Jackpot Nation
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Jackpot Nation

Richard Hoffer

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Jackpot Nation

Richard Hoffer

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About This Book

Is this a great country or what?

You can bet on the turn of the card or a roll of the dice, but also on the NFL, the NCAA, and which Olsen twin marries first. We bet $80 billion a year, the amount growing wildly as more and more people gain access to this huge American wheel of fortune. No longer quarantined in Las Vegas, gambling has become as local and convenient as our neighborhood cineplex. If there's not a casino around the corner, there's one on your laptop computer.

In Jackpot Nation, Richard Hoffer takes us on a headlong tour, alternately horrifying and hilarious, across our landscape of luck. Whether he's trying to win a side of bacon in a Minnesota bar, hustling a paper sack filled with $100, 000 in cash across Las Vegas parking lots, poring over expansion plans with a tribal chief in California, or visiting the New York prison cell of a retired bus salesman with a poor understanding of three-game parlays, Hoffer explores with wit and heart our national inclination—a cultural predisposition, even—to take a chance.

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Year
2009
ISBN
9780061860355

Twin Cities, Minneapolis

Volunteer Tax, Hypergeometric Distribution, and Bacon
I knew at some point, and at some place, I’d have to grapple with the idea of our lotteries, simply the most pervasive and apparently least objectionable form of gambling there is. As I rambled and gambled, it had begun to occur to me, become glaringly obvious, in fact, that we were no longer dealing with a sordid recreation, a guilty pleasure, but a mainstream pastime. Of course, I could see how corporate America had co-opted the unholy entertainment, decriminalizing just about every form of it to develop one of the most reliable, recession-proof revenue streams there are. Any first-time visitor to Las Vegas could recognize as much. The outlaws had been replaced by big business, who hiked the house edge just a little more, the tradeoff for increased consumer confidence.
What wasn’t immediately plain to me was how state and local politics had been such a necessary, and even willing, partner in this transformation. But, really, there could have been no transformation—no racinos in West Virginia, no giant Indian casinos in Connecticut—if our government hadn’t been able to come up with a definition for legal gambling (illegal gambling being the only kind there was for a couple of centuries). The definition, by the way, being anything that helps a budgetary shortfall, saves a politician the self-inflicted gunshot wound of asking for more taxes, or otherwise pays the bills.
The other forms of illegal gambling—exceptions, you might call them—had been part of a gradual acknowledgment, an acceptance. Still, as state governments maintained a regulatory stance in exchange for their cut, there remained some distance between them and gambling. But once the states, smelling easy money, cut out the middleman and went into the gambling business for themselves, it became harder and harder to find distinctions between legal and illegal gambling, or even between gambling and taxation. Once they began marketing their own lotteries, in the name of whatever benefit they could justify, all bets really were off.
Just about everybody has one of these lotteries, as unwieldy and inefficient a fund-raiser as you could possibly invent. The sheer popularity of a lottery is, on the one hand, a rebuke of common sense, an assault on our traditional value system, an amoral accelerant. For one thing, you can’t win. Those mega jackpots are so statistically irrelevant they may as well be a fiction. To me, this was always a problem. For another, if you should win, against hilarious odds, you don’t get your fair share. Another problem. A lottery is gambling at its worst, in other words, a system of public taxation gussied up in marketing campaigns and ridiculous catchphrases. But as I said, just about every state has one.
But where best to inquire into this triumph of social engineering, this strange apparatus of hope? This country’s history is saturated with the idea of a lottery, which, when you think about it, is, on the other hand, strangely American. It’s gambling, yes, but with the apparent application of democracy. The lottery is a commingling of desperation, a way to share risk and reassurance. We’re in this together. And if it can be twisted into the service of public good, well, no wonder it has such an everlasting and permeating appeal. Yet, is there one place in this country that’s more vulnerable to the poor odds and rich rhetoric of the lottery than another? Is there some community so devoted to the idea of pooling resources for the unlikely excitement of a Powerball drawing? A state where gambling has become giving more than any other?
Why, yes there is, and I’m in it, standing outside Tin Cup’s, in St. Paul, Minnesota. There are probably more glamorous venues from which to access this phenomenon but I doubt you could understand it any better anywhere else. So, before we get into the idea of government, morals, and lightning-strike odds, let’s visit the kind of place where it all almost makes sense. Where you could apply a few principles of math, a measure of anticipation, and possibly do some good. Or have a beer, anyway.
Here, outside Tin Cup’s, a neighborhood tavern, there were four brown metal folding chairs, and on them were four of the palest senior citizens I’d ever seen, huddled under thick cloth coats against a March mist, each honking away on a cigarette. “Meat raffle?” I asked. One of them hacked and jerked a thumb inside. St. Paul’s no-smoking laws, complicated beyond belief, had apparently struck Tin Cup’s. There was a randomness to the policy that confounded and confused patrons and tavern-owners alike. Just up Rice Street, you could still puff away at Lonetti’s; only a state inspector could possibly explain why. It occurred to me that even the best-intentioned legislation can produce a medical tradeoff: Inside Tin Cup’s, the cancer rate was no doubt declining, while just beyond the door, a certain demographic was becoming subject to a higher incidence of walking pneumonia. “The meat raffle’s here?” I asked again, since I could hardly believe there was such a thing in the first place, in this particular tavern or any other. Got another hack, a more emphatic thumb jerk than last time, and was sent in.
It was indeed here, and was still in progress, a young girl hustling around the bar/dining room with a tray full of tickets. It took her all of two minutes to sell the full allotment of thirty, buck apiece, and my dollar draft had hardly been delivered before she was spinning the wheel again. All I can report is, things happen pretty fast in the meat-raffle business. “Twenty-one!” she called out over her little PA system. A sixtyish man, perhaps between smokes, leaped out of his seat, waving his ticket. He walked up to the white cooler next to the wheel and began pawing through the offerings—wrapped rib eyes, ground beef, a grouping of pork chops, a pair of steaks in cellophane wrapping. Most of the players I talked to at Tin Cup’s had the same complaints when it came to the meat raffle. First, the smoking ban. Second, old-timers who spend a little too much time fondling the meat. “Look at the way he’s poking at that,” said a grandmother next to me. “Just pick one out!”
Sixtyish guy settled on the ground beef—a $22 value, like all the packaged prizes, this particular meat from Kamps Food Market—and returned to his table, accepting congrats along the way. Many huzzahs, and halfhearted attempts to grab his prize as he made his way. Once there, a round for his table, which now had a butcher-wrapped centerpiece for all to admire.
As I say, things happen fast. After this initial excitement, I had a chance to calm down, drink my beer, look around the room, and see what I might be up against. Older couples, mostly, who’d come down to Tin Cup’s for a beer, for dinner, though definitely not for a cigarette. This was a neighborhood tavern, in a real neighborhood, two-story houses with aluminum siding up and down the streets. This was the kind of place where you were certain to run into someone you knew from down the block. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could further see that not a few other customers had shrink-wrapped meat on their tables, or on the bar, the red beef (no chicken or fish at a meat raffle!) glistening through the plastic.
And here came the young girl again, the next drawing ready to go. I spent a buck, got No. 19 and wondered what I’d do if I happened to win a cutlet so far from home and indoor refrigeration. “You won’t win,” said the grandmother next to me. “Read a story in the paper. Numbers 3 and 19 never win.” Although she would prove to be an astonishing trove of misinformation throughout our little evening together, she was right about No. 19. It was a loser. A sixtyish lady did win, but deliberated quite a bit at the meat locker, the selection no longer what it was, grabbing this one and that—making everybody mad—before hollering back to her husband: “You want the lunch meat or the bacon?” Lunch meat.
At Tin Cup’s, this goes on for about four hours, twice a week, Thursdays and Sundays. There might be twenty drawings a night, whole sides of beef gone to a statistical slaughter, hogs quartered according to mathematical probability. And it wasn’t just at Tin Cup’s. Throughout the Twin Cities, there were at least fourteen bars and grills hosting meat raffles, an entire mewling herd being randomized, lotterized, carved apart by chance. An anthropologist might see here an ancient reenactment, the thrill of a primordial hunt, the risk in this case expressed not so much in terms of survival of a species, as a one-in-thirty chance to bring home the bacon. Or, as the crusty grandmother next to me explained over her own draft: “Drink beer, win meat. What’s not to love?”
The point of a meat raffle, though, is not to transform grocery shopping into a gambling experience, or even flex our meat-gathering instincts, but to do good works. To take a chance on a New York steak is, the wonderful marbling aside, an actual act of charity. It’s not much charity, as we’ll see in a later math tutorial, but it is a form of giving. At Tin Cup’s what’s left after paying for the meat, the help, and the space inside the tavern, goes to St. Bernard’s, a struggling K-12 school just blocks away.
In fact, all the meat raffles in the Twin Cities benefit one charity or another. It’s the law. To wish for a pork loin is to help the St. Paul Winter Carnival at Joe & Stan’s, or Midway Training Services at the Lucky Foxx Bar & Grill, or to help buy a fire truck at Old Clover Inn. When I went to the Cardinal, a corner bar in Minneapolis’s Southside, I was able to take a chance on a rib roast from Everett’s (which everybody there swore by) and thereby fund the Olympic wrestling movement.
It’s true, you could enjoy unlimited slabs of beef, the collateral damage of cholesterol offset by the warm glow of charitable giving. At autopsy, the constriction of arteries was forensic evidence, not of a damaged heart but a giving one. Here, for as long as that organ pushed globs of fat through the bloodstream, which had fatally red-lined as the wheel neared his number, beat the heart of a hero. This poor, atherosclerotic victim had led a purpose-driven life.
In Minnesota.
Elsewhere, it’s just betting on some meat, not likely legal and mostly beneath everyone’s dignity. But this is the land of a thousand lakes, toasty cabins that sit on top of ice, the Prairie Home Companion, former governor Jesse Ventura, and charitable gambling. This is, in fact, the country’s capital of charitable gambling.
Minnesota didn’t mean to become the nation’s leader in this category, home to meat raffles and whatnot, but has gotten there all the same. It was sort of accidental, actually. Minnesota has had bingo since 1945, which was no huge deal, but in the 1970s the game was unexpectedly becoming boffo, not so much for the $5 admission packages that promoters could sell, but for the pull-tabs they were allowed to peddle alongside, all in the name of charity. Pull-tabs were a fairly revolutionary phenomenon, just coming out about then, appealing to the lottery player that the states were then grooming. They are basically paper slot-machines, the three tabs that you pull back from the cardboard ticket even resembling a machine’s payout windows. Sold for a buck apiece, with prizes topping out at $2,000. Though not once in my experience. It turned out that there’s really only so much money a player could lose at bingo—how many cards can you play at once?—but no limit whatsoever with pull-tabs. It took no great effort to spend $200 a night, buying ’em up between games. Bingo was becoming beside the point.
There were thirty-seven states operating just like that, selling pull-tabs alongside bingo. But then Minnesota, in what some folks consider a colossal oversight, in 1981 legalized pull-tabs as a stand-alone game, permitting it to become the cardboard equivalent of video parker in bars throughout the state. There was no debate, consideration, any thought at all. It just got tacked onto a bill on the floor that session. “You could say they took off,” Mary Magnuson told me. Magnuson, who represents the National Association of Fundraising Ticket Manufacturers, the people who make the pull-tabs, said the industry really got up and running by 1985, when charitable gambling in Minnesota amounted to little more than $100 million, about average in this country. By 1989, with pull-tabs having proliferated, it topped $1 billion.
This movement, whether it’s circumstantial or Scandinavian, as some natives tried to persuade me, has turned Minnesota into the nation’s leader in charitable gambling, with $1.4 billion in receipts a year. No other state comes close; Washington is second with less than $900 million, and a few other states do close to $600 million. But basically, when you think charitable gambling, you should think Minnesota.
And charitable gambling can mean just about anything here. Last time Minnesota put out a number, there were 1,438 organizations licensed to conduct gambling, the nonprofits ranging from the Albert Lee Wrestling Boosters to the Zumbrota Volunteer Fire Department. In between, there were tiny outfits like the Second Harvest Northern Lakes Food Bank and the enormous Multiple Sclerosis Society, which pulled in $529,000 in 2005. Nobody goes door-to-door in Minnesota. No reason to hold a bake sale. Sell you a ticket instead.
It’s so much easier this way. Who can’t recognize the power of gambling in attracting dollars that otherwise resist donation? How could this have been unanticipated? Somebody who might not send off a check for St. Bernard’s latest fund-raiser might nevertheless be inclined to spend a few bucks in pursuit of a flank steak, or on a couple of pull-tabs. Of course! No easier money than gambling money. Beats a car wash.
This is hardly a new business model, no more for nonprofits than it ever was for the mafia. Or, for that matter, our country. Beginning in 1963, when New Hampshire went back to the lottery well to keep its low-tax reputation intact, states have been doing more or less the same thing with their own numbers rackets all along. Although no state classifies it as such, a lottery is charitable gambling as well, with bigger advertising budgets and skimpier payouts. That’s all. It’s the same idea: Take advantage of our inborn jackpot mentality to coax us into a volunteer tax. Genius!
Still, no other state has seized upon gambling quite like Minnesota has, to supplement its budget. And no other citizenry has been so flexible when it comes to embracing the supposed evils of gambling. Let’s put it this way: In no other state could you dial up a Catholic school and ask to be put through to the gambling manager.
But I could and did. Mary Vancura, who holds that title at St. Bernard’s, picked up and explained exactly what Tin Cup’s meat raffle means to her school. “Everything,” she said. “It keeps our doors open.”
The Catholic Church, like federal and state governments, is no longer able to support its members the way it used to. And the Catholic Church, like those governments, has had to make tough, bottom-line decisions. One of them came in 2002 when the Minneapolis–St. Paul Archdiocese stopped subsidizing St. Bernard’s school. At a school like St. Bernard’s, where tuition is kept affordable (when it’s collected at all; 87 percent of the students there receive financial aid) to service the community, this kind of pullout is usually fatal. The high school, which drew from outside the community, might survive. But the grade school, attended by kids from a hardscrabble neighborhood, wouldn’t. “We were going to shut down,” she told me.
St. Bernard’s has always had fund-raisers, but, for any school, these tend to work according to the community’s resources. Thus, the schools that need money the most, because they are serving communities who have the least, will raise the fewest dollars. In private education, the rich get richer and the poor really do get poorer. The St. Bernard silent auction was never going to make up the shortfall.
But meat raffles and pull-tabs might. St. Bernard’s was able to talk three establishments into providing space for its pull-tab booth and its meat-raffle wheel. With so many organizations looking for venues, this is not always easy. It’s gotten very competitive, in fact. The bar owners, who enjoy the extra business the activity brings, are nevertheless able to cut deals that are anything but charitable. If they don’t charge rent, they get a percentage of the business. Still, there is so much money involved, almost any deal is acceptable. Managing three sites, St. Bernard’s, a faltering school with five hundred kids, had gross receipts of more than $6 million in 2005.
And that, my friends, is why a small Catholic school has a gambling manager. Honest to God.
This kind of fund-raising was going on everywhere I looked. I could have gone to a meat raffle every night of the week and not seen half of them. I did manage a visit to the Cardinal, another tavern situated in a middle-class neighborhood of two-story, aluminum-sided homes, where the beef was also going to a good cause. In this case, it was Minnesota USA Wrestling, the state affiliate of USA Wrestling, the one that sends our grapplers to the Olympics every four years.
From the patrons’ point of view, of course, the cause is irrelevant. Nobody was buying chances on Everett’s cuts of meat because they believed in the advantages of Olympic participation. If this was patriotism, it was highly inadvertent. As far as I could tell, nobody was even aware of the beneficiary, which is only listed on a card by the booth, per state regulations. At the Cardinal, the point was the meat, coming as it did from Everett’s up the street. In fact, in my meat-raffle travels, what stood out most was not the comparative worth of one charity over another, but the relative primacy of neighborhood butchers.
At the Cardinal, some of the mainstays were fairly rapturous when it came to Everett’s. I had come across accounts where patrons were absurdly loyal to Angus Meats’ pork chop on a stick at Joe & Stan’s, but never saw this kind of devotion to a particular butcher. At the bar, when patrons heard I was new to meat raffles, winners were prodded forward to show me their prizes and allow me to fondle them (their prizes) if I wanted (I didn’t). There were long discussions about favorite cuts. One lady, in her meat ramblings, recalled a restaurant that used to serve Everett’s cuts exclusively. “Remember Bill’s House of Good Food?” she asked. Everybody did. Here I recognized that Lutheran modesty Garrison Keillor’s always talking about on his radio show. Not Bill’s House of Great Food. Just good food.
One man thankful for that Everett’s goodness, and the neighborhood’s willingness to play for it, is Dan Chandler, a one-time Olympic wrestler and coach, who oversees a $3.5 million gambling empire. The Cardinal is one of five sites that Chandler has, some meat raffles but mostly pull-tabs. And why? “Pays my salary,” he told me.
That was his idea, back in 1990, when he presented the state wrestling organization with a proposal. He’d head up charitable gambling if it would pay his salary out of the proceeds. Minnesota Wrestling is a relatively small organization, compared to some other states, but from its five thousand members come a disproportionate number of top-flight wrestlers. In fact, since 1984, Minnesota has produced five medal winners, one in five of the last six Olympics. “As an entry,” he pointed out, “that’s second only to Russia.”
But there’d be no head of Minnesota Wrestling, nobody to manage a grass-roots campaign to organize the state’s youth at local tournaments or to keep pre-Olympic prospects going, if there weren’t charitable gambling. “There’s no other way,” he told me. “Look, this is a social ill, lot of people addicted, I know that. And a lot of people think we shouldn’t be doing it. But it’s not like I can walk into some large corporation, hit IBM up for a donation. There are much more organized charities doing just that, and when it comes to choosing between wrestling and the American Cancer Society, some people might think there are causes more important than our sports groups.”
So Chandler grinds it out on the ground-chuck circuit, spending far more time, he admits, administering the gambling operation than the wrestling. The paperwork, demanded by the state, is like doing your income taxes, except every month. And he’s always racing around, delivering pull-tabs, paying help, paying taxes, rent (as much as $1,750 a month at one bar). All to fund a budget that’s perhaps $200,000 a year—tiny by government funding standards but pretty much out of reach for anybody else. “I’d be a struggling stockbroker, except for this,” he said. And there’d be wrestling of a lesser caliber, one guesses, except for this also.
Meat raffles may be the most elemental form of gambling there is, what with the chance to actually assure survival (assuming your own freezer is desperately empty and going to the grocery store is out of the question)...

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