Governor Pat Quinn signed a bill earlier this summer to legalize video poker and help the state raise much-needed revenue. They won't be up and running until 2010, but you can already feed your hard-earned dollars into a "speakeasy" video poker machine in Chicagoland today.
The legalization of video poker in Illinois, otherwise good news for gambling enthusiasts, threatens to upend a staple source of cash for the Chicago mob.
The Outfit has benefitted from illegal gambling machines in the neighborhoods of Bridgeport and Chinatown for years, where that particular form of white collar crime is quite lucrative. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, signaled to reporters that a federal investigation is underway (NBC Chicago). In fact, raids of bars housing such machines have been raided since this summer.
One Chicago criminal attorney told reporters that the FBI so far has hit about 10 or 12 taverns in Bridgeport, taking the circuit boards of the machines as evidence for possible tax evasion charges. Go figure: After all these years, exposure to nonpayment of taxes remains the main Achilles heel of mobsters.
It is believed that the video poker racket began under the supervision of the late Joseph "Shorty" LaMantia, who worked under Frank Calabrese, Sr. After a jury found Calabrese guilty of participating in multiple Outfit hits and running an illegal gambling ring in 2007, he was sentenced to life in prison.
Similar to the end of Prohibition in 1933, which allowed states to tax legal sales of liquor, the legalization of video poker seeks to replace the Chicago mob with the Illinois state government as the main benefactor. Former FBI Supervisor Jim Wagner was quoted in the NBC article as to the Outfit's future with video poker:
"[There's] too much money to be made with those machines to turn their backs on it. They have their own equipment out there and that won't change."
The Chicago Outfit or the State of Illinois -- now, at least, you'll have choices of where to drink alcohol and feed cash into a glowing, blinking machine.
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Illinois Gambling Laws (FindLaw)
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Mob Lite (Chicago Magazine, via Laborers.org)
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Chicago Criminal Defense Attorneys (FindLaw)
