For now, besides provoking Archuleta, Schnaubelt maintains a list of poker rooms (and their level of unlawfulness, in his opinion) at www.phoenixpokerclubs.com, a site that was used previously to promote one of Lee's activist groups, Arizona Poker Army.
By destroying off-res poker, Schnaubelt believes, he can save poker.
Despite the felony conviction of an eccentric Valley poker-parlor owner, non-tribal card clubs still proliferate here.
Courtesy John Schnaubelt
The Tilted Jack, a facility run by Schnaubelt where a "cooperative" of members played poker, closed last month.
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The overall number of poker clubs may be higher than authorities know because underground clubs don't have storefront locations.
In the case of the Nuts Card Room, owner Harry Glazer and his associates hosted high-stakes card games at the Bunker Indoor Golf & Training until someone tipped off Goodyear police, leading to the December raid on the Nuts club in Phoenix. (Schnaubelt says he had nothing to do with the tip.)
When one card room closes, usually for financial reasons, another opens to take its place. It seems that the few prosecutions under gaming department director Brnovich hardly have been a deterrent. Glazer, the apparent ringleader of the Nuts operation, pleaded to just one felony charge of promotion of gambling and received the same sentence as Lee — a year of unsupervised probation — though he had a different judge. Glazer was ordered to pay a $33,000 fine, which shouldn't be much of a financial hardship considering police estimate his operations brought in more than $600,000 a year.
Brnovich is a former writer and researcher for the Goldwater Institute, which strongly touts the spirit of free enterprise, and he has libertarian leanings. That makes his duty as government regulator of a gambling monopoly an oxymoron. But Brnovich, while a legal scholar and listed as an unpaid "expert" on a range of subjects for www.policyexperts.org, can throw the book as well as read it. He was a former prosecutor focusing on gambling violations for the U.S. Attorney's Office before his appointment as state gaming chief.
For the 2009 New Times article, Brnovich described how unregulated gambling "can attract cheaters, crooks, and corrupting influences like moths to a flame." He claimed he would be "extremely hands-on" in dealing with gambling violators and said he intended to "find the necessary resources" and a willing prosecutor to take on Lee and other poker scofflaws.
While he did take on Lee and a few others, Brnovich admits to New Times that he didn't find the resources he mentioned back then. In fact, he says, the agency has one fewer investigator for such tasks than when he took his job. He insists that the department is doing its best with the resources it has. If lawmakers want him to bust more card rooms, "we could make it a higher priority," he says. "Before we got here," he says, "no one was investigating these cases."
He stresses that the department's main function is to help tribes regulate casinos and to ensure that the state gets its proper cut of gambling earnings. Since 2004, the department's website shows, the state has received more than $800 million as its percentage of the take — which runs from between 1 percent and 8 percent of all casinos' gross earnings.
Brnovich says he's heard tribal members talk about the off-res poker rooms, but none has asked him "formally" to do anything about them. Even if a tribe did, he says, his job is to serve the state, not the tribes.
The Indians could push the issue, if they wanted. A "poison pill" clause in gaming compacts between the state and the reservations allows tribes to ignore "limits" in the compacts if the state doesn't curtail non-Indian gambling. Without the limits, the tribes could put slot machines in every convenience store on reservations and expand casino operations.
The number of non-tribal poker rooms never has grown large enough to become more than an annoyance to the tribes.
The Arizona Indian Gaming Association didn't return calls on the matter.
Residents in the neighborhoods around the card rooms haven't complained much lately, Brnovich says.
Schnaubelt says a gaming agent told him two months ago that the state believes as many as 30 to 36 illegal card rooms operate in the Valley.
Asked about that, Brnovich says he thinks there are fewer rooms than three years ago when he went after Bud Lee. But he adds, "We don't know how many more would have opened" if it weren't for the enforcement deterrent, he says.
Pressed for actual numbers, Brnovich replies flippantly, "Stats are for losers."
However, Brnovich's chief of staff, Rick Medina, replied later to New Times with the numbers.
Gaming intelligence agents estimate that 19 illegal card rooms operate in Arizona, with 16 of them in the Valley.
This is the same number of card rooms that agents believed the Valley had three years ago, when authorities went after Lee.
With resources tight, off-res poker rooms appear destined to stick around. If members of the poker community, especially John Schnaubelt, learn to play well together — and not upset the BIA cabal.
