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Governor’s Task Force Set On Fighting Illegal Gambling

Posted on March 27th, 2010

In a teleconference with reporters Wednesday afternoon, Gov. Bob Riley said the attorney general’s attempts to abolish the Governor’s Task Force on Illegal Gambling will not stop the group from carrying on its work. On Monday, Alabama Attorney General Troy King announced that he was dismissing John Tyson as head of the governor’s task force. “He has had his chance with unrestrained authority and unlimited resources. He has failed,” King said.

Riley maintains that electronic bingo machines are basically slot machines, which are illegal in Alabama and said it’s not within King’s power to give orders to his task force. “I swore to uphold the laws of the State of Alabama, and I will continue to uphold the laws of the state,” Riley told reporters. He said the bingo machines do not abide by the criteria of what a game of bingo would require as ruled by the Supreme Court. “A player can turn his back to the machine, hit a button three times and complete a game in about 10 seconds. That’s not bingo, and that certainly does not satisfy the Supreme Court’s requirements,” Riley said.

King also ordered Tyson to surrender all evidence seized by the task force from the gambling halls during its raids in the past 14 months, but Riley said the evidence is under the custody of the Department of Public Safety and the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, and not in Tyson’s possession and neither does it belong to King. “If we turn the evidence over to the Attorney General, we might as well turn it over to the casino bosses,” Riley said. Riley said King wants the civil, not the criminal courts to judge the legality of the machines, despite the Supreme Court saying that it would not consider any case filed by the attorney general for declaratory judgments.

Riley said if the civil courts handled the issue, “that will destroy the criminal investigation and could endanger our undercover law enforcement officers, and we are not going to do that.” He said the civil court system, in contrast to the criminal court system, would allow criminals to go on with their illegal activities until the courts pronounce judgment. Riley said it’s unfair for the state to allow electronic bingo in three counties while stopping its operation in 64 others. He said the majority of the state’s district attorneys consider electronic bingo machines illegal under Alabama’s law.

Riley also accused King of hiding information from the Governor’s Office and the Department of Public Safety after King’s office got word from federal authorities in 2004 about illegal gambling activities in the state. “If the Attorney General had done his job then, we never would have had this explosion of slot machines that we now have to deal with,” Riley said.