Back on October 4, the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) voted to uphold the payout of a $2,045 jackpot to Rhon Wilson from Mesquite’s Casablanca hotel-casino, after the casino originally refuted the winnings on the basis that Wilson had been previously removed from the property for theft and therefore was trespassing when the jackpot was won.
In the weeks since the ruling, the potential precedent that the incident has set has been top-of-mind for operators and regulators—the topic was debated again during a NGCB meeting on October 19, and new regulations outlining the future handling of these incidents may be in the works.
One figure present at both meetings was Dick Tomasso, who serves as Mesquite Gaming’s vice president of security and government affairs—Mesquite Gaming owns Casablanca. In his comments to the board, Tomasso explained that Wilson had been removed from the property a total of seven times over unpaid bar tabs, but he frequently re-entered the premises over the course of several months, winning three jackpots over that span.
“A patron is an invited guest,” Tomasso argued to board members, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “A trespasser is an uninvited guest. A trespasser is a lawbreaker. A trespasser is a banned individual. There’s a big difference, and that distinction goes to the heart of the legal obligation that a casino has to pay a patron his winnings.”
During the October 19 hearing, Tomasso was joined by several other security and surveillance colleagues from other companies in asking regulators to look more closely at this trend, including Wynn Las Vegas’ Vice President of Security, Investigations and Crisis Management, Todd Fasulo.
In his comments to the board, Fasulo explained that trespassers are often removed from casinos for petty crime and minor offenses that law enforcement officials either can’t or don’t want to enforce due to a lack of time and resources. As such, wrongdoers are often able to ignore exclusion orders and simply re-enter casinos over and over again, especially with the knowledge that they will be paid if they happen to win jackpots.
In response, board members argued that the enforcement of trespassing laws is not necessarily the responsibility of regulators, and offered the example of the Circa in downtown, which checks identification of all patrons entering the casino.
“If they want to expend the labor costs to put somebody at the minimal amount of doors that they have to check ID, that’s their prerogative,” Fasulo retorted, as reported by the Review-Journal. “I guess that’s the choice that they make. For me to do that at the Wynn, you’re talking at least 15 different doors that I’d have to do that. And the sheer volume of people coming through, there’s 20,000 to 30,000 people that come through our doors on a daily basis, depending on conventioneers or just local tourists or out-of-town tourists.”
Christopher Lalli, assistant district attorney for Clark County, also presented some figures that showed how the legal enforcement of trespassing is not holding much water—according to Lalli, there were a total of 87 trespassing cases from July alone in the Las Vegas court system. Per the Review-Journal, he explained that most defendants simply plead guilty, and are usually banned from the casino in question for six months.
One board member who agreed with the arguments was George Assad, who was the lone detractor in the 2-1 vote that reinstated the Casablanca jackpot payout in early October.
“Some policies are good, and we should respect and honor them. Some policies are outdated,” Assad argued, according to the Review-Journal. “This policy is certainly outdated. I don’t know who came up with it or what the rationale was for it, but it makes absolutely no sense at all.”
The NGCB is expected to review drafts of potential regulations concerning the matter in the coming months.
