Word: riverboats
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...recent landing in Mississippi, however, the road-warrior reverend found his path strewn with obstacles. Few states have embraced gambling so wholeheartedly. Since 1992, when the first riverboat casino floated down the Mississippi River to Tunica, the desperately poor county that Jesse Jackson once called "America's Ethiopia," 28 casinos have sprung up from the Tennessee border to the Gulf Coast. These garish palaces employ 27,300 people and last year put $189 million into state and local coffers. "Hey, look, Tom Grey, gaming is working here in Mississippi!" declares host Rip Daniels, welcoming Grey to his talk show...
...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...
...cities that benefit most from casinos are those that can attract enough out-of-towners so that the regressive losses, and attendant social problems, fall less heavily on their own 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...
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...
...adults exposed to gaming can be expected to develop into pathological gamblers. In Collinsville, Illinois, a short drive from East St. Louis, a teacher dropped off her two children at school one day last January, drove to a parking lot and shot herself in the head. Although a riverboat spokesman said he had no record of her visits, friends told the local press that the 40-year-old woman gambled frequently at the Casino Queen. The day she died sheriff's deputies were on their way to her home with an eviction order. She left a note on the door...