Robert Lytle, the former top cop in charge of regulating casinos in California was subjected to possibly the worst humiliation for such an officer who once held that level of trust: his own gaming license was revoked and he was forced to sell his interest in two card rooms, while paying a ,000 fine.
This prevents Lytle from making any money from casinos, either from owning them or consulting for them.
Those were the terms between Lytle, who was the former director of the Attorney General’s Bureau of Gambling Control and the California Gambling Control Commission (CGCC) in an agreement penned last month and revealed last week.
California Attorney General Kamala Harris in 2014 accused Lytle of a conflict of interest and illegally obtaining information about an investigation of one of his clients by the agency he formerly headed.
Last month’s agreement included this statement: “Lytle’s receipt of such information and documents potentially compromised the effectiveness, and undermined the integrity, of the bureau’s investigations.”
In return for agreeing to these stipulations Lytle avoids any criminal charges.
Lytle leaves a legacy behind him, however, that may continue to poison the atmosphere in the state’s card rooms for years to come. Shortly before he left the state’s service in 2007 to become a consultant he wrote an “opinion letter” that greatly benefitted the card rooms he was about to go to work for.
His letter dispensed with the need to rotate the deal at card games, giving card clubs greater flexibility, and allowing them to make more money. However, critics in the Indian gaming industry complained that the letter violated the letter of the state’s constitution.
Tribes have been agitating ever since to get the old rules reinforced because they will make things so tedious at card clubs that they hope players will return to Indian casinos.
According to the Attorney General’s office Lytle’s controversial letters wasn’t mentioned as part of his settlement because it happened before he went into private business. “The accusation against Lytle was initiated based primarily upon his actions as a licensee in the gambling industry several years after he retired from the state and is unrelated to the issues presented by the tribes about card player rotations,” said a spokesman for the AG.
Some critics object to Lytle getting away with that because, they note, he began negotiating his contract with a card club while he was still a top enforcement officer for the state.
Recently the Attorney General’s Bureau of Gambling Control issued a new letter that tribes complain does not go far enough and card rooms claim goes too far. They allow card rooms to rotate the deal every two hands, rather than every hand.
Tuari Bigknife, attorney general for the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians commented last week: “We’re very disappointed with the actions taken by the Bureau of Gambling Control.”
However, card rooms are likely to like the action, which in the minds of some cynical observers of state politics, means that they are likely to donate to Harris’s U.S. Senate campaign.
And Governor Jerry Brown has, as he said, ancestors who operated San Francisco card clubs, and he once remarked, “I come from a long line of poker players.”
California has the unusual, maybe unique situation of having two state agencies in charge of gaming, one under the governor and the other under the attorney general. Both the governor and the attorney general appear to like things just the way they are.
