Via Radley Balko, more evidence that we have collectively lost our minds:
Sunday bowling events, spaghetti dinners and card games have entertained folks at Akron’s Jednota Club since the 1930s.
Now the Morgan Avenue Slovak organization may be forced to change one of its Old World customs — thanks to a police raid.
A card tournament organizer, Norman D. Metz, 63, is to stand trial Thursday in Summit County Common Pleas Court on two counts of operating a gambling house at the club and two additional counts of gambling.
Police Lt. Terry Pasko, head of the department’s vice unit, said vice detectives — acting on a complaint — raided the club at 2 p.m. on Aug. 17.
None of the 50 or 60 club patrons playing in the euchre tournament that day was arrested, Pasko said, because the focus of the police operation was Metz and his wife as the alleged ”operators” of the event.
This is insane.
The Grand Panjandrum
Just another brick in the wall …
SpotWeld
You have no idea. I’ve taken some long hours of thought to ensure that the poker tourner we’re running at the local gaming con is clearly a “bragging rights only” competition and any prizes are clearly of the sort with no monetary value.
Even them I’m hoping that the small size of the thing just keeps us under the radar.
Just Some Fuckhead
Hey, if they don’t like our rules they can GTFO and go back to Slovakia.
cleek
i love euchre.
and now you know.
over_educated
The comments on that site are hilaracist.
Elie
This is just the gambling industry limiting anything that seems like fun that isnt in their control, just in case. They would like a complete monopoly on any game of change that is fun and could bring even the slightest revenue…Pathetic but then we let doctors who are supposed to care for us dispassionately own services that they then send us to. We allow one insurance company to run 70 – 80% of the market in one state..Different kind of monopoly but that’s all the gambling industry is trying to do — control its market…
Terrible.
A Mom Anon
So there’s nothing else for vice cops in Akron to do then,since they’ve done such a stellar job of cleaning the place up. Good to know.
Our whole culture is mentally ill. Our priorities,what passes for entertainment,how we take care of each other(or not),hell,even notions of beauty are distorted and skewed.
Ack,I need to hush or I’ll annoy people more than I do already.
passerby
Damn! What’s next, Bingo?
Here’s hoping they get an activist judge who tosses this case out on it’s pathetic ass.
The Moar You Know
First blacks, then hippies, and now old people. One group at a time. This is how you get a police state.
I’d rather they tase me than shoot me, bro.
ricky
This may indeed be insane, but in the Age of the Internet, for eleven months to pass before we are informed of this is an outrage.
NonyNony
This is par for the course for Ohio, where you’d think gambling was the worst sin ever invented by man or, alternatively, by The Devil. Even worse than dancing or drinking.
Raids like this happen all of the time in this state. Usually it’s small-time poker games though – I’ve never heard of a euchre game getting busted before now. Never any indication that there’s anything worse than just a group of people in a bar or club playing cards either – it’s not like they trace the winnings to organized crime or to money laundering of drug money or even small-time tax evasion charges. Just guys in a room playing cards for money. And the police think it’s a good use of their time and money. Just stupid.
EDIT: Hmmm – I wonder what I said that tripped the moderation filter. Does it think that gambling is as bad as socialism or something?
Fulcanelli
Careful with that axe, Eugene…
Keith
When I was in high school, we had a huge fundraiser that included money prizes. It’d been going on for decades, but while I was going there the vice squad came to the school and made them shut it down. These days, the prizes are just tickets/toys, but back in the day, parents would come in and very often pocket a nice bit of change.
Zifnab
Is that what you people want? Elderly folks playing Euchre willy-nilly, till they’ve frittered away their social security checks and they are laying destitute on the street in their own filth? We need some personal responsibility. We live in a country with laws. Someone should teach those amorale free love hippies a thing or two about good old fashioned Christian American values. They could be in a church, saving their own souls. Instead, they’re in a parlor of sin.
Lock’m up and throw away the key!
tc125231
Don’t be such a drama queen. This kind of “bee in the bXtt” nonsense has been going on since we left the caves.
Now, it would be INTERESTING if you could show me:
1. The incidence rate of such nonsense is up
2. There was some organized attempt to make such stupidity universal
Well, acrually, given the post Eisenhower GOP, the last isn’t THAT interesting (e.g. man bites dog). But it would be useful to know that there is more than one group that has made stupidity an operating principle
Xecky Gilchrist
Hey cops, I heard Tommy Chong was selling bongs on the intertubes. Get ‘im!
Morbo
Oh no! Looks like I’m going to have to narc on my grandpa next time he gets called for euchre at the American Legion. Sheesh…
Bruuuuce
Didn’t I see this on TV in the 1970s? Oh, yeah…
I don’t see this turning out any better than that did.
ET
Don’t the Republican, law-and-order types always say if you aren’t a criminal you don’t have anything to worry about when expanded police/security powers come up?
MH
One of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces.
Aaron
Puh-leaze. Police offers enforcing the law? What is the problem?
Comrade Dread
@Morbo
Or you and your people could just take advantage of vice cops easily damaged knees.
linda
yeah, but how do you know that the proceeds from this den of iniquity weren’t going to fund the islamofascistcommiemarxist terrorists in our midst….
c u n d gulag
So, they finally got ol’ Norman “Get down Your Bets” Metz, huh? Euchre this time.
Last time, he was busted for running a game of “Go Fish” in a designated wetland.
They should put Norman in there right next to Bernie Madoff, that’s what they should do.
Anne Laurie
Would the Ohio cops have come busting in if those elderly gambling fiends had had the good sense to involve one of the local Christian churches in their nefarious money-laundering scheme? Just curious…
passerby
@NonyNony: “So-shall-ism” is the tripper. It contains the word c-i-a-l-i-s.
NonyNony
@passerby:
No-no – I know that one – I put in the “economic system that shall not be named” after I’d gotten the moderation message as a gag. Not a very funny one, but ah well.
I still am not sure what in the original block of posting set off the moderation filter – I’m going to guess gambling and see if this post gets moderated too.
EDIT – nope, I guess it wasn’t gambling.
NonyNony
@Anne Laurie:
Actually, they were associated with a church:
The Catholic Church, which doesn’t frown on drinking or dancing or even gambling. But it is still a church and they got busted anyway.
inkadu
@Aaron: I’m with you, buddy. The law is the freakin’ law. And the racists are the ones who don’t think it should be applied against old white people, or in those office pools. Nobody bitches when teh negroz get arrested for playing craps for even smaller stakes.
It’s crap like this creates shadow racism — we write the laws, but the police undestand whom they are supposed to enforce it against.
If you don’t think it should be illegal to have small pot gambling, then change the law and stop bitching about it being applied.
That said, if the police are going to start enforcing a law they haven’t enforced for 60 years, it IS a little unfair to go after some old geezer at a card game and throw the book at ’em. That’s just arbitrary nonsense.
Blowjob. Also.
Llelldorin
@passerby:
Yes, I believe he knows that, and added it in his edit as a joke.
If I had to guess, it’s the prevalence of (hmmm, how to avoid the filter myself…) 0nl1ine p0k3r 6ame5 in spam that sent the message into moderation.
BDeevDad
This won’t get the attention it deserves until the first little old ladies group gets arrested for sponsoring a Mah Jongg, Bunko, canasta, etc tournament.
Uloborus
Sigh. Well, I don’t find this particular incident any more or less strange than the others. The relics of old time Christian morality in our law are perverse.
Gambling is illegal. Prostitution? Illegal. Drugs? Illegal. Blue laws forcing business to close on Sunday? Still common.
Myself, I see arguments for controlling, for regulating some of these types of things. But the laws are based on ‘sin = bad’ not on ‘free access to highly addictive heroin could lead to people getting horribly addicted who didn’t understand the risk’. It’s old-time black and white morality.
I don’t blame the cops at all. It’s not practical to expect cops to decide which laws are just. It’s a position they’re put into far too often, and of course they end up enforcing things we think are stupid. Even if (hypotheticall) the cops in question picked this bust because they’re a- uh, crapheads, I can’t see any realistic way to screen out people like that from becoming cops anyway. The only thing you can do is try and make the laws they’re enforcing reasonable.
Throwin Stones
You’d better run!
Just Some Fuckhead
Wait – people from Slovakia are white??
Police state!
KRK
Škoda.
Moje vznášadlo je plné úhorov.
Zifnab
@inkadu:
It’s called “campaigning” and “fund raising”. You send the cops out to crack a few heads, impound a few cars, and make some headlines. That brings in money for a bunch of folks and makes the police look useful. Then you send out the politicians to bemoan the crime wave of elderly euchre players sweeping the state.
If the laws enforcement seems arbitrary, they’ll just tell you that they need more money to make enforcement more universal. If the punishments seem a bit harsh, and tend to somehow financially benefit a few inside guys – prison wardens, state officials with authority over how fines are spent, someone looking to close down the church / bar / whatever and buy up the land cheap – well, these things happen.
:-p
Delia
Hey, when the cops get done busting the old folks I got a hot tip on some middle school girls who just scored some ibuprofen.
Dennis-SGMM
Law and order, old motherfuckers. How are you going to keep all of those black people and brown people and hippies in jail without law and order? That the “right” people occaisionally get busted is just an unfortunate side effect.
Scamp Dog
Think about what you would rather do if you were a cop: go after a cocaine dealer with guns and a penchant for violence, or the old guy at the Slovak association? An arrest is an arrest, right?
Ash Can
I’d like to know who’d be enough of a killjoy asshole to have complained to the cops in the first place.
Gym Rat
Meanwhile in New York some punk at Goldman Sachs is borrowing a hundred million on one dollar of capital and betting (oh I’m sorry investing in Credit Default Swaps) on whether XYZ Inc. is going to pay off its bonds.
JenJen
Hey, ho, where did you go, Ohio…
May I suggest for everyone’s viewing pleasure:
Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video #1
Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video – 2nd Attempt
Political Pragmatist
Not poker? The boom has busted.
Bill In OH
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that our Democratic governer and state legislature , against the express will of the people, are passing legislation to allow slots at the state’s horse racing tracks. Maybe they don’t want any competition.
JenJen
@Bill In OH: Gov. Strickland is doing that to help get our state out of a severe budget crisis.
Voters here have repeatedly rejected casino gambling measures (inexplicably, if you ask me), but I don’t recall a ballot measure that was strictly an up-or-down on racetrack slots.
YMMV, but to me, it’s more or less an expansion of the state lottery system, at already-established, legal gambling (albeit pari-mutuel) facilities. I don’t have the slightest problem with it, especially as it will create a few more jobs while generating much-needed revenue for a state that has been effectively abandoned by industry.
Punchy
With the econ in shambles, Five-O has to come up with some way to pay for those shiny new badges and police cars with them fancy ultra-thin cherries……….
I bet this stands as 3 minor mistys, but with some redunkulous fine like $5-large or something. Just a shakedown racket, this time organized by the po’leece.
General Winfield Stuck
Heaven’s full of Astronauts
and the Lord’s on Death Row
And Old folks
can’t even scare up
a good game of cards.
mclaren
But oh so typical.
inkadu
@Zifnab: I wouldn’t be surprised if Rush Limbaugh is organizing the sherriff’s next political campaign.
Dork
You wanna do what, exactly?
/dials up vice-cops, puts finger over “send” button
JenJen
Just wanted to add… I don’t support at all what happened to this club, but I understand it.
A quick perusal of Ohio Tavern News tells me Jednota Club holds an on-premise liquor license, meaning they can purchase wholesale beer, wine and liquor for resale to customers inside the club. Unfortunately for them, in Ohio, as in many states, clubs holding a liquor license can’t operate card games where money is exchanged. As someone who has owned, consulted and managed taverns and nightclubs in the state of Ohio for more years now than I care to admit, I can assure you that every week, bars across the state are busted for illegal gambling, no matter how large, no matter how small. Every state has its own Tavern News publication, and such violations are printed weekly for all of us in the industry to see.
It doesn’t often result in anything, other than a $250 fine and a warning. You can get a few of these warnings before your liquor license is temporarily suspended. However, that’s a lot of money that was exchanged, and they’re probably facing a heftier fine, and a suspension.
If I were advising the owners of Jednota, I’d tell them to let it go and lay low. And if they want to keep operating their card game, all they have to do is drop the liquor license. I doubt they’ll want to do that, because that’s how they make money at these things, and once you drop your license, you’re probably not getting another one. Also, I’d advise them to settle this thing with the liquor board so as not to result in any kind of conviction, which will doom their ability to procure or hold a license in the future.
Again, not intended as a slam on Jednota or a slam on the law. It is what it is, and these particular owner/operators should really know better.
General Winfield Stuck
@JenJen:
Maybe they could just convert to strip poker. On second thought….
Anne Laurie
So, just as my native Michigander friends always told me — the hardshell Ohians still don’t consider the Catholic Church Christian? (/snark)
themann1086
If I had my way I’d have all of you shot!
Surreal American
So when do we get back to talking about whether Cheney has A Saucerful of Secrets or not?
Warren Terra
It’s shown up in these comments before (if only once that I saw), but it’s worth repeating: the comments to the article that Balko links include some that are just astoundingly, inconceivably racist.
NonyNony
@JenJen:
The last casino gambling measure was so stupidly written and so FUDed up by both sides that it doesn’t surprise me that it went down in flames. It also didn’t help that the amendment was written in such a way that a particular casio owner was going to reap a whole bunch of benefits OR that the casino owners in Indiana were flooding the state with advertising money to try to stop him so they could continue to get the gambling money from our state. That last initiative isn’t a measure of anything more than the FUD machine from the alliance of Christian busybodies and the Argosy casino folks who make up the bulk of the anti-gambling forces in the state of Ohio. Strange bedfellows.
But don’t ask me to defend Governor Ted “I wish I were a Republican” Strickland these days. The man is deathly afraid of being perceived as a Democrat and it shows in how he’s been reacting to this crisis. He’s been the leading champion for trashing funding for our schools, libraries and programs for the unemployed and employed-but-under-the-poverty level at a time when we need them the most. And he’s doing it because he’s deathly afraid of the Republicans. He doesn’t realize quite yet how much he’s alienated his own core constituencies by being such a vocal asshole towards them over the last month. We understand sacrifice in this state, but you don’t have to be an asshole about it and you can at least pretend that you have some compassion and you might pretend that you’re going to ask some folks other than the middle class and the lower class to sacrifice something. Not Ted though – he’s too busy trashing people who worked their ass off to get him elected. What a self-righteous sanctimonious asshole he’s become – I’m almost ashamed to have voted for him (though, as always, the alternative was worse).
NonyNony
@Warren Terra:
Ah – you’ve never lived in Akron Ohio then. I have. The entire area around the city IS astoundingly, inconceivably racist except for a small pocket around Kent State University, which is just clueless. It’s a bastion of Redneckia that folks from Cleveland who move down there are often surprised to find so close to their city (which for all of its faults is not nearly so racist). It’s also pretty incredibly economically depressed and has been for years. These two facts are not unrelated.
JenJen
@NonyNony: Hey Nony, are you still in Ohio, and where do you live now? Just out of curiosity.
Last fall’s gambling measure meant a lot to me personally, just because I know so many people in Wilmington who were losing their livelihood due to DHL utterly abandoning them, and that’s where the proposed casino was going. It was dumb from the beginning to put the casino in only one place, I couldn’t agree with you more, and with the Indiana casinos it was probably dead on arrival. And I also agree in essence with you on some of the reasons behind the new measure to put slots at racetracks. Remember, too, that Kentucky is thisclose to doing it, and down here in Cincinnati, we view things differently than the rest of the state, to put it mildly, but mostly because of over-the-river competition within my industry. Also, I’m a racing fan and come from a long line of thoroughbred and pacer breeders, so I’m not personally opposed to doing that kind of thing to bring money to our dying state. We watched down here as our food & beverage industry fled to the other side of the river after the Ohio smoking ban was passed, and I think we might be a little gunshy.
I was mostly annoyed with Strickland after that “Shame on you, Barack Obama” debacle where he was standing right behind Hillary Clinton as she said that during the Ohio Primary. But I did vote for him, and this being one whack-ass state, what other choice did I have?
Ugh. You know, I really need to get out of here.
sab
Apparently they were taking part of the pot. Hosting the game is OK, but profiting from it is not.
Jeez, and now our fair city is all over the internet as a den of iniquity, when it’s actually just a scrappy little multi-ethnic mid-western city that has kept it’s head above water
financially, and has an obnoxious but hugely competent mayor, gorgeous parks and pretty good libraries and schools.
To Warren Terra, the surrounding suburbs may be racist but the city itself is not. That’s why they’re in the suburbs!
passerby
@Llelldorin:
Here, I’ll give that one a go.
Testing: On-line gambling. no I mean on-line poker games
ETA: Verified. “on-line poker games” trigger moderation. I’m in limbo now.
Bill In OH
JenJen –
I should have included this in the original comment, but honestly I have no particular stake in casino gambling (or slots, or video poker, etc.) one way or the other. If that’s what people want, it’s cool with me. My snark was intended more along the lines of what NonyNony said. To wit:
This. And I might add, at least pretend to care that the people have stated several times that they don’t want any more gambling in the state than they already have now and try to address their concerns. Don’t ignore them like they don’t have a say. Like I said, it doesn’t matter to me, but I think it does to some.
Either way, it was just a stupid comment on my part and shouldn’t derail the thread. My apologies.
Mike G
What the crap is up with Ohio?
They are known for having the crookedest, most over-aggressive highway speed enforcement in the country, now they waste their time busting petty card games.
I guess either Ohio has no real crime, or it has too many bored cops who are assholes going after easy targets.
Cris
I used to play poker with some of my stoner buddies, and the prize for the big winner was always a quarter of the pot.
ksmiami
And they see no reasons cause there are no reasons… what reason do you need????
HyperIon
@Cris: I think the “they” that sab refers to is the folks who were running the game.
the law is the same here in WA. you can run games where the players buy in with cash and pay out in cash, but the operator cannot take anything for running the game.
which seems reasonable to me but someone told me that it is evidence of insanity so….
tc125231
@General Winfield Stuck:
HRA
Gambling on premises with liquor licenses is not allowed in this state (NY) as well.
We have a state run slot machine casino at our local racetrack situated inside of our county fairgrounds. They are going to build a larger casino in the near future.
A co-worker friend began going to the Indian run casino/hotel complex in Niagara Falls a few years ago. It’s located in a poor area. When the debate began about having a casino in downtown Buffalo, she became absolutely against it. “They are targeting the poor people.” Really? Over here the “poor people” of Buffalo have been packing the gambling locales in Canada on welfare days every month for years.
I was dragged from Cleveland to Cincinnati and all points in between as a child to visit relatives. All I remember of Akron is the smell of rubber.
EriktheRed
Hey…
What’s with the Pink Floyd references??
hamletta
Church Bingo nights? Haha, I remember them. Vaguely.
They were wiped out decades ago, because only the Catholics indulged, and here in SBC–CoC Land, Catholics ain’t Christians.
We do have a state numbers op…I mean, lottery now.