WHILE ROME BURNS AMERICAN GAMBLERS STILL FIDDLING AT LAS VEGAS

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33425, 5 January 1974, Page 10

WHILE ROME BURNS AMERICAN GAMBLERS STILL FIDDLING AT LAS VEGAS

(By

MICHAEL THOMPSON-NOEL.

writing in the "Financial Times")

(Reprinted by arrangement)

“Of all the exciting scenes in my Palace of Pleasure, none will thrill you more or be more in keeping with the times of Ancient Rome than your first vista of the action in my Caesars Forum Casino. It is here that I, Caesar, have opened to your pleasure the arms of that most fickle female, Lady Luck.”

It’s midnight and I am sitting in the Galleria lounge in Caesars Palace, studying the action on the neon-lit floor of the vast casino and clinking the ice in my orange juice in tune to the sound of the hotel’s 400 slot machines, eight dice tables. 36 blackjack tables, three roulette wheels, two baccarat tables and .two chuck-a-luck machines.

Wherever I look . . . frenzy. The Circus Maximus has just disgorged its supper club crowd, the gaming tables are full, and hotel guards with silver pistols watch the cashier’s grill where several thousand dollars a minute are being converted into chips. “Energy crisis?” asks my companion, a lady from Milwaukee. “Energy crisis? I don’t see no energy crisis.” She is wearing "two fur coats, one on top of another, but then this is Taste City and we are in Caesar’s Palace — the noisiest, most endearingly vulgar, most successful hotel-casino on The Strip. It has 905 rooms (at $2B-$220 a night) and is adding a 16-storey, 333-suite tower.

The Roman motif is spectacularly overdone. Mock Michelangelo statuary lurks everywhere. There is a Cleopatra’s barge on a swirling neon Nile and the waitresses wear mini-togas. The snack shop is called the Noshorium, the card that hangs on your room door says Do Not Disturbus, Roman columns flank the phone booths in the lobby arid a plaque in my room states: “I, Caesar, list the following local television channels for your viewing pleasure ...” Now, Caesar isn’t stupid. He may urge me to visit the Roman Bazaar or the Garden of the Gods, but what he’s really after is my custom at the tables because Las Vegas, as everybody knows, is the gambling capital of the world and gambling, as only Caesar really knows, is among the two or three hottest growth industries in the whole of the United States.

I “Caesar”, in this instance, is Caesars World Inc., a (publicly quoted corporation (with around 7m stockholders and a current pre-tax net income of around Sl2m-plus. Twenty-five thousand people a day visit Caesar’s Palace and the hotel’s room occupancy rate almost never dips below 90 per cent. The company’s gross revenues last year totalled some sBom (it spent around s7m-sBm of that on entertainment — 8 cabaret artistes, free drinks and free rooms for big spenders) and has just bought the Thunderbird Hotel for sl4m. It now plans to build America’s largest resort hotel, the 2350-room Mark Anthony, for sl2om. But Las Vegas is only part of the American gambling scene. Almost everywhere, it seems, gambling is gaining respectability. According to a recent “Forbes Magazine” cover story, nine Eastern states are now running lotteries and seven more states are considering them. Off-track race betting has been introduced in New York, is about to start in Connecticut and may be introduced in Pennsylvania. Sports pool betting is being considered in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, while New Jersey, Maryland (and possibly Hawaii) are contemplating casino gambling. The upsurge in American gambling activity is explained in two words: taxes and crime, although it appears to be the latter which is at the forefront of legislative minds. As “Forbes Magazine” reported: “Only a fool would think that gambling could ever contribute more than a tiny share of the money needed to run our states and localities. If all the gross profit from all the gambling in the United States could be ’socialised’, the amount involved probably wouldn’t exceed $6000m; it cost $192,000m last year to run these local governments.” Legalised gambling In a special report to the New York State Commission on Gambling compiled by Joseph J. Weiser, a Commission member, the rationale for extending legalised gambling is spelled out as follows:

“The primary reason . , . is to minimise or eliminate gambling as a source of revenue for organised crime. Moreover, the corrupting influence of these activities on law enforcement officials has been demonstrated very clearly, to the point where police officials have been recommending legislation simply to fight corruption.

“In order successfully to counter the criminal element, it will be necessary to provide a higher payoff to the better and to persuade the public that, whatever advantages illegal betting offers, it is contributing directly to narcotics addiction and the consequent rising crime rate.” Commissioner Weiser claims later in his report that what was wrong with recently legalised gambling in a number of states was that priorities were reversed to emphasise tax revenues rather than crime control. Estimates of current gambling turnover in America are hazy but the figures which recur most often are slo,ooom for legal gambling — racetracks, Nevada casinos, lotteries and legal off-track betting — and $25,000m for illegal gambling — bookies, illegal sports pools, the “numbers” racket and so on. In some estimates these figures are considerably larger.

In the case of New York State, private studies by the Fund for the City of New York, while recognising the attractiveness of legal gambling as a weapon against crime, have also recognised that the state’s economy has been “damaged” by the lure of legal gambling in Nevada, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean and that moves toj legalise additional forms of gambling in neighbouring states have raised the possibility of “extensive additional damage.” New Yorkers’ betting Further studies by the Hundon Institute have indi-. cated that legal betting among New Yorkers at present amounts to $2000m; that illegal gambling provides a livelihood for 25,000 people and generates net profits of around ssom; and that illegal gambling organisers spend around s3om a year in “bribes, payoffs, political contributions and other techniques for securing political power and protection”. The institute reckons that the state could realise substantial revenues (perhaps sloom-slsom) from a legal “numbers” game or from a| publicly-run casino programme, but points out that] the effect of casinos would; be primarily to redistribute money — any net gain would be too small to be significant for the state’s economy. It is in favour, therefore, of legalised numbers and legalised sports

'pool betting but draws the (line not only at casinos but |at “jai-alai, dog racing, mouse racing (as in Australia), widely distributed slot machines, pin-ball machines and other low-skill gambling devices”. One low-skill device currently gaining widespread acceptance is the lottery. In 2[ years New Jersey’s lottery has taken in s32Bm. New York’s has grossed s46om in six years and Pennsylvania’s last year took in $124.4m and paid out $57.5m in property tax subsidies to help elderly Pennsylvanians. I was in New York a short while ago when Mrs Janet Pari, mother of three, wife of the owner of a liquor store and delicatessen, was announced the slm winner of New Jersey’s 30th millionaire lottery. “I'll probably just keep doing things the way I’ve always done them,” "she said, as winners do. People will gamble There is an exemplary social awareness in the way many states are approaching legalised gambling (many have sent representatives to talk to the Gaming Board of Great Britain about precisely this issue). There is also a realisation that “people are people and people will gamble,” and that is the phrase I have heard most in Las Vegas tonight. Nevada casino turnover last year was around $3300m indicating a gross income for the casino operators of around s6som. (Gamblers’ losses in Nevada, as distinct from their outlay, are reckoned at around 20 per cent of the total bet, which is known as “the handle.”) Las Vegas’s gambling revenues have been growing at an annual rate of around 10 per cent for the past 14 years, although how the fuel crisis will affect the hotels and casinos is hard to tell. All casinos in town are now restricted to one outside neon sign each, which cramps their sense of style, but business at the tables will probably remain brisk until the airlines are forced to cut back on flights. The state of Nevada last year received from gambling $54.8m, or 43 per cent of its total expenditure. But Nevada’s image is being updated and the names of some of the big property owners have solid stock market muscle: Hilton Hotels, Harrah’s Inc., Howard Johnson’s, M.-G.-M. It is now way past midnight and my companion and I are in Circus, Circus, the most bizarre spot on The Strip. The past .halfhour has been given over to an intriguing explanation of margins — they vary from 0.6 per cent against an expert black-jack player to 1050 per cent on the slot machines — and to a description of the intense security measures in force on the casino floor. The dice tolerances, for instances, are pre-cision-milled to 1-10,000 of an inch and the spots set flush; the roulette wheels are checked microscopically for wear and unevenness and switched to new tables at least once every day. In Circus Circus an upper gallery offers carnival booths, shooting galleries, an oyster bed with a Japanese pearl diver, candy floss and ice cream. High above the ranks of slot machines is a dazzling display of trapeze and high wire acts which alternate with other circus attractions such as Mexican acrobats and Tanya the Baby Elephant. Nobody notices. Nobody cares. An aerialist could plunge 60 feet and would attract the attention only of the slot machine player on whom he happened to land. The others are too busy gambling.