Video poker brings mob buckets of profits
The machines are electronic video poker, which has been called crack for compulsive gamblers.
The money is bribes to politicians.
And the speaker, investigators say, is Thomas Tucker, former chief of detectives in the tiny suburb of Stone Park, relating the orders of a mob boss, James Marcello. Tucker is a bagman, the guy who carries the bribes from the mob to the politicians to protect the illegal gambling.
So what's the big deal with video gambling machines?
As innocuous as they may appear, they are among the most lucrative ways the ever-shrinking Chicago Outfit still has of making money.
One machine, standing alone in a bar on the Northwest Side or among a dozen other machines in a social club in Addison, can rake in $100,000 in profits a year. The bar takes half, and the mob takes half.
And in the Chicago area there are hundreds of machines.
About once a week, a collector for the mob will visit a machine, remove a padlock and check two digital counters--one that tallies how much money the customers put in that week, another that tallies how much they won.
Only the mob's collector has access to those all-important counters.
The winnings already will have been paid out by the bartender to customers, taken from the bar's cash register.
And the bar owner will have emptied the machines of cash each night--to avoid having them broken into.
The money paid out to the winners will be subtracted from the money fed into the machines. What remains is all profit--split between the bar and the mob.
For the Outfit in Chicago, video gambling machines are "one of the top businesses," said DuPage County sheriff's Detective Sgt. George Wick, and the fight over profits can get deadly.
Take, for example, the case of Anthony "the Hatch" Chiaramonti, a violent mobster who was shot dead last year in suburban Lyons.
Police have not revealed what they believe to have been the motive, but some Outfit watchers blame the hit on a turf battle between mobsters operating video poker machines.
The importance of the machines to the Outfit was made apparent in the recent investigation of reputed West Side and DuPage County mob boss Anthony Centracchio, who died in August 2001, former Stone Park Mayor Robert Natale and others.
To build the case, led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Levine, FBI agents recorded conversations through various means, including putting a microphone in Tucker's car and a video camera in the ceiling of Centracchio's office at his abortion clinic.
Among the many conversations recorded about street taxes, bribery and food, one recurring topic was video gambling machines.
In one conversation, Tucker explained to Centracchio that he told Natale that the $500 or "nickel" a month bribe Natale was getting was for one thing only: protecting the machines.
The bribe "is strictly machines, nothing else," Tucker recalled telling Natale. "Just don't bother the machines."
"Don't bother them," Centracchio agreed.
And during his reign, Centracchio didn't have to worry about the machines being bothered, with the bribes he passed out each month.
In other jurisdictions, though, bar owners and the mob have had to come up with more creative ideas when facing police raids.
Wick, an expert on video gambling machines who has destroyed hundreds of them, said crooks use ruse after ruse to avoid the law.
In a twist of Illinois law, the machines are legal as long as they don't pay out money.
Investigators have to prove that the machines are meant to pay out money, so they look for machines that have been illegally altered. Take for instance, the second digital counter that records how much money has been paid out from a machine. If the machine isn't being used for gambling, there's no reason for that second counter. And that's something cops can point to in court.
Some bars have tried to skirt the ban on paying out money by offering something close to cash, such as gift certificates. But that, too, is illegal.
Other machines can be converted with a press of a switch from a video gambling machine to a harmless-looking trivia game, in case of a raid.
No matter what the ruse, the machines are designed to suck in gamblers.
The payout rate can be adjusted, and bars usually keep it high in the first few weeks, to get the gamblers hooked. Then they drop the rate, making it much lower than the rate offered by machines on gambling boats, when gamblers are already sucked in, blowing their weekly paychecks.