Lots of Slots in St. Mary's

Sheriff Joe Lee Somerville recalls packing up two tractor trailer loads of

                            slot machines at the order of the Attorney General

 

By Kenneth C. Rossignol

ST. MARY’S TODAY

 

LOVEVILLE —— “The Attorney General called me and told me to personally take charge of removing two tractor-trailer loads of slot machines from the storage area over top of Treasury Drugs in Millison Plaza,” former St. Mary’s Sheriff Joe Lee Somerville told ST. MARY’S TODAY this week.

“It was about 1978,” said Sheriff Somerville as he stood outside of Third Base Store in Loveville recalling the last time he had seen slot machines in St. Mary’s County.

“The Attorney General made it clear that he wanted me to personally supervise recording the serial numbers of each machine which had been in storage there and were owned by Larry Millison,” said Somerville. “We wrote down each serial number and watched as the workmen loaded them, filling two big tractor-trailers and then we had escort them to the county line where we turned the escort over to the State Police and that process went on to the Virginia state line and then state by state until they got to Nevada.”

That recall of the last time slot machines were in St. Mary’s County in a massive way, concurs with recollections of Millison prior to his death 10 years ago.

Millison, along with a half dozen other machine operators, such as Frank Abell and Phil Gray, controlled most of the slot machines which were strewn across the region, from Anne Arundel County at such places as Mayo Beach and Beverly Beach, to Chesapeake Beach and Solomon’s Island, to Benedict, Pope’s Creek, Colonial Beach (on large piers out in Maryland waters) to Tall Timbers, Colton’s Point, Point Lookout, Seven Gables, and of course, the many bars which populated Lexington Park and Leonardtown. 

Leonardtown now has as many liquor licenses as were in place during the height of the slot machine days and the prospect of a developer coming forward now with a plan for a slot machine casino in the new waterfront commercial area being built at the foot of the hill at Leonardtown Wharf, much like the old Wharf Club, is very real.  Imagine a few hundred slot machines being trucked into Leonardtown in coming weeks.  They are on the way.

Over the past few weeks ST. MARY’S TODAY has outlined much of the extent of the problem of the return of the slot machine days.

An abundance of kindness has explained the lack of any backbone on the part of local lawmakers, law officers or other elected officials and the absence of any leadership to fight the spread of what most everyone agrees are illegally placed machines.

The careful explanation of defining the machines is a dialogue prepared by shyster lawyers which has been carefully laying the tracks for an express train of greed.  To make matters worse, those who are reaping huge profits are lying through their teeth in presenting the false front that somehow the profits from these slot machines are going to charity.

First, the machines are owned by a Towson firm which captures some 40 to 70 percent of the take from the machines. 

Next, the bar owners, where most of the machines are placed, are not overly community spirited folks, if they were, they would drive more of their customers home rather than turning them loose to kill and maim every day.  There are few bar owners which take keys and arrange rides, but you’ll turn blue quick if you think many of them do so, some aren’t sober enough to make the decision to save a life.

The politicians are all fearful of making some of the “charitable” organizations mad, so they mutter under their breath, to the bar owners to make all the money they can as quick as they can because the Attorney General will jump into this and stop all the fun sooner or later.

The trouble with that is the Attorney General is too busy running for Governor to bother with the issue and he already has a couple of twits who are his assistants somehow telling St. Mary’s Sheriff Tim Cameron that these hundreds and hundreds of machines are legal.

Of course, the average Joe Citizen knows that they are not legal and that they are slot machines.  Sheriff Cameron should have rented some big trucks and hand carts and gone out with a posse of deputies and rounded up every last machine and put them into storage while the courts sort it all out.  But, being a tenderfoot sheriff, he made the mistake of asking the Attorney General assistants what to do.  Any lawyer is going to give a client advise which minimizes his work, especially legal titmouse’s like these cats who get paid a salary and won’t make more money for more work.  Thus Cameron got the Fritz version and the Titmouse version and has settled into a course of non-action, which might be a good case of covering his butt, but while he is doing nothing, fiddling away the days, Rome is burning and his county is overflowing with corruption as illegal machines blossom forth in a way which would have made the legendary Al Fisher crazy with envy, rivals the days of the Honey Lane and the little Las Vegas row of casinos which formerly lined Rt. 301 in Waldorf.

Yes, Sheriff Cameron has proceeded carefully, as he is a new sheriff and with all of his book learning he forgot how to be a cop.  The law is clear, that in order for the machines to be in Maryland, they must be licensed.  No court decision said to go forth and propagate.  One court ruling afforded counties the ability to allow “instant bingo machines” which are the slot machines which consume the money of the players into the slot of the machine, never to give it back except by the few winners pushing a button to “cash out”.  But only Anne Arundel and Calvert have established any regulations or ordinance allowing these devises, St. Mary’s has not.

The issue of slot machines may be decided by the Attorney General if he can take some time off from running for Governor and figure out that this is a major issue.  But then again, he may not, at least not until the machine operators run out of bars and liquor stores in St. Mary’s and start placing these machines in Montgomery County, the home county of Attorney General Gansler.

The County Commissioners say this is a state issue and they forwarded a letter to the legislative delegation two years ago asking the legislators to clarify the laws after the Texas Holdem folks started letting outsiders come in and run the gambling, in violation of the law which calls for the card games to be run only by the charitable organization.

This past week found that the dozens of machines in the St. Mary’s Landing in Charlotte Hall had small white pieces of notebook paper with the words “This machine sponsored by Mechanicsville Lions” or other local organizations, taped to a corner of the machine.

A restaurant at Wildewood Shopping Center now has added slot machines and there are reported plans to put them in the old Lenny’s, one of the old bars still open which used to house slot machines.

The recently closed up Roost could find a new world of rejuvenation as a slot machine roadhouse, exactly the way it was born in 1947, with hard drinking business people, Navy pilots and base workers cramming into the joint for booze and slots after leaving the base.

There are few instances of slot machine money actually going to charity.  The Mechanicsville Moose Lodge has donated all of its money to charity since placing the machines in their bar last fall.  More than $10,000 was given to various groups.

A portion of the money from the Brass Rail slot machine parlor has gone to Little Flower School.

But, the illegally placed machines have no required reporting and there is no accounting, and Sheriff Cameron says that the only places with licenses from him are the Boatman’s Foundation.

Boatman asserts that his Foundation was set up in 2006 and has been donating meals and food to the Hughesville Women’s Shelter for the past few years.

Sheriff Cameron acknowledges that if anyone is legal with the machines, it is only Boatman and the bona-fide charitable groups who have them, such as the Moose. 

But, in the same breath, Cameron continues to maintain he is powerless to remove the illegal machines, which Maryland Senate President Mike Miller adamantly says are illegal and that the Sheriff should immediately remove them . 

Miller says it is a fraud on the public to bring these machines in the back door when in just a few months voters will have a chance to decide the issue of whether to allow slot machines in Maryland.

The key on how they are illegal appears to be if the politicians, shyster lawyers and hapless law enforcement officials wander into the jungle of dangling legal participles and declare that what Joe Citizen knows is a slot machine is actually an instant Bingo machine.

The machines, at no point in the hour that this writer played them at St. Mary’s Landing, once hollered the words “Instant Bingo”.  No words came up to that effect, the machines acted just like the machines at Atlantic City or Dover Downs.

St. Mary’s States Attorney Richard Fritz, as clever a lawyer that ever existed, said in a letter to Frank Moran and Sons, the chief purveyors of the electronic slot machines, that upon his review the machines do not fit the qualifications of being slot machines.

Fritz did write in his letter of July 25, 2007 to Moran that the local law states that only qualified organizations as defined by CL Article 13-2101 (e) of the code may engage in “gaming events” and operate “gaming devices”.

Fritz wrote a letter to the commissioners advising them to seek clarity in the law from the legislators and the commissioner say that they forwarded the letter on the lawmakers in Annapolis.   But Delegate Wood apparently finds he makes good political hay just patting his good old boy pals on the back and telling them to make hay while the sun shines.

Sen. Roy Dyson, who sponsored the original Bingo legislation in the Maryland House of Delegates in 1975, to put the brakes on the ADF Bingo operation, set in motion the law restricting the Bingo to charitable groups, forcing the operators to have people from the benefiting organizations, such as Mother Catherine Spalding School, to volunteer at the events as workers. 

Dyson may have to expand the existing law, which Cameron will appreciate, as he is genuinely sincere in making his veteran Sheriff status by winning the Slot Machine Merit Badge and advance on to the status of Eagle, which is exactly where the future welfare, safety and security of the county demands he advance.  Cameron has stated that he fears the slot machines as the entry for organized crime. That horse is out of the barn and the Sheriff is standing in the pasture surrounded by tall grass looking for a horse to lasso. Hope he finds one. We need him to succeed.

Dyson could gain Cameron’s support rapidly if he introduces an amendment to the existing Bingo law which would restrict these “gaming devices” to the premises of charitable organizations which have been in existence for three years, require the machines to be owned by the organization and outlaw all of the existing machines which have been unregulated, unlicensed and are propagating like a swarm of drunk sailors set loose in a whorehouse, which is quite a glimpse into both the past and the future of St. Mary’s County with hundreds and hundreds of slot machines.

The public will take the backseat as the politicians fear making the charitable groups, the bar owners and the slot machine interests mad.  Just like Washington, where the special interests rule.  

The church leaders; pastors, priests and ministers must all be too busy eating at church suppers, overwhelmed with the problems of their flocks or in denial, as some funds still are coming to their bingo nights and they too, like the politicians, are more cowardly than courageous.  The weekly addiction and compulsion of slots will make the sub-prime crisis look like a church picnic as they start to see the human toll of neighborhood casinos.  Then the posturing and pontificating will take place, when it is too late.

Remember, what will be on the ballot this fall is for the voters to decide if thousands of machines should be allowed in the state, at five racetracks and other central locations, not in every bar liquor store and gas station.   The strategy for the slot machine explosion is to get them in now and make it politically impossible to remove them with the bar owners all crying how they will go out of business if they lose the slots.

The slots, which the reader can vote to approve on the referendum, will be state owned with the race tracks getting a share but the Maryland Lottery system will regulate them, control them and the only graft and greed that will be taking place will be through the normal channels which Maryland proudly protects and centers mostly in Annapolis.