The gamecock. (Columbia, S.C.) 1908-2006, October 12, 2005, Page 5, Image 5
Gulf Coast a graveyard for thousands of slot machines
Adam Goldman
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
GULFPORT, Miss. — C.J.
“Mac” McClendon spent years
installing slot machines on the
Gulf Coast. These days, he is
exhuming them.
When Hurricane Katrina
leveled the Gulfport and Biloxi
area, it silenced about 18,000
slot machines at Mississippi’s
floating casinos. Some of the
one-armed bandits were washed
into the sea. Looters ran off
with others. And the vast
majority — about 75 percent
— were destroyed.
“I can’t think of anything that
is even close to this,” said Mike
Ulmer, North American casino
services manager for
International Game
Technology, the world’s largest
maker of slot machines.
IGT and other big slot
makers are picking through the
twisted casino barges, trying to
salvage machines and reclaim
the ones they leased to the
gambling companies. They have
not found much to save at the
13 casinos that dotted the
Mississippi coast.
“Imagine throwing your
computer into the ocean,
drying it out and seeing how it
works,” McClendon said.
Monday, McClendon and
two IGT technicians descended
on the Copa Casino in Gulfport
to remove the 17 IGT-owned
machines from the
approximately 1,250 ruined
one-armed bandits there. '
The casino barge was lifted
from its moorings and tossed
onto the asphalt, where ocean
waves continued to pound it,
drenching the machines in salt
water.
Inside the Copa, battered and
broken slot machines littered
the casino floor, forming row
after row of metallic corpses. All
the favorites were there: The
Wheel of Fortune, Lobster
Mania, Enchanted Unicorn and
Cleopatra. A pair of Regis
Philbins were still standing in
one corner.
“It’s hard to write off Regis,”
said McClendon, casino services
manager in IGT’s Gulfport
office.
But Regis, it turned out, had
suffered the same fate as the
other machines. The salt water
destroyed , their electronic
innards and caused them to
rust.
Looters climbed aboard the
Copa but did not get away with
any real money, since employees
removed most of the coins and
bills from the machines before
the hurricane hit, said Rick
Quinn, the Copa’s chief
Destroyed or damaged slot machines are shown at the Copa Casino on Monday in Gulfport, Miss. When Hurricane Katrina leveled the
Gulfport and Biloxi area, it silenced about 18,000 slot machines at Mississippi’s floating casinos. Some of the one-armed bandits were
washed into the sea. Looters ran off with others. And the vast majority — about 75 percent — were destroyed.
executive. But some five-cent
machines still had nickels in
them. And in one area of the
casino, a dozen or so buckets
were filled with thousands of
nickels.
“Quite frankly, the priority
was getting the paper money
out,” Quinn said.
Dan Lee, chairman and chief
executive of Pinnacle
Entertainment Inc., said thieves
sneaked into his casino and
tried breaking into the
machines and security carts that
hold money.
He said they almost got lucky
— coming close to discovering
roughly $400,000 that was
inside a locked cash cart and left
in the casino during the storm.
Pinnacle recovered the money,
Lee said. Armed guards now
protect the casino.
State gambling regulators are
supposed to keep track of every
slot machine, but Katrina has
made that task unrealistic. It is
unclear how many were
swallowed up by the sea.
• “Basically, it’s impossible to
account for each and every one
of those lost,” said Larry
Gregory, executive director of
the Mississippi Gaming
Commission.
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