Thank God, our very own state attorney weighs in on the Maquinitas!

Just in the nick of time no less!  With illegal gambling machines (aka maquinitas) popping up all over the place despite the fact that the governor signed legislation into law banning them and clearing making them illegal, what could be better than an opinion from our very own state attorney, Katherine Fernandez Rundle, regarding these machines and their legality?

First we'll start with an email from John Tupps to one of our readers from Governor Scott's press office regarding these machines...

Governor Scott was pleased to sign legislation that banned illegal internet cafes across Florida, including Allied Veterans – a multi-state criminal conspiracy. Law enforcement officers must make the determination whether any machine violates the law. Accordingly, you should speak with local law enforcement and the state attorney’s office.

Ok, great!  Logically, the next step would be to reach out to our state attorneys office since at least one municipality, Hialeah, is under the impression that these machines are legal.  With that said, take a look at the response from the state attorneys office...

Since the machines themselves are not illegal, unless and until there is some sort of “payout” for playing them, there would need to be some police undercover work in order to make an arrest for possession of the “maquinitas”.  Hillah Mendez, Legal Counsel for the Hialeah Police Department, contacted our office and we explained this investigative requirement to her.  It is up to the Hialeah Police Department, or any individual police department, to undertake such an investigative effort. Thank you. Tere ChavezMedia RelationsMiami-Dade State Attorney's Office305-547-0885

Oh, OK!  So the machines are not illegal despite all this grandstanding and other bullshit...

Alrighty then, I guess the problems been solved!  Despite our very own governor outlawing these machines statewide and shutting down the businesses that housed them, now our very own state attorneys office has given them her blessing and made them practically immune to prosecution.  Perhaps the machine owners just need to affix one of these stickers to the machines and their problems with law enforcement will be a distant memory...

Doesn't this man look amused?

Check out our friend Elaine de Valle's story on the ever present maquinitas, tomorrow we'll get back to our discussion of former state attorney Richard E. Gerstein.

Spanish language TV picks up the Maquinita story...

Or at least I think they did?!  I don't speak or understand Spanish, nor am I able to get the video where channel 41 allegedly discusses the maquinitas that are being found all around town to play on line.  Here's the video embeddedm the discussion starts at around the 17:00 mark...



Video streaming by Ustream

And here's the link to the story just in case the embedded video doesn't show up.  

Ironically the commercials before the video worked just fine for me but the actual video where they discuss the maquinitas refused to work for me for the first few tries, by the third time it worked.  The best part though comes at the 18:43 mark where a cop shows up where the TV crew is filming and looks dumbfounded when the reporter asks him about the illegal gaming machines inside the restaurant...

If I'm not mistaken, I think the cop actually tells the reporter that the machines are legal in Hialeah!

That's enough for now, it's Friday, we'll pick up where we left off next week.

They're ba-ack! Fucking maquinitas are popping up all over the place again!

Can you believe this shit?  After fighting these goddamn machines for years on end and finally thinking we had won, they're back with a fucking vengeance!  Back in March the Florida senate passed a bill outlawing these machines, that doddering old fool of a mayor Tomas Regalado even came out publicly and stated that the maquinitas are illegal...

Despite all of that, despite all of the press conferences, despite all the grandstanding by local pandering politicians, it was all bullshit as they're showing up in all the usual places.  Take a look at some of these photos that one of our readers sent us, mind you, these photos were all taken within the last 48 hours at various locations throughout the City of Hialeah...

In the backs of restaurants, hidden in the back corners of small mom and pop grocery stores, whether out in the open...

Or hidden behind shelves just out of view.  Would you be there?  Could you be there...

For those establishment owners with a modicum of common sense, they try to hide them behind boxes off in a far corner...

Or secret them in a back store room just out of view...

On the other hand, you have those business owner that are so brazen that they not only have them machines out in the open in plain view for anyone to see in storefronts...

With the photos of the machines plastered on their storefronts!

Can you believe this shit?  Despite all the hoopla about the machines officially being made illegal, despite all the media coverage, despite all of the photo ops with bulldozers crushing illegal gaming machines all over the local press, the machines are back, back with a vengeance no less!

What makes matters worse though is that one of loyal readers, who happens to be a public servant, sent the photos you see here over to the feds in an effort to stop what ostensibly looks like, smells like and certainly feels like illegal activity.  What the feds did with that information though is borderline scandalous, what's that old saying?

"the cover up is worse than the crime?"  

We'll discuss in depth tomorrow, in the mean time, if any of you guys spot more of these maquinitas, take photos and send them to me!

Not this shit again...

Just when we thought the maquinita war was over, our least favorite local newspaper does a puff piece about the stupid machines...

“No! No! No! Arrrrgh,” cried out Barbara Sciandra in a strangled tone, hands clutching the sides of her head in anguish as the numbskull newbie in front of the video slot machine — that is, me — botched yet another game, another 8 cents frittered away to rookie incomprehension.
“Sorry,” she continued a moment later, in a calmer tone. “But you had three ‘cross fever’ symbols in the corners. You should have held them and raised your bet. If you get four, a jackpot is almost inevitable.”
Actually, the jackpot would have been entirely theoretical, as were those 8 cents I lost. We were playing the machine secretly and for free, in a South Florida arcade closed last month when the Florida Legislature passed a harsh new video gambling law.
The owner opened it up, reinstalled the computer motherboards in several of the machines, and invited a few of the arcade’s regular customers back for an afternoon so I could test one of the frequent criticisms of the slots: that they’re pure games of chance in which skill plays no part.
The no-skill allegation came up again during the legislative debate this spring over a bill, which eventually passed, to ban video gambling in senior arcades, gas stations and mom-and-pop cafes. “They are not games of skill,” lobbyist Ron Book — who represents pari-mutuel racetracks, which wanted to stamp out competition for their casinos — told the Florida House. “They are clearly games of gambling and chance.”
Nobody denies the machines involve gambling; you play them for pennies in hopes of winning a much more valuable prize. And they certainly involve an element of chance, like all games, even chess. (Many statistical studies have shown that the player who gets the white pieces and the first move, which is typically decided with a coin flip or something similar, wins between 52 and 56 percent of the time.)
But if skill plays a part in the video games, even a small one, then they aren’t gambling devices under Florida law. And if my afternoon at the arcade means anything, skill matters a lot.
Three arcade regulars — including a mentally handicapped woman — beat me like a drum for hours as we tried out various machines. Regular players (some of them visited the arcade six times a week before the new law closed it) have learned strategies and physical skills that help them win on a regular basis.
“Don’t feel bad,” another regular — retired furniture saleswoman Gail May, herself a pretty fair player — consoled me as Sciandra piled up winnings while I lost and lost and lost. “I don’t think I’ve seen her leave this place once without at least a $25 gift card,” one of the prizes that the arcade used to award to big winners.
“It’s like anything else, if you practice and pay attention and work at it, you can win,” said Sciandra, 72, who retired a few years ago from her job as a cafeteria worker in the Broward school system. “Not everybody does that — some people are content to just punch the button and let the game play out, like you would a regular slot machine in a casino. But that’s not the way I do it.”
The video slots (or maquinitas, little machines, as they’re often referred to it in Miami-Dade County) superficially resemble their casino counterparts. You put in a coin (or swipe a smart card), punch the start button and several rows of little images — fruits, bells, bugs, flowers, whatever — start spinning. You punch another button to stop them, and if the images align in designated patterns (five grapes in a row, for instance) you win credits that can be turned in for prizes.
But that’s where the similarities end. Unlike casino slots, where the player does little more than stick in a coin, video slots offer players ways to alter the action through betting strategies and physical and mental skills:
• Many of the video machines allow players to hold onto some of the images, double their bets and play again — not unlike tossing out cards and drawing others in poker. That’s what Sciandra wanted me to do with those “cross fever” symbols, hold them for another play. “You can really raise your odds that way,” she said.
• Wild-card images that make it easier to complete a pattern, or raise the value of a jackpot, or offer some other advantage, periodically flicker across the game screen. An alert player with quick eye-hand coordination can lock them in, improving his chances of a win.
• Some machines have what are known as “skill stop” buttons that allow the player to individually freeze each column of spinning images. Because the images spin in repetitive patterns, that means a good player could line up, say, five cherries, one at a time, to win.
Many critics of the machines don’t believe that’s possible. (Lobbyist Book, in his speech to the Florida House, specifically denounced the idea as a fraud.) And, watching the mad blur of the spinning images, I certainly thought it was impossible.
But that was before I watched Gale Davis play Queen Bee, the Rolls Royce of video slots, the machine that’s used in video-slot tournament pay. Gale’s husband owns a senior arcade in Port St. Lucie (they were just visiting South Florida for the day) and she has put in countless hours on the Queen Bee. She can read its swirling colors like a book.
“We’re going to look for birds down here in these two panels in the lower right,” she announced after watching the images flicker for 10 or 15 seconds. Waiting... waiting... and then she pounced on the stop-button. “Yessss!” she squealed — and sure enough, there were the birds. The only thing I couldn’t figure out was what she was excited about. She was relentlessly successful in picking her target, hitting 10 out of 12 at one point.
The 59-year-old Davis was, nonetheless, apologetic. “This isn’t my regular machine,” she explained. “So the patterns that the images move in are different. But there’s always a pattern, and you can figure it out if you play for a while. See how each image is a different color? So even though it’s moving so fast that you can’t really make out the flower image, you know where it is because the yellow flashes by. Of course, the machine tries to fool you. See this little picture of a green bug? When it’s spinning, it looks red. But you can learn things like that.”
None of this is a surprise to the owners and operators of video slots. “I had a lot of regulars who went months at a time without paying me a single dime,” said Gale Fontaine, president of the Florida Arcade Association, who owns a now-shuttered senior arcade in Pompano Beach. “They just kept playing on their winnings. The arcade makes its money on the large number of customers who are just there for the fun of playing and don’t work at it very hard. But I’ve got some who just win all the time.”
The question of whether the games involve skill is much more than academic. Fontaine nearly went to jail over it in 2006 when Broward prosecutors charged her with operating an illegal gambling house (a felony) and possession of an illegal gambling device — a Queen Bee machine just like the one I played. She won the case at trial, but only after spending $250,000 on her defense.
Fontaine's case is just one of eight during the past few years in which arcade owners have beaten back courtroom attempts to label their games pure matters of chance. Fort Lauderdale attorney Michael Wolf, who represents the Florida Arcade Association, says jurors who actually see how the machines operate inevitably think that luck is not enough to beat them. “The application-of-skill issue has been tried in many courts across the state,” he said, “all with a finding that there is.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/27/v-print/3419135/skill-or-chance-maquinitas-hold.html#storylink=cpy

FUCK!  While the Miami Herald's Glenn Garvin is sitting around with these old farts playing slot machines trying to figure out an angle to appease the illegal gaming industry, let's take a look at a video I made a few years ago showing an old man getting a $900.00 pay out from one of these harmless machines...



Funny, how that old man getting paid out by that machine spent all afternoon pumping nearly $2,000 into that machine before it paid out the $900 in that video.  How harmless is that?  As far as the games being "games of chance" that's even more bullshit as the business owner had showed me in the past how he manipulated the dip switches on the machines circuit boards to alter how often they paid out or not!  I've been personally fighting these god damn machines for the last 8 years as a tenant in one of my commercial properties had a cafeteria with seven of these machines.  I tried for years to get the machines out both with the county and the city police to no avail.  The funniest part of all of this is that my property was located just three blocks west of another cafeteria, Via del Rio, that had even more of these machines, plus illegal drug dealing, prostitution, etc.  

For years despite all the fighting, stabbings and shootings at that cafeteria, we could never figure out how they continued to do business with relative impunity from the police till one day someone told me that the business owners husband was someone high up in the City of Miami PD.  Turns out that person was none other than former City of Miami police officer Hector Mirabile who went on to become the City of South Miami city manager!    Mr Mirabile and his family owned the cafeteria/pool hall/illegal gambling den/etc till a City of Miami cop shot and killed one of their patrons...



Shortly after this murder, the Mirabile's sold the business to my ex tenant and rid me once and for all of all these god damn machines from my property.

It's too bad Mr. Garvin didn't go out to the bars and corner markets of Miami and Hialeah before he wrote this article rather than go hang out with the old folks in Broward county.  What a crock of shit.