Playing 50/50? You're gambling with the law

The Sheriff's Office is calling out illegal activity.

By MOLLY MOORHEAD, Times Staff Writer
Published November 19, 2007

Pasco Sheriff's Lt. Robert Sullivan sees offenders everywhere.

Poker tournament to raise money for Alzheimer's support centers. Casino night to help a civic group. Church holding 50/50 raffle.

The county's longtime vice cop has a reliable intelligence network for finding illegal gambling operations: newspaper ads.

"There's not even an attempt to mask it," Sullivan said last week during a Gambling 101 session of sorts with local media outlets.

He's on a mission to put a stop to widespread illegal gambling, which he says is often committed by people unaware they're breaking state law.

Frequently, the violators are nonprofit groups raising dollars for worthy causes. "I don't know if people just figure, well, we're giving this to charity so it's okay," he said.

But he suspects that's the case.

"We want to spread the word on what is gambling," he said. "We just want people to be knowledgeable of the law."

And the law defining gambling, according to Sullivan, establishes three critical elements:

- Participants have to pay to play.

- The game is primarily one of chance, not skill.

- There's a prize at the end.

There are events like Las Vegas Night, where companies are hired to bring in slot machines, blackjack tables, roulette wheels and dealers for a party.

But playing the games is gambling, Sullivan said, and beyond that, the equipment is illegal to possess.

Other common violations he sees are poker tournaments, often held in bars, and 50/50 drawings - contests where participants buy tickets, and at the end a winner is drawn who collects half the proceeds. The other half goes to the cause.

Sullivan says those are "virtually everywhere."

Pasco law enforcement has historically low tolerance for gambling dens. The county made national headlines in the early 1990s when the Sheriff's Office arrested seven elderly men during their daily penny-ante pinochle game on Hudson Beach. The State Attorney's Office later dropped all charges against the so-called "Hudson Seven."

In 2004, masked detectives seized 60 slot machines from Spanky's Gameroom on U.S. 19 in Port Richey.

Sullivan doesn't plan to send undercover agents, guns strapped to their calves, into ballrooms and fellowship halls to stage raids.

So far, he has been calling organizers when he sees a promotion for an event with gambling.

Dominick De Petrillo received such a call in September, three days before the Alzheimer's Family Organization threw its second annual Texas Hold 'Em fundraiser.

De Petrillo, the group's executive director, said he believes the event was legal because paying to play was optional. As for the poker, the only prize was bragging rights.

By the end of the night the organization took in more than $17,000, which gets distributed for respite care to people taking care of Alzheimer's patients.

"We're trying to raise funds for a not-for-profit organization, and to me that doesn't constitute gambling," he told the Times.

The group also planned to hold a 50/50 raffle that night - until the call from Sullivan.

"He said no one from the sheriff's department will be coming, but that's an illegal thing. So we didn't do it," De Petrillo said.

Perhaps in a sign of the tall task before Sullivan, De Petrillo added: "I don't know any not-for-profit organization that, when they're having a fund-raising event such as this, they don't do a 50/50."

Molly Moorhead can be reached at moorhead@sptimes.com or 727 869-6245.

[Last modified November 18, 2007, 19:41:41]