Booth said the change has led many game room owners to go off radar and open without a permit, because it’s difficult to find a building that’s not within 1,000 feet of a home.
“I do know of one person who has a game room that doesn’t have a house anywhere around it, so they don’t have a problem on that. But I will tell you that most of the people I know have just reopened without a permit. … That way they don’t have to tell the sheriff’s office where they are, they can put tinting on all their windows so police can’t see in, they don’t have to allow them to inspect, so the sheriff’s department has to have a warrant to get in there,” Booth said.
Hill, the former police sergeant, said Houston patrol officers monitor the sites of shut-down game rooms to ensure they don’t reopen.
“And also we have citizens. We have a very active community in Houston that is very concerned about these,” he said.
Hill’s most memorable bust was in October 2016, when police raided and shut down the Green Grass Game Room in northwest Houston and seized $1.9 million from the home of its owner, Chang Choi, 59, who was arrested on organized crime charges.
Harris County District Attorney’s Office misdemeanor division chief Nathan Beedle said his office focuses on gambling cases with ties to organized crime, and cracks down on owners who hide their affiliation through shell companies.
“The employee of the owner standing there, facilitating the game room, I would say we treat differently than the owners,” Beedle said in a recent interview at the Harris County Criminal Courthouse in downtown Houston.
“I’ll give you an example. I had some woman in her 70s who was working [at a game room]. I think this is the only place she could get employment. I’m not going to be particularly high on the punishment scale for her.”
The District Attorney’s Office offers pretrial diversion to many game room employees and owners, under which they sign a contract with prosecutors, and if they abide by the terms, which may involve community service or classes, the charges are dropped and may be expunged.
Beedle was hired by District Attorney Kim Ogg, who took office in January. He said he assigns his division chiefs, one for each of Harris County’s 16 misdemeanor courts, to illegal gambling cases to overcome potentially skeptical jurors, and they’ve had no trouble impaneling juries. The division chiefs are assigned illegal gambling cases because they have more experience “dealing with crimes a segment of the population believes should be legal.”
Beedle said the district attorney’s office has tried four or five such cases this year and won them all.
Meanwhile, Booth is hoping to get the record-keeping aspect of the game room regulations declared unconstitutional. He believes it violates Texas privacy laws.
“Name me a company where the receptionist at the front desk has access to everybody’s W-4 and everybody’s employment application, with all their work history and salary history and their Social Security number,” he said.
Power Politics
If the line between fuzzy animal toys and hard-core gambling may be blurry at times, so can be the line between prosecution and politics.
Booth said Harris County and Houston may give free passes to big-time operations that can afford to hire high-powered legal help, and go after easy pickings, such as true Mom & Pop stores.
He mentioned arcade-restaurateur operator Dave & Buster’s, a publicly traded, Dallas-based company with more than 83 outlets in the United States. Its arcades include bars and sit-down dining. Customers can play video games and games of chance that spit out tickets, some of which can be redeemed on site for stuffed animals. Serious players who amass enough tickets can redeem them for expensive prizes, such as X-boxes .
Citing corporate records that Dave & Buster’s disclosed to federal regulators, Booth said the company should have to get game room permits for its outlets because it gets more than 51 percent of its revenue from amusement redemption machines, the benchmark by which companies fall under the regulations.
“The reason they don’t enforce it against these companies is because they could pay for a huge amount of lawyers to go in and get this law thrown out,” Booth said.
Dave & Buster’s did not respond to a request for comment.
Attorney Booth calls police seizures of money at game rooms “legalized theft.” He said he’s seen cases in which police broke open an ATM on the premises and took all the money from it.
Less Money … Less Crime?
Seizure records provided by the Harris County’s District Attorney’s Office show there are fewer permitted game rooms operating here than in years past.
Harris County and Houston police seized more than $2 million from game rooms in 2014 and 2015, but only $616,000 in 2016.
Revenue from permitting and machine-license fees is also down.
According to Houston’s Administration & Regulatory Affairs Department, which administers machine and game room permits for Harris County and the city, machine-permit revenue fell from $536,000 in 2014 to $337,400 in 2015 and $269,000 in 2016 — nearly a 50 percent drop in two years.
Game room permit revenue dropped from $314,500 to $149,400 to $99,000 in those same years.
Though he’s retired, Hill said he’s going to stay active in law enforcement, teaching officers for Texas police departments that don’t have academies. He said game room regulations have helped make Houston a safer place.
“When we first started doing the active investigations back in 2013 and 2014, it seemed like on a weekly basis there was a report in the media about some violent event at a game room, and I think through the concerted effort of law enforcement in Harris County that you’ve seen those violent game room robberies and aggravated assaults have gone down.”
But the dings, whirs and bells of the computer games still sound in corner stores, and players still sit in front of them entranced, sliding in their cash, thanks to the Fuzzy Animal Exception.
(Photos courtesy of the Harris County Sheriff's Department.)
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