Gambling in South Florida is about to take its most depressing turn since the feds shut down Meyer Lansky’s 26 casinos in 1950. Hallandale, AKA “Little Vegas” and “Sin City,” has never been the same.
On Tuesday, the Seminole Tribe quietly reactivated a beta version of Hard Rock Bet, an online sports betting app that, after a brief run in 2021, was shut down until the tribe fended off legal challenges. A spokesperson said the Seminole casinos are now “offering limited access to existing Florida customers to test its Hard Rock Bet platform.”
Most of the lucky few granted access to the app are members of the Hard Rock loyalty program, a kind of frequent flier program for inveterate gamblers. Less frequent fliers will just have to wait.
Eventually, the Seminoles intend to make the mobile sports app available to all adult Floridians. Lately, the word eventually sounds more like imminent. A large-font headline on the Hard Rock Bet website this week announces, in all caps, “LEGAL SPORTS BETTING IS COMING TO FLORIDA.”
For the past 100 years or so, South Florida has indulged in a dazzling array of gambling pursuits, some illegal, but almost always in communal settings. With lots of togetherness. The patrons of racetracks, bingo halls, card rooms, gambling boats and strip-mall “senior arcades” all seemed to buzz with over-wrought optimism, as if the notion that “tonight is the night I beat the odds” were a contagious delusion.
Retirees, tourists, minimum wage laborers, service workers, teachers, plumbers, doctors, builders, fancy lawyers, fancier bankers, bejeweled trophy wives and at least one journalist — pretty much the entire spectrum of South Florida society — lend casinos a kind of egalitarian fellowship. Everyone like-minded in their pursuit of a jackpot. Everyone sharing a common goal.
In South Florida, that qualifies as a close-knit community.
But mobile betting apps are operated in solitude, in the purview of lonely introverts. Florida online gamblers, at home in tattered T-shirts and underwear, cellphones in hand, will soon be able to squander little Tommy’s lunch money without venturing outdoors, without human encounters, without the sympathetic commiseration of fellow losers.
You know — without the fun.
Like so many other internet endeavors, online betting will devolve into so many soulless transactions between computers and consumers. With all the drama that comes with buying shoes on Amazon, gambling that they’re really size nine.
Of course, 22 other states and the District of Columbia already allow online gaming, so what do I know?
Florida briefly joined that list in 2021, after Gov. Ron DeSantis negotiated a $2.5 billion five-year gambling compact that grants the Seminoles a monopoly on online sports betting, along with actual onsite casino sport book betting stations. DeSantis threw in exclusive rights to roulette and craps, a kind of multimillion-dollar sweetener.
Of course, the parimutuel casinos — shut out of these lucrative new pursuits — sued. Everything was postponed until the legalities were settled.
Last month, the parimutuels’ last federal courts appeal was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. A similar lawsuit is still wending its way through the state courts, but the Seminoles are tired of waiting.
On Dec. 7, D-Day at the Hard Rock, the Seminoles plan to roll out roulette and craps and in-person, onsite sport books at the tribe’s six casinos. With the virtual version coming soon.
It was so much less complicated back in the 1930s and 1940s, when the mob ran South Florida casinos. Cops and local politicians, most of them on the take, didn’t dare make a fuss. Everyone left the business decisions to Meyer Lansky.
Illicit gambling was South Florida’s defining characteristic in those days. Lansky, along with Lucky Luciano and Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, operated 26 casinos in South Florida, most of them in wild, lawless Hallandale. If Meyer wanted sport books in his joints, it happened. Nobody complained. Nobody who wanted to live.
Politicians stayed mum. Cops were on the take. Broward Sheriff Walter Clark not only allowed illegal gambling houses to flourish, he ran a side business repairing slot machines. He explained his failure to enforce gambling laws: “I don’t go around these parts and stick my nose into private businesses.”
For two decades, the arrangement worked swimmingly. (Up until a sensational U.S. Senate investigation in 1950 convinced Lansky and friends to relocate to Havana.)
Lansky’s gambling palaces like Club Boheme, the Colonial Inn, the Club Greenacres and The Plantation were big draws for high-rollers and rich tourists, making millions.
And the only hand-held device that mattered in those environs was a .38 caliber revolver.
Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @grimm_fred.
