Friday, October 03, 2008

Repent, Sinners

Gambling is sinful again. For a while, it was no longer a closet pastime, but the New York Times seemed to be driving us undercover by association when it recently tarred John McCain for shooting crap and accepting campaign money from such miscreants as Terry Lanni, the MGM Mirage impresario, a horse owner and a director at Del Mar, and Steve Wynn, head of his eponymous gaming company in Las Vegas and a former ally of Marje Everett at Hollywood Park. Gad, I once went to Lanni's office in Pasadena for an interview. I hope none of it rubbed off.

The Times quoted a former McCain aide once warning the senator, ". . . Good things don't happen in casinos at midnight." First off, it's hard to tell it's midnight in Las Vegas, because there are no clocks, and secondly I've had some fairly decent blackjack runs after the little hand met the big hand at 12. If I had known my reputation was at stake, I'd have asked my wife to tuck me in.

It gets worse. The National Football League, asleep for about 40 years, has decided that it's improper for the Rooney family to own the Pittsburgh Steelers as well as the Yonkers Raceway harness track in New York and a dog track in West Palm Beach, Fla. The Rooneys have owned the dog track since 1970 and Yonkers since 1972, as well as tracks in Vermont and Pennsylvania along the way. But now the House of Rooney is doubly suspect because there are video display terminals (dare I call them slot machines) at Yonkers and a poker room at West Palm. Both of these operations were rumored to be going strong well past midnight, too.

I thought all of this puritanical poppycock had ended after the American League told Edward DeBartolo that he couldn't buy the Chicago White Sox in 1980. At the time, the DeBartolo family owned three race tracks, the San Francisco 49ers and the Pittsburgh Penguins, and the NFL and the National Hockey League weren't dishing out any this-or-that ultimatums. The NHL knew it was lucky to have someone meeting the payroll in Pittsburgh. I once said to DeBartolo, "What's the capacity of that building in Pittsburgh?" He said it was about 17,000. I asked him what kind of crowds he needed to break even. "Twenty thousand," he said.

DeBartolo, who died in 1994, always thought that it was more than his race-track holdings that kept him out of baseball. One of the problems, he hinted, was that his last name ended in a vowel. Bill Veeck, who owned the White Sox then, ran Suffolk Downs briefly and said that he had come away from the track free of contamination. Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner of baseball, explained away George Steinbrenner and John Galbreath by saying that they had been grandfathered into the lodge. Steinbrenner, principal owner of the New York Yankees, was involved in race tracks in Illinois and Florida, and Galbreath, biggest shareholder in the Pittsburgh Pirates, owned considerable stock in Churchill Downs. Years after the DeBartolo-White Sox fiasco, Kuhn mentioned Pete Rose's name to me, preened and said that the American League had done the right thing.

Back to McCain. The Times said that in 2007-08, he's received $260,025 in campaign contributions from the gambling industry. Proving its due diligence, the newspaper reported that Barack Obama has received $132,633 from similar sources during the same period. I guess that makes Obama only half-pregnant.

You could put the McCain and Obama totals together and not nearly approach what the Indian casinos spend on politicians and campaigns in California. According to one study, the tribes spent $12.7 million in 2006 and half of 2007 on "political expenditures, mostly campaign contributions." ArnoldWatch.org recently identified Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's biggest individual contributor as B. Wayne Hughes, who donated just over $1 million.

Hughes made his fortune in storage rentals, and while he doesn't own a race track, or perhaps roll dice at midnight, he does campaign a large racing stable. Surely Schwarzenegger knows.