EFFin’ Unsound

– posted by thehim

If there’s one nice thing I can say about Lou Guzzo, it’s that he’s shown that even crazy old people can have a home on YouTube.  Lou returns to writing in his latest rant, and he takes on one item in his long list of threats to American society - gambling:

While I was attending a public school in the heart of Cleveland’s Little Italy back in the early 1930s — as the Great Depression was in full sway — my friends and I noted one day that several boys, ages 14 and 13, were missing from classrooms and would never be seen again at the school.

Don’t worry, Lou isn’t going to challenge the scientific consensus on spontaneous combustion.

Had they been kidnapped? Or had their families moved to another city?

Did the rapture happen in 1933 and everyone was too poor to care? 

It was nothing of the sort. The boys had been recruited by Mafia families in the district to move to a city in Nevada whose name we would later learn was Las Vegas.

They must have just taken the smart kids. 

We also learned much later that the Cleveland Mafia had “invented” Vegas and that the boys were being trained to man roulette, poker, and other gambling games.

The Cleveland Mafia “invented” Vegas?  Really?   

The excuse was that the poverty brought on by the Depression made it necessary to find work for the youngsters so they could help feed their families. Some excuse that was!

Yeah, let ‘em starve!

The gambling bug didn’t mean much to me in those days, but it soon became a major menace in my mind as I moved into newspaper reporting and, eventually, into full-scale investigation of all types of crime.

Lou’s whole worldview appears to be about being menaced in his mind.

It was then that I discovered the rottenness of gambling and its role in inviting corruption, cheating, political payoffs, and other crimes.

He should have seen it when it was illegal.  Oh wait, he did.

Is it any wonder, then, that I became an enemy of all gambling because of the despicable characters it attracts, as well as its penchant for fleecing suckers?

Yet he gets along great with Republicans.  Strange that. 

As managing editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, I led my staff in exposing racketeers and gambling — as well as political and police officials who had profited from illegal gaming.

I guess the last thing we’d want to do is go back to those days by closing down all of the area’s casinos.  I’m sure you see where this is going.

All of this leads me to the report this month of 24 federal indictments against casino-related criminals, who had devised an elaborate system of using marked cards to cheat 18 casinos of millions of dollars in Washington, California, Nevada, Connecticut, Mississippi, Louisiana, Indiana, and even Canada.

Even Canada?  Now that’s elaborate.

Among the men indicted were card dealers and pit bosses working for the casinos.

So if a bank employee tries to steal money from the vault, do we have to outlaw banks? 

Ten of the casinos involved are owned and run by Indian tribes.

Chief Doesn’t-Believe-In-Background-Checks has some egg on his face. 

Although security workers at one of the Indian casinos have been credited with starting the investigation, I have no sympathy with any gambling casinos, whether run by the Mafia or the Indians.

That Trump guy is ok as long as he keeps fighting with Rosie O’Donnell.

That brings me to the main point of this commentary:

Holy shit, there’s a point? 

I believe Congress and all 50 legislatures should act to ban professional, organized gambling everywhere in the U.S. and to order heavy fines and even prison terms for those who break the law and set up high-stakes gambling,

It’s modeled after the war on drugs, which has been a smashing success.

Of course, some persons addicted to gambling will argue that it’s all in fun and that it’s just an innocent pastime.

Don’t they have any idea how much these casinos are being ripped off by bad employees? 

They also argue that, if a man or woman wants to toss his or her cash into a game of chance, that should be each person’s prerogative — and that every person has a right to do so.

Someone remind me not to invite Lou to my Super Bowl party this year.  I don’t want him throwing the 5-layer dip at me as we draw squares.

To these addicts, I can say only “Boloney!” The damage done by high-stakes gambling is often tragic.

So is the damage done by war, but that hasn’t really stopped Lou from supporting that at every turn.

A few gamblers “hit the jackpot” on occasion — but that’s exactly how the casinos want it to happen so that the publicity about the few “big winners” will entice non-gamblers to visit the gambling houses and go into heavy debt, as a result.

Uh oh, someone needs to call Steve Wynn.  The top-secret strategy of the casinos has finally been revealed.

At the same time, we must reckon with the payoffs the gambling industry indulges in to keep its operations going. Many money-hungry politicians have been all-too eager to arrange legislative and other favors to casino operators in return for a hefty political contribution.

By that logic, we should make oil illegal. 

Gambling is a curse and should be banned nationwide.

I’m choosing Lou in my next death pool.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 4:56 pm and is filed under TheHim. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.