The folks at the Arizona Department of Gaming are convinced that onetime Phoenix Justice of the Peace Harold "Bud" Lee isn't playing with a full deck.
Victor J. Palagano III
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It infuriates them that the 64-year-old Tombstone resident continues, as they see it, to break the law and laugh in their faces as he does so.
According to outgoing ADOG director Paul Bullis, "Harold Lee and his cohorts have attempted to expand their criminal enterprise of illegal gambling halls throughout Arizona. These are not casual poker games among friends."
Poker rooms are against the law in Arizona, except at the 22 casinos on 15 Indian reservations, where 212 tables (at last count) are in service night and day.
Arizona does permit "social gambling" outside of the Indian casinos, but only if no one other than the players collects money from a game, whether it is poker or anything else. It also is illegal for the "house" to charge an entry fee for a poker game off the reservations.
But ADOG's agents don't have the time or desire to investigate goings-on at the back of, say, an Elks lodge, where the guys get together on Friday nights to play a little poker.
Instead, they increasingly are focusing on the two dozen or so poker rooms that, according to the agency, have opened illegally around Arizona in the past few years.
Bud Lee has been involved in several of these operations. ADOG has spent thousands of dollars and untold man-hours investigating Lee's rooms.
Lee has appointed himself spokesman and would-be martyr to his cause, which is that poker salons should be allowed to operate and flourish without government interference outside of Indian country.
He is at the forefront of a high-stakes and increasingly public controversy concerning Arizona's Indian tribes and the role that prosecutors should play in enforcing the state's anti-gambling laws.
No doubt, ADOG's agents would love to play a game of Arizona hold 'em with the wise-guy ex-judge — as in hold him in jail. But to the chagrin and dismay of the Indian tribes and ADOG, no prosecutorial agency has been willing to charge him with something.
That includes at least two County Attorneys' Offices and the Office of the Arizona Attorney General, which consistently have rejected Gaming's requests for criminal prosecution of Lee and others.
Lee says he's eager to take on the state of Arizona in a no-limit, winner-take-all courtroom brawl.
"The foggy idea that adults playing poker for money in a card room is so dangerous to the community that it warrants a state-level prohibition is really quite loopy," Lee says. "And to squander resources in attempting to sustain such a silly prohibition is truly preposterous. I'm telling you, there's a bigger hand to play in all of this, and if they have to toss this old grandpa into the slammer before we get to make our point, fine with me."
Mark Brnovich, the newly appointed director of ADOG, who takes over next week, just might call Lee's bluff.
"As far as Mr. Lee goes," Brnovich tells New Times, "if he continues to do what he's been doing and is so anxious to be prosecuted as a criminal, well, I intend to oblige his request."
The real game, it seems, may be just starting.
Though Bud Lee has a penchant for showing his hand, he will allow only that he's been making "a little" money in the poker rooms around Arizona with which he's been involved.
But whatever his income, Lee is light years shy of the million-dollar Texas hold 'em pots seen on national television that have turned poker from just another popular card game into a spectator sport replete with superstars, fan clubs, and thousands of Web sites.
Lee's organization, the International Card and Player's Association, essentially is a one-man band. For a starting fee of $5,000, he will issue a charter and a kind of business plan for an off-reservation poker room. He also collects as much as 15 percent of the profits from a room's owners.
Lee tells New Times that he also makes money from the $20 annual ICGPA "membership fee" charged to every new poker player at one of his rooms. He claims that more than a thousand people "joined" one of his onetime affiliates, the now-defunct Club Royale in Tucson.
All of the above — the start-up fee, the percentage of the profits, and the membership charge — are crimes, say ADOG officials.
Arizona's anti-gambling laws range from conspiring to conduct illegal gambling operations, conducting a criminal enterprise, promotion of gambling, and benefiting from gambling.
Each is a felony punishable by a prison sentence.
Lee is adamant that ICGPA rooms don't have a so-called "rake," as the Indian casinos do. The rake is what the casino collects from each player, usually 10 percent of every pot (casinos have a dollar limit in their cash games and in certain tournaments, though most tourneys are non-limit).
Lee explains that a player at one of his tables who holds the dealer button — a disk that rotates from player to player after each hand — pays $1 to $3 to the club before the cards are dealt, not after.
