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South Carolina's video-poker operators run a political machine

"If you're not playing at Treasures, you're taking a chance," warns the billboard towering above Broad River Road on the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina. I don't like to take chances, so I pull into the parking lot, beneath Treasures' glowing, glowering pirate sign, and find a space next to a black Mustang, license plate: HNG OVR.

Treasures is suburban-strip architecture as fun-house. The building, a low-slung, cheap-looking structure the size of a tennis court, is covered with mirrors from rooftop to asphalt. The walls are mirrors, the roof is mirrors, the doors are mirrored glass. It's as though the building is trying to pretend it doesn't exist. I enter through the mirrored doors and find myself in a fifteen-year-old boy's dream room: floor-to-ceiling mirrors, a carpet the color of dried blood, black lights, a choking fog of cigarette smoke, a plastic bowl filled with Tootsie Rolls, and all the gambling one's heart desires.

In any other spot on the planet Treasures would be called a casino, but because Treasures is in South Carolina, and because South Carolina likes to make believe it doesn't have legal gambling, Treasures goes by a cheerful euphemism: "video mall," or, if you prefer, "video parlor." Whatever you want to call it, it's a warren. I wander through a dozen "game rooms" sardined back-to-back off a central corridor. Each is a dark narrow cleft the size of a large closet, with just enough space for five stools, the five people perched on those stools, and the five machines those five people are glued to. The machines are "Pot-O-Golds," and they are video-gambling devices. South Carolina, naturally, prefers the euphemism "video games." The game rooms hold about sixty video-poker machines among them, even though South Carolina law states with blinding clarity that no business can have more man live machines. This is possible because Treasures is not one business but many: technically--and only technically--each closet is its own independent enterprise.

It's past eleven P.M. on a Thursday evening. Even so, every machine is occupied. About half the gamblers are elderly white women, about a third are young black women, and there's a smattering of young redneck men. The manufactured good cheer of Las Vegas is absent here. The gamblers gaze transfixed at their terminals and tap the touchscreens with a kind of Stepford intensity. An eerie silence envelops the place: the only noises are the bells ringing on the Pot-O-Golds, signaling gamblers that someone else just won a few bucks, so you will too. I settle into the only empty stool I can find and watch the woman next to me. She is chainsmoking Vantages with her left hand and jabbing the screen rapidly with her right. She's playing Shamrock Sevens, a poker game that rewards a hand of three sevens with a din of electronic Irish music, a digital leprechaun who announces, "Aye, a pot o' gold for ye!" and a mingy bonus. She occasionally interrupts poking and puffing long enough to gulp down handfuls of Tootsie Rolls and Styrofoam cups of water. These are the only food and drink Treasures offers, unless you count breath mints as food. I intrude on her during one of these refueling breaks. Her name is Joyce, she tells me, and she's a grandmother in her fifties. She has been playing Shamrock Sevens on this Pot-O-Gold since four P.M., she thinks. Joyce is betting twenty-five cents a hand, six hands a minute, 360 hands an hour. If she is at the odds,(*) she has lost sixty dollars in her seven and a half hours of wagering.

Treasures is one of more than 7,000 places to gamble in South Carolina, which means that the Palmetto State--which you probably didn't even know had legal gambling--has more places to wager than any state, and about three times as many as Nevada. South Carolina has 36,000 gambling machines, more than any state but Nevada, New Jersey, and Mississippi--and nearly one device for every hundred residents. South Carolina offers gambling without rules: the state collects no taxes, imposes virtually no regulations, does not restrict who can own machines, does not require that the machines be honest, does not forbid children from playing them. South Carolina's video-poker millionaires call this "convenience gaming." (And indeed it must be convenient to gross $2.5 billion annually, net $728 million, pay no taxes, and have your profits climb 20 percent a year.) Gambling experts, on the other hand, call it the worst gambling industry in America, economically useless and socially devastating.

How South Carolina wound up in this mess is a cautionary tale about money and politics, but it's not one of the money-and-politics stories you've heard a thousand times before. It is not a story about how big businesses bent politicians to their will, or a story about how some megacorporation invaded South Carolina and corrupted it, or a story of how an industry lobbied and bribed politicians to lower burdensome taxes and abolish burdensome regulations. No, video poker's conquest of South Carolina is a tale of the sinister power of small business. It is a tale of how, in almost no time at all, a bunch of gas-station owners, jukebox operators, and barkeeps used lawsuits, strong-arm lobbying, dead-of-night legislation, and just plain deception to transform a small-time illegal gambling business into a multibillion-dollar legal one; how these folks fought to increase regulation and taxation; and how, in the process of all this, they resurrected the state Democratic Party, battered the state legislature, wiggled out of campaign-finance restrictions, made common cause with white supremacists, and, in a remarkable and demoralizing 1998 election, deposed one government and bought themselves a new one. And this, in the grandest euphemism of all, they call just politics.

Video poker is South Carolina's white noise, so pervasive that you stop noticing its ugliness. The first building outside the Columbia airport is a dingy warehouse, dressed up with eight video-poker machines, a fresh carpet, and a sign reading AIRPORT GAMES. Video-poker casinos form a stockade around the state. At the northeast tip the ramshackle fishing village of Little River now has sixteen video-poker casinos and a new nickname, "Little Reno." At the southern tip, the State Line Casino guards the Savannah River crossing from Georgia. (It was here, in the summer of 1997, that Army Sgt. Gall Baker left her ten-day-old baby, Joy, in the car while she went inside to play a few hands. When she exited the casino seven and a half hours later, Joy was dead of dehydration.) In the north the first exit off I-77, even before the state welcome center, delivers you to a strip of shabby double-wides and stucco prefabs, halfheartedly decorated with bunting and hopeful names: Golden Touch, Treasure Chest, Lady Luck, Slots of Fun (CHECK CASHING, CASH ADVANCES, CAR TITLE LOANS, says the sign above the door). Each one is a maze of snaking corridors, sardine closets, and countless Pot-O-Golds.(*)

Some 339 cities and towns in South Carolina now have video-poker machines. Columbia, a city of barely 100,000, has 483 places to gamble and more than 2,000 machines. "There is not a place in South Carolina where there could be a machine and there isn't one," says Glenn Stanton, who runs the anti-gambling Palmetto Family Council. Vegas has The Strip. South Carolina has the gambling strip mall: Babylon in the shopping center. Almost any business with a steady flow of customers has a machine or two or five in the corner and a red neon GAMES sign in the window. L'il Cricket, a convenience-store chain, is among the state's biggest gambling companies. So is R. L. Jordan Oil, which owns gas stations. An astonishing one-quarter of South Carolina's retail businesses offer video poker. Sometimes it feels as if all of them do.

As an experiment, I try driving west out of Columbia on a rural road and stopping at every business I pass. The Locker Room, a down-at-the-heels pool club, has two machines at the back. The Hot Spot, the convenience store next door, owns five machines, a bettor parked at every one. Halt a mile up the road at Kelly's, you can buy pickled pigs' lips, then drop a few bucks in the five poker machines along the side wall. Judy's advertises BEER, POOL, GAMES. Club 76 Game Room is a cinderblock shack: its windows are boarded up, but it's open for gambling. At long last, I pass a building where I can't play video poker: the Prayer Bible Study Church.