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When the casinos finally came, they caught both the city and the state completely unprepared. Then Governor Brendan Byrne was so intent on keeping casinos out of the hands of organized crime that much of his energy went into developing a body of law and a bureaucracy that would do the job. As a result, the two regulatory agencies that enforce the formidable Casino Control Act spend $59 million annually to police twelve casinos, in contrast to $15.7 million for 285 casinos in Nevada. The two agencies can, in the words of Carl Zeitz, a former member of the casino-control commission, fairly claim to have "legitimized the industry" in New Jersey. But with all its attention focused on the Mob, the state let eight years pass before establishing a mechanism to collect revenues for the rebuilding of Atlantic City. "The biggest mistake I ever made was not creating some kind of regional state authority at the time," says Byrne.
/ Not until 1986 did the casino reinvestment development authority begin to do business. The agency is now preparing to resurrect the Inlet by leading a $500 million investment program for building heavily subsidized housing for the middle class. But neither the casinos nor many of the Inlet's inhabitants have much faith in the effort. "You can't mix caviar with tuna," says Dorothy McCann from the rocker on the porch of her oceanfront Victorian home. McCann, 71, has reason to sound ornery: the agency bought her out last month as part of its raze-and-rebuild plan, despite the headline-making campaign she waged to stay put. "My husband Frank wants me to move out and go to a place where we'll have some nice white neighbors," she says. "I'm thick."
"You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days," says Lou, an aging errand boy for the Mob played by Burt Lancaster in Louis Malle's 1981 movie Atlantic City. Lou is strolling down the Boardwalk, recalling the city's hip-swiveling days when a political boss strolled on the Boardwalk in the company of Al Capone. "Now it's all so goddamn legal," he mumbles. "Tutti- frutti ice cream and craps don't mix."
In Atlantic City they do, which is why the Boardwalk reflects both a grandiloquence imported from Las Vegas and an insistence on bourgeois comfort. Parading past the statue of Caesar Augustus (finger aloft, as if hailing a cab), the Boardwalk crowd offers an unself-conscious mixture: round middles barely disguised by oversize T shirts or bulging above cinched-in belts; conical straw hats; white socks in white sandals; baseball caps on balding heads; male decolletage; painted eyebrows; sequins in the daytime; polyester stretch pants; factory-knit acrylic cardigans; lots of polka dots; colors usually found only at the extremities of a kid's Crayola box.
Gambling may have brought to Atlantic City a Pompeian profusion of statues, but the city's long-standing sense of carnival still flourishes. The casino boutiques may sell Gucci leather, but the Boardwalk is a bazaar of plastic beads, mugs shaped like women's breasts, and baby sand sharks in glass jars. When Las Vegas was nothing but a jukebox in the desert, Atlantic City had clam-eating tournaments and midget boxing matches; today one of the Boardwalk's main attractions is Celestine Tate, a disabled woman who lies on a stretcher like a beached mermaid and plays a Casio keyboard with her tongue.