Word: casino
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...until 1986 did the casino reinvestment development authority begin to do business. The agency is now preparing to resurrect the Inlet by leading a $500 million investment program for building heavily subsidized housing for the middle class. But neither the casinos nor many of the Inlet's inhabitants have much faith in the effort. "You can't mix caviar with tuna," says Dorothy McCann from the rocker on the porch of her oceanfront Victorian home. McCann, 71, has reason to sound ornery: the agency bought her out last month as part of its raze-and-rebuild plan, despite the headline...
Instead the casinos have sometimes behaved cavalierly -- even arrogantly -- toward their hosts. Under an early, vague requirement that casinos invest in Atlantic City, Caesars Atlantic City Hotel Casino tried to get credit for the $625,000 statue of Caesar Augustus that guards its entrance. Trump promised to build affordable homes in Atlantic City when he bought Resorts International Casino Hotel in 1987. Then last year he sold the casino to entertainer Merv Griffin, leaving Griffin with $925 million in debt. "I gave that obligation to Merv," says Trump now. "He got the debt, and he got the low-income housing...
...explanation for the casinos' failure to live up to their civic responsibilities is that only five out of twelve posted a profit last year. Overall, the casinos earned just $14.7 million after expenses in 1988, a meager return on the $2.73 billion that gamblers lost in the slot machines and at the tables, according to Marvin Roffman, a casino analyst with Philadelphia's Janney Montgomery Scott. The reason is the debt the casinos have taken on in the past three years, much of it through junk bonds, either to fight off takeovers or engineer them. Atlantic City's casinos have...
...Casino executives, for their part, resent what they describe as a city hall whose idea of governance has evolved little since the 1930s, when the city's political boss Enoch L. ("Nucky") Johnson, a carnation in his lapel, kept a paternalistic eye on the rackets, the bordellos and the firehouses from a suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. From the 1890s until 1972, Atlantic City was ruled by a succession of political machines, and while nothing quite as feudal remains today, political leaders still seem to exhibit the high-handed habits of that era. Only eight years ago, the city...
...When the casinos finally came, they caught both the city and the state completely unprepared. Then Governor Brendan Byrne was so intent on keeping casinos out of the hands of organized crime that much of his energy went into developing a body of law and a bureaucracy that would do the job. As a result, the two regulatory agencies that enforce the formidable Casino Control Act spend $59 million annually to police twelve casinos, in contrast to $15.7 million for 285 casinos in Nevada. The two agencies can, in the words of Carl Zeitz, a former member of the casino...