very little gambling in the Bahamas. The Penal Code in colonial statutes declared all gambling to be illegal. In the 1920s, however, the small Bahamian Club opened in Nassau on New Providence Island, having been given an exemption by the governor. Another small casino won an exemption to operate on the tiny island of Cat Key. Efforts to establish major casino facilities had been advanced by Sir Stafford Sands as early as 1945. Sands was a private attorney seeking opportunity, but he was also the minister of finance and tourism for the island colony. The timing was not right, but Sands did not go away.
Sands was still a critical player in island politics in the early 1960s when the Castro revolution in Cuba caused many gaming interests there to look in the direction of the Bahamas. Meyer Lansky was purported to have visited Sands in 1960 with a $2 million offer for the right to have casinos. The offer may have been rebuffed, but soon Sands, in a “partnership” with two Americans—Wallace Groves (a convicted stock swindler) and Louis Chesler (a major Florida land developer and compulsive gambler)—pushed a proposal for a casino in Freeport through the Executive Council. The Monte Carlo Club at the Lucayan Beach Hotel began operations in 1964. A second casino in Freeport—El Casino—opened in 1966. Lansky had a direct interest in the property, as several of his associates in Cuba took management roles. These included brothers Dino and Eddie Cellini, who also shared management in a Lansky-controlled London casino and in a casino dealers’ school that furnished employees for casinos in England as well as the Bahamas. Initially, all casino employees had to be nonresidents, a rule that has since changed. From the beginning, no local resident has been allowed to be a player at any of the casinos in the Bahamas. A local resident is fined $500 if caught playing.
Sands was also instrumental in pulling together the principals who negotiated to establish a casino near Nassau. These included James Crosby and Jack Davis of the Mary Carter Paint Company, Wallace Groves, and Huntington Hartford, a millionaire with grandiose dreams for development of Paradise Island, which was very near Nassau. A silent partner in the organization was Lynden Pindling, whose political party had won control of the government in the parliamentary elections of 1967. It was the first time in the history of the island that the Black party had won an election. The effort to gain a license for a new property included the purchase of the license that had been held by the Bahamian Club.  In 1968, the Mary Carter partnership was reorganized as Resorts International, and they opened the Paradise Island Resort and Casino. The company had to actually move the Bahamian casino building onto their grounds to gain its license. Today the old casino facility is the restaurant within the new casino structure. Resorts International also took over the management of the El Casino in 1978. In 1983, the license for the El Casino was sold to the London-based casino company (Lonhro) that built the Princess Casino in Freeport.
A second casino in Nassau was licensed on Cable Beach in 1978. It operated as the Playboy Casino until 1983. Then the license was transferred to Carnival Cruise Lines, who opened the Crystal Casino; subsequently it has become a Marriot property. In the 1990s, the Paradise Island Resort was sold to Sun International and renamed the Atlantis. Also, the Gentings Casino company of Malaysia purchased the Lucayan Beach Resort. A fifth casino license has been given to the Club Med, which operates the Columbus Isle Casino on San Salvador Island, the location where Columbus first set foot on land in the Western Hemisphere in 1492.
Earlier patterns of organized crime involvement in Bahamas casinos have essentially been eliminated through a process of effective regulation. Moreover, the operators’ connections to other jurisdictions where they must face vigorous checks for licensing preclude connections with organized crime. The Bahamas have one of the most interesting taxation systems for casino gaming—a reverse progressive tax system. The island nation wishes to use casinos to promote tourism. Because the political leaders realize that it is expensive to market gaming to high rollers and persons who will spend considerable vacation dollars in the islands, the goal is to attract players who will stay in the hotels and take full advantage of the beaches and other tourist amenities. Larger properties have a better chance to market to these players. Also, it costs more to bring in such players than it does to advertise to low-roller day trippers who take boats from the Florida coast. Hence, the reverse-progressive tax system. Casinos pay a 25 percent tax on gaming revenues up to $10 million per year. As the earnings go up, the tax rate goes down. For earnings between $10 million and $16 million, the tax is only 20 percent. It is reduced to 10 percent for earnings between $16 million and $20 million. Annual earnings above this amount are taxed at a rate of only 5 percent. Casinos pay other fees as well.