Fear of the mob delays casino gambling in Atlantic City
The seagulls have Atlantic City's famous Boardwalk almost to themselves these days. Icy winds and frigid surf have driven away the taffy sellers, the carny barkers, even the sideshow girl who turns into a gorilla before the very eyes of anyone with the 750 price of admission to the Million Dollar Pier. But in hotels along Pacific Avenue, restaurants on Atlantic Avenue and offices along North Carolina Avenue, there is heated talk about options, leases and multimillion-dollar deals—life imitating a Monopoly game. Almost all of the conversations center on the question: When will the first gambling casino open and begin spinning out better days for the fading dowager queen of seaside resorts?
Since New Jersey's voters approved casino gambling for Atlantic City in November 1976, investors have announced plans for 21 casinos, including one in a marina for yachtsmen passing by on the Intracoastal Waterway. Resorts International, which operates two gambling palaces in the Bahamas, has invested $10 million to buy and refurbish the 1,001-room Chal-fonte-Haddon Hall Hotel, installing roulette wheels, craps tables and a high-priced French restaurant. Bally Manufacturing Corp., a Chicago slot-machine maker, has leased the fabled Marlbor-ough-Blenheim Hotel for $850,000 a year from Reese Palley, a wealthy jeweler and art dealer, and Lawyer Martin Blatt. Penthouse Publisher Bob Guccione intends to build a $50 million casino-hotel, possibly on the site of the bedraggled Mayflower Hotel. Playboy Publisher Hugh Hefner is looking for a partner in a planned $69 million casino-hotel on Florida Avenue.
Despite expectations that the boom will begin this spring, however, the first casino probably will not be in operation until the fall, and no more than half a dozen may be in operation by the mid1980s. Even though the casino-hotels will give a powerful economic boost to a deteriorating city that has lost 18,000 residents since 1960 (current population: 41,000) and has a 17.6% unemployment rate, state officials are moving with extreme care in issuing licenses. The object: to keep out organized crime, which is heavily involved in gambling elsewhere.
That could prove impossible. Soldiers from the crime family led by Philadelphia
Mafia Boss Angelo Bruno have long controlled Atlantic City's narcotics, prostitution, loan-sharking and illegal-gambling rackets. Lately, Mafiosi from northern New Jersey, New York City and even Chicago have been buying pizzerias, restaurants, discotheques and other nightspots in Atlantic City. Often they use front men with clean records, producing what Joseph Rodriguez, chairman of the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation, describes as a "mysterious movement of cash and checks through a strange mix of bank accounts and people."
One Domenico Adamita, for example, told the commission that he had borrowed $350,000 to buy Casanova's Disco. Where did the money come from? Adamita's less than satisfactory reply: from a man who kept his money stashed in a bag hidden in his basement. In fact, investigators believe that two cousins of the late New York crime boss Carlo Gambino, one of them a longtime friend of Adamita's, put up the funds.