Word: queen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...question is not ironic. For if most investors would hesitate to bet on a basket case, the five businessmen who launched the Casino Queen in June 1993 recouped their money in six months--and have been raking in profits ever since. Meanwhile, taxes on the riverboat's $150 million annual revenues have doubled the city's budget to $12 million, allowing East St. Louis to reduce property levies 30%, slash its debt, double the number of police officers and patrol cars, and thus cut the murder rate by a third. The boat, with 1,250 workers, is now the city...
...citizens. In Las Vegas, Southern California tourists bear the burden, while the riverboat in Council Bluffs, Iowa, lives off bettors from Omaha, Nebraska. And although most Illinois casinos attract few out-of-staters, East St. Louis is an exception. On two recent nights some 70% of the Casino Queen's patrons were white, many of them from across the river in Missouri. "Casino gambling is a shell game," explains Earl Grinols, a University of Illinois economics professor, "attracting dollars from one person's pocket to another and from one region to another...
East St. Louis had less to lose. Still, the rising tide of riverboat revenues has not lifted all boats. The Casino Queen parking lot is surrounded by a high-security fence with guards in two watchtowers and on the ground. A new stop on the MetroLink commuter train, which deposits visitors at the boat, was designed to bypass the heart of East St. Louis, which even now has large tracts of urban desolation and 1,700 abandoned buildings.. "You have not seen a lot of gambling revenue trickle into the neighborhood," says community activist Alandra Byrd. But the casino...
...some thought him a "sicko" and "a loner," no one could have foreseen the depth of evil in their midst. At the local morgue, hospital chaplain Jim Benson comforted parents as they identified their children. But no words, no memorials or visits by the Queen will make it easier for a parent to comprehend that a son, a daughter is never going to wake again. After one mother looked at her dead child, she turned to Benson and said, "My baby always sleeps like that...
...hope he's wrong. People who would snatch Trafalgar Square pigeons for restaurant stewpots would snatch almost any animal, no matter how repulsive--although the Queen will be relieved to hear they'd probably draw the line at corgis...