| State help urged to battle slots Area legislators issue call to AG 04/07/2001 By Lee Hancock / The Dallas Morning News Dallas County legislators, concerned about the lack of prosecutions against illegal gaming parlors, are asking the state attorney general to help combat the spread of video slot machines.
In addition to the unusual united front from the lawmakers, one representative hopes to introduce a measure to strengthen Texas' ban on the gambling devices.
Dallas County District Attorney Bill Hill said Friday that he was unaware of the request but welcomed the attorney general's help. He said his office had scheduled a meeting for Monday with Attorney General John Cornyn's office to discuss how they might work together to prosecute slot operators.
"If this is what it takes to get me off my butt or get Cornyn to work on it, that's fine," the district attorney said Friday. "I think things need to be done. I don't mind doing it. We just need more resources."
Rep. Fred Hill, R-Richardson, said he was so concerned about law enforcement's inaction in Dallas County that he called Mr. Cornyn this week and then began asking other members of the county's legislative delegation to join him in a formal request.
He said all but three of the area's two dozen legislators had signed the plea for help. He hopes to obtain the rest and deliver their letter to Mr. Cornyn early next week.
"I have taken it to the DA's office. They seem to feel that there's nothing that they could do. So I called John Cornyn," Rep. Hill said Friday. "He felt there were laws on the books that could be used to prosecute aggressively.
"It's gotten too big," he said of the gaming rooms. "When you've got that much money involved and you've got people thumbing their nose at the law, the next thing you know there will be some other illegal problem. ... This has been going on for too long."
Mr. Cornyn's office declined to comment Friday.
The Dallas County district attorney's office has not pursued a video slot case in more than three years, although the attorney general's office has had repeated successes in helping other counties seize machines and prosecute video slot operators.
Wednesday, Mr. Cornyn's assistants helped Ector County authorities win a five-count gambling conviction against a slot-machine operator who was paying out store gift certificates as prizes – a common practice in what operators say may be as many as 100 game rooms across Dallas County. The seizure of the Odessa operator's 62 machines in February 2000 was one of the largest ever from a single location by the attorney general's investigators.
The attorney general's anti-gambling task force only becomes involved in such cases when invited by a local district attorney. And the attorney general's assistants last worked in Dallas in 1999, when one lawyer spent about a year working on civil forfeiture cases.
Prosecutors said they were told that a lawyer was reassigned from Dallas because of competing demands from rural areas, and their office's lone civil forfeiture specialist was thereafter unable to handle the time-intensive civil slot cases.
Dallas City Council members and police investigators who worked video slot cases in the past have recently complained that Dallas had become an open city for minicasinos because of local prosecutors' inaction.
Dozens of game rooms offering video slot machines and openly advertising 24-hour blackjack, video poker and other casino action operate across the city.
Legal dispute
Proponents contend that the slot machines are legal and that game rooms are being unfairly vilified because overzealous prosecutors and the attorney general misinterpret state law.
"I don't deny that there are a significant amount of game rooms," said Mike Warner, an Austin lobbyist for the Texas Amusement Association, a group of about 200 game room operators around the state. "My understanding of why the Dallas DA is not filing charges against anyone is that he knows that they're not doing anything wrong."
Mr. Hill's assistants say the DA's office has been concerned about the proliferation of video slot machines but has been hamstrung by a flawed state law. They say current law makes police investigations difficult and poses prohibitive high-resource demands.
Rep. Will Harnett, R-Dallas, said he would try to introduce a measure to bolster the state's anti-gambling law. But with the deadline for filing new bills passed, he said it might be difficult to find legislation on which such an amendment can be attached.
"I'm on the warpath," Mr. Harnett said. "I'm very creative at amending bills. That is now my number one project, is to strike at those parlors with everything I can, with every amendment I can."
Similar bills were killed in 1997 and 1999 despite Gov. George W. Bush's support.
45,000 machines
Authorities estimate Texas has 45,000 machines – more than double the number in 1999.
Operators contend that the machines were legalized by a 1995 measure aimed at exempting children's arcade games from anti-gambling laws. The law, dubbed the "fuzzy animal" exception, allows such arcade games to award noncash prizes as long as they are worth $5 or less per play.
But the attorney general's office and many district attorneys say the machines are illegal.
The Dallas district attorney's office has recently complained that no one in the county's delegation would consider requests to introduce an anti-video slot measure before the mid-March filing deadline for new bills. But Reps. Harnett and Hill each said Friday that they had not been asked earlier to introduce anti-slot bills.
"No one has ever talked to me about this issue, and I've been down here for 10 years," Mr. Harnett said. "As hot as I am right now, if someone had approached me I would have at least looked hard at finding a way to introduce it."
Rep. Hill said he called the district attorney's office repeatedly over the past few months to discuss constituent complaints about slot parlors.
A burden to bear
When he asked whether new legislation was needed, he said, prosecutors told him that their biggest problem with pursuing slot parlors was the prohibitive expense of storing dozens of seized slot machines while cases moved through the courts.
"From my perspective it's a burden that we've got to bear," Rep. Hill said. "When you've got something that's illegal that's generating this kind of money, this kind of money leads to other things. I'd be careful about letting this go on for very long. You're empowering an element of society that we don't want to empower."
The district attorney said Friday that his assistants could have misstated the extent of his office's efforts to find sponsors for a reform bill. But he said his office's Austin liaison buttonholed area legislators early in the session and found that no one "cared one way or the other."
"I can see where the Dallas delegation might be upset," he said. "That wasn't intended, but we couldn't find any interest."
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