'Legalized Gambling' Feeds Community Groups' Budgets and Fanatics' Habits
By Nick Miroff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Virginia has long been considered something of a wasteland for the wagering public. It has zero casinos and no slot machines. A recent push to bring video horse racing to the state failed, despite lawmakers' desperation for new sources of transportation funding.
But while the politicians argue over morals and road money, one form of legal gambling has been steadily expanding in the Old Dominion anyway, little by little, one firehouse and Moose lodge at a time: bingo.
Not the cardboard-and-chips kind played in grade school and summer camp, but one on which state residents spent $318 million on last year, nearly twice the amount spent on horseracing. All across Virginia, fire departments, fraternal organizations and community groups have gradually built bingo nights into quasi-casino affairs, where players can wager hundreds of dollars on touch-screen terminals and instant-bingo "pull-tab" cards.
No one -- not the firemen nor the bingo industry nor state regulators -- pretend anymore that bingo games aren't gambling. But in Virginia and many other states where most betting games are banned, an odd symbiosis has evolved to entwine the fortunes of certain critical public services and community groups with the wagering habits of the betting faithful.
The Annandale Volunteer Fire Department, for instance, makes $400,000 a year from its twice-weekly bingo operation, which accounts for more than 70 percent of its annual budget. It's a formula repeated across Virginia, where fire and rescue departments garnered $55 million from bingo last year.
"At the end of the day, this is legalized gambling," said volunteer fireman Raju Khemani, a Wachovia executive who runs the Annandale game. "But if we didn't have this, we wouldn't be able to support our two stations."
The Mount Vernon Knights of Columbus scored the biggest bingo jackpot in Northern Virginia last year, taking in $2.1 million.
Richmond pockets a small share of the action: charitable-gaming operators pay a 1.125 percent administrative fee on their receipts, which added up to about $3 million. Fire and rescue departments are exempt.
Large amounts are also spent on bingo in Maryland, which leaves regulation to local authorities and allows commercial bingo operations, some of which are famous for running shuttle buses through the District to scoop up loyal customers.
Almost all of bingo's growth in Virginia, where gross receipts have risen 27 percent in the past eight years, comes from a spike in the popularity of pull-tab cards, according to the Virginia Department of Charitable Gaming. While paper bingo receipts have remained constant, revenue from pull-tab cards increased 68 percent during that period, from $92 million in 1999 to $155 million in 2006.
A pull-tab card resembles an Advent calendar -- with little paper doors hiding combinations of numbers and symbols worth $5, $50 or, most often, zilch. With few exceptions, they can only be sold by licensed operators on bingo nights, and players buy stacks of the $1 ticket-size cards, chasing payouts of $600 and more. Some players call them "paper slot machines," and in practice they differ little from scratch-off lottery tickets, although the odds are typically more favorable than the gas station variety.
Last Thursday at the Annandale firehouse, Gail Jones, a 45-year-old Alexandria resident, was playing 21 cards at a time, inking them up and down with an arsenal of bright, carrot-size squeezable markers known as "daubers."
"It's a part-time job for me," said Jones, who often plays four nights a week and was already in for $200 on bingo sheets and pull-tab cards that evening. She tore the doors off a pull-tab card and won the money back in a single, lucky strike.
"It's the thrill," she said. "I just love to win."
Elsewhere in the hall, players with reserved seating had installed shrinelike arrangements of assorted curios and lucky knickknacks around their bingo stations -- plastic elephants, ceramic pigs, framed photos of children and spouses, among others. One woman wore a wrist brace on her dauber arm.
And yet, quirkiness aside, the game playing out in Annandale that night was a far cry from the typical church-basement bingo. Snazzy flat-panel monitors with a video link displayed the bingo balls as soon as the automated machine spit them up. Ticket vendors plied the room, selling stacks of pull-tab cards. And in case anybody wanted to push beyond their budget, the firehouse had its own ATM at the ready near the ticket counter.
"It's like any other business," Khemani said. "You have to keep the customers happy, or they'll go elsewhere."
The competition to attract new and younger players can be fierce, as many bingo operators work to break the image of the game as a slow, smoky bore. Marketing-savvy firemen now lease out touch-screen computer tablets, allowing customers to play 50, 60, even hundreds of bingo cards at once. And a flashy new prime-time show on ABC, "National Bingo Night," is a sign to some that the game is on the verge of a social revival.
"Bingo has been waiting to become the next Texas Hold 'Em in the American marketplace," said Mark Davis, chief executive of Bingo Innovations, an industry consulting firm and equipment distributor. "Corporate America has realized that there is a ravenous, addictive nature to the game and a very viable market for every type of commercial advertising."
Americans spend $10.1 billion a year on bingo games and supplies, according to Davis, of which $8.2 billion comes back in cash and prizes. Nearly $3 billion is spent at charitable outfits including the Annandale Fire House, which has paid out more than $14 million in winnings since 1993.
With all that cash flying around, it's no surprise that the game has developed a seedier side. Several high-profile embezzlement cases have been prosecuted in Virginia in recent years, including that of Kenneth E. Graham, a Richmond man convicted of stealing $690,000 from charity bingo games in Hanover County. Now a fugitive, he's been profiled on "America's Most Wanted."
Then there are compulsive bingo players who burn through thousands of dollars a month, often using the seemingly innocuous bingo setting as an excuse to overdose on pull-tab cards. "Many clients I've seen who are hooked on bingo are buying the pull-tabs," said Joanna Franklin, president of the Maryland Council on Problem Gambling.
One of Franklin's clients even developed a callous on her hand from popping open so many pull-tabs. The woman was soon on a path to ruin, first wagering her grocery money, then writing bad checks. She ultimately destroyed her marriage and became suicidal, Franklin said.
Bingo is a particularly appealing game to "escape gamblers" -- often women -- Franklin said. In contrast to "action" games, which are more popular with men and based on competition and deceiving or outsmarting opponents, bingo is "pressure-free."
Dysfunctional relationships, financial problems, even chronic pain all quickly fade when the daubers and the pull-tabs come out, Franklin said. "You get a massive dose of escapism when you're playing," she said.
Franklin doesn't propose a bingo ban, but she notes that Virginia does not require operators to post Gamblers Anonymous information at bingo halls.
Each locale has its high rollers as well as its tempered regulars. "If I kept track of how much I spent, I'd probably kill myself," said Jill, a 52-year-old Burke resident playing at a firehouse in Burke who requested her last name not be used because she is a federal contractor.
"Some women spend $500 on a purse," she said. "I do this. I look at it as my entertainment." The early bird round was not yet through, and she'd already forked over $80 for pull-tab cards.
Two years earlier, a friend persuaded her to play at a Dale City bingo night. "At first, I said I didn't want to go, that it was for old people," she recalled. "That night I won $1,000. I've been hooked ever since."
Soon Jill was playing every night of the week, but she has since scaled back, she said.
Still, for her, bingo is simply the most convenient and accessible way to gamble in Virginia. "As many times as I've gone to Vegas," she said, "I've never set foot in a bingo parlor there. I'd rather play blackjack or roulette."
Her friend Joan Haar of Springfield sat across the table with rapt anticipation, a leprechaun-shaped dauber in hand. Haar, a retired bus driver and former bingo caller, said she loves the game for its own merits. "It's that rush," said Haar, 74. "The suspense. The adrenaline. You get your heart going thump, thump, thump. When I'm waiting for that $1,000, I can feel it."
A few years ago, Haar's longtime bingo partner died one night in Annandale, right in the middle of a game, and that, to Haar, seemed like as good a way to go as any.
"She went as many nights as she could," Haar said. "She died happy."
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