Yes, there’s been another fire at the Monte Carlo. This one was confined to the Double Barrel Saloon and there was only one injury, most importantly. That place has some rough luck, doesn’t it?
It doesn’t matter what Cantor Gaming CEO Lee Amaitis (left) knew or when he knew it. He should have known that director of risk management (ha!) Michael Colbert was accepting unlawful bets. That lack of due diligence will cost Cantor (now CT Technology) a record $5.5 million in Nevada fines. Without admitting to almost any culpability, Cantor conceded that the Nevada Gaming Control Board could cook its goose, if need be. And regulators had good reason to drop Thor’s Hammer on Cantor, considering that online poker is in its legal infancy, casinos would like to follow suit with online sports betting and everybody’s got to prove they are more virtuous than Caesar’s wife. As NGCB Chairman A.G. Burnett put it, “Public trust can only be maintained by strict regulation of gaming. Violations of the type alleged in the complaint must have significant disciplinary consequences.” And so they did. “We are … pleased to put this behind us,” stated a Cantor spokeswoman. Well, they certainly hope that’s the end of it.
In other Control Board news, executives of Bally Technologies are getting schooled. They going to have to take “registration classes” after it was found that the company had failed to register 51 employees. Bally has agreed to pay $125,000 and take unspecified “remedial steps.”
When it comes to gambling, my native state of Virginia still behaves as though it were 1744. But that same state sees no problem with conducting a lottery, complains columnist Bart Hinkle. Ditto bingo, horseracing and OTB parlors. “The pretense that placing bets in Virginia is not sin-drenched gambling but merely a means to some virtuous end is growing gossamer thin,” writes Hinkle, giving casinos his equivocal endorsement.
