Inside Asian Gaming

JUNE 2015 inside asian gaming 39 Gambling and the law Regulators tend to start out overly-strict, although they eventually become overly-friendly with the industries they control. Government bureaucracies continue to grow, even when the businesses they are regulating are shrinking. And a rule, once put down on paper, lasts until ... well, forever. Jersey, for example, there was a great fear that all that new money would create conflicts of interest for elected and appointed officials. Casinos were brought in to revitalize Atlantic City. A Casino Reinvestment Development Authority was created in 1984 to make sure the money went into projects like housing. Strict rules were put in place to ensure casinos would not influence where the money was spent. This led in 1986 to the Chairman of the CRDA having to resign, because his adult daughter, a casino cashier, moved back into his house. It’s easy, in this case, to see that a government agency was not going to direct hundreds of millions of dollars into, say, building a parking structure for a casino, simply because the Chairman’s daughter worked in that casino. But how would you write a rule that allows a young daughter who is a casino cashier to live in his home, but not an older son who is a casino president? Unless you are willing to spend enormous amounts of time and money holding hearings on each individual case, the rules have to be written in black and white, with bright red lines telling people what they can and cannot do. We could also say, “That’s so 1980s.” But listen to this complaint from Steve Wynn, while he was being vetted by the Massachusetts regulators: “An investigator who gets paid by the hour and can decide how many hours he should charge, called up one of my outside