Wampum by Donald Craig Mitchell

Author:Donald Craig Mitchell [MITCHELL, DONALD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS037080
ISBN: a9781468313352
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2016-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

Because a conviction for violating the Johnson Act would result in the revocation of their licenses to sell video gaming machines to casinos in Nevada and Atlantic City, the mainstream manufacturers would not put their machines into Indian bingo halls. However, according to Bob Sertell, companies that manufactured machines for the “gray market” that existed in states where the machines were illegal were “quite big in Indian country,” and “all of their machines were either slot machines with random number generators in the belly masquerading as something else, or they were server-based slot machines masquerading as bingo or pull-tabs or something.”

For example, in 1987, Greyhound Electronics. a gray market manufacturer in New Jersey, sold thirty machines whose software had been programmed to enable a player to play poker to the White Earth Nation, which had opened a bingo hall on the nation’s reservation in Minnestota. The company was owned by Carmen Ricci, an associate of “Little Nicky” Scarfo, the head of the Mafia in Philadelphia. In 1990, Ricci and Scarfo were indicted for putting Ricci’s machines into taverns and other locations throughout Philadelphia. In 1991, SMS Manufacturing, a New Jersey gray market manufacturer that had been started with financing from a member of the Scarfo family, provided the machines that were installed in the bingo halls at Pascua Pueblo and on the Tohono O’odam Reservation in Arizona.

In 1982 Mariana Shulstead was the Department of the Interior attorney who advised Norman Crooks when Crooks and Steve Whilden negotiated the management agreement that resulted in the Little Six Enterprises joint venture constructing, and then managing, the Little Six Bingo Palace on the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community’s reservation at Prior Lake, Minnesota. According to Shulstead, the year after the bingo hall opened, Little Six Enterprises built an addition that ran the length of the hall in which “machines that were supposedly bingo-like games” were installed. And on every other reservation in Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Nebraska, “Wherever there were bingo halls, they also had machines.”

The Nevada Gaming Control Board and the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement require video gaming machine manufacturers to submit a prototype of each model of their machines for testing to ensure that the RNGs, microprocessors, and software have not been rigged to pay out less than the amount the laws in Nevada and New Jersey require or to allow winning combinations to be manipulated.

The gray market machines in bingo halls on Indian reservations were subjected to no such testing. And because they were gray market, they were of low quality. According to Bob Sertell, many of the machines in casinos on Indian reservations in southern California had doors that did not lock, contained RNGs that did not generate numbers randomly, and “if you slammed them on the side of the cabinet in a particular place in a particular pattern, the machine would pay off twenty dollars.”

The machines also were easy to rig. As Sertell, who the NIGC hired as a consultant, explained to the NIGC, some

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