Letting It Ride: Hawai‘i's Obsession with Games of Chance

“The benefits would not exceed the social cost of gambling.” 

So said Governor David Ige in reference to a proposed casino resort in Kapolei in late 2020. “It does not provide economic value to our community.”

His comments came after the Hawaiian Homes Commission narrowly voted 5-4 to back the bill allowing the development of the proposed casino on a commercial parcel belonging to a Native Hawaiian land trust—a vote taken on December 28, 2020, a time when people’s attention tends to be elsewhere.

It wasn’t the first time a gambling bill was introduced; there’s one practically every legislative session. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a more stark example of Hawai‘i’s schizophrenic relationship with gambling.

According to a Honolulu Civil Beat special report series on Hawai‘i gambling in 2022, (“Rolling the Dice”), Hawai‘i visitors to Las Vegas spent at least $159.7 million dollars in 2019, though that figure could be as high as $411 million. And that’s legal, out-of-state gambling. There are no reliable revenue figures for illegal gambling, but in 2021, the Honolulu Police Department raided 50 illegal gambling establishments. And yet, Hawai‘i remains only one of two states in the nation that continue to outlaw gambling in all its forms (the other is—surprise!—Utah).

The identity crisis we have when it comes to gambling may be symptomatic of our strangely boll-weevil-like political character—fiscally liberal, but socially conservative—and yet gambling as a vice and racket seems to occupy a more socially-acceptable lower rung on the bad behavior totem pole when compared to drug use and sex-for-hire. Everyone here is thrilled for the receptionist and her boyfriend when they come back from Vegas a couple of grand richer, but nobody really says, “Dad and Uncle Herb went to the Chicken Ranch and got me this t-shirt!”

Gambling has been a Hawai‘i obsession for a very long time. Horse racing was popular during the monarchy, and various games of chance were a favored diversion of plantation workers. Gambling’s illegal nature in the 1960s made it prey to organized crime, and Wilford “Nappy” Pulawa’s “The Company” exercised a stranglehold on the control of the rackets throughout their heyday in the 1970s. Then, in the 1980s, a funny thing happened to the rackets: they changed.

China White heroin and marijuana took a backseat to cocaine, which shifted the source of the commodities from Asia and homegrown to South and Central America. Foreign meth would follow. Prostitution started a shift from streetwalkers to brothels masquerading as massage parlors with overseas labor. 

“There is a certain logic in seeing gambling as a last chance, the sole remaining means to live in these overpriced islands as one pleases. Winning means security, luxury and peace of mind impossible to attain through hard work alone.”

Local organized crime was beleaguered by this sea change. Gambling may have been the biggest paradigm shift of all, when Boyd Gaming owners Sam and Bill Boyd made an aggressive grab at the Hawai‘i market in the mid-1970s and turned their California Hotel & Casino into a Ninth Island gambling bubble—its motto is “Aloha Spoken Here.” The pipeline to Las Vegas commenced, stripping local “traditional” gambling dens of much of their clientele.

With Vegas becoming more accessible, gambling became a vice for everyone. It wasn’t just the shifty addicts and “bad” husbands who were sneaking out after dark anymore to get their shot at get-rich-quick. Now it was Mr. and Mrs. Hashimoto of Pearl City, your next-door neighbors, asking if you could keep an eye on their house while they hopped on a charter to Sin City for a few days of slots, blackjack and sucking saimin at the California. Those junkets became so pedestrian that you almost weren’t local if you didn’t experience them.

Engaging in legal gambling had removed the “criminal” stigma, though it was no less financially ruinous—if you check the excuses offered by our big-name embezzlers and crooks, from government officials to high school athletic club organizers, the line “maintaining a lavish lifestyle and gambling debts,” is always there.

Though illegal gambling here doesn’t radiate the same immoral taint as narcotics and prostitution, it has arguably wrecked as many homes, careers and bank accounts as the other two rackets. Only chronic losers are ostracized as pariahs, while their “winner” counterparts are lauded by friends and family as lucky, shrewd and generous. (Yet, as anyone who knows a gambler knows, they inflate their wins and never talk about their losses.)

Illegal gambling rooms saw a rise in patronage during the pandemic, theoretically because the Vegas pipeline was temporarily shut down. Today’s den of iniquity is different from the Chinatown establishment of the Company heyday. They are no-frills, occupying vacant commercial space in the upstairs units of two- or three-story commercial walk-ups in the McCully, Ke‘eaumoku and Kapi‘olani areas and resemble video game arcades but without the racing stripes painted on the walls. They are even in residential homes in bedroom communities throughout O‘ahu in the form of low video tables occupying the space where sofas and coffee tables once lived.

As we move out of the shadow of COVID, these establishments have mushroomed. HPD has been playing a low-speed game of whack-a-mole with these dens, hamstrung by the fact that possession of gambling devices is not illegal until they are employed for their intended (and illegal) use.

The machines are far from the main focus of gamblers. Of the many forms illegal gambling takes here, the least obtrusive, and, for that reason, the most insidious, is probably sports betting.

Sports betting is virtually invisible as it does not place the burden of physical presence on the gambler. There is no establishment to go to, no worrying about your license plate number in a tiny parking lot, no “security” thug at the door to pass, no risk of being caught with your proverbial pants down during an HPD raid. Sports betting is a phone call of a few seconds. Nobody knows it’s being done, nobody knows it’s been done. Nobody knows. Until, of course, you lose.

Perhaps no written account surpasses a work of fiction that captures the poison of sports betting in Hawai‘i with accuracy and color: Mark Panek’s Hawai‘i (Lo‘ihi Press, 2013). Hawai‘i is quintessentially about gambling on many different levels, and presents a window on our obsession with chance. It captures the palpable desperation of every echelon of local society in laying it all on the line to improve their lot in life. From the very first pages, we are immersed in gambling.

Hawai‘i opens with an intense prologue taking us inside the head of racketeer Kekoa Meyers at a UH football game. Kekoa and his boys are prematurely celebrating a big payday in the waning moments of a losing UH effort against UNLV. Kekoa is quietly confident, knowing the fix is in:

Yeah, automatic. If Kekoa had known how easy it was going to be, he’d have tried it years ago. All you needed was one or two solid local boys from the next generation down, boys who looked up to you, who could call you “Uncle” without making you feel old at 42 because they’d been calling you that for fifteen years now. And Kekoa had one: Kyle Ching, the son of his cousin Boy, who’d had to move to Vegas in the ‘90s to find work. When Kyle wound up covering receivers in the UNLV defensive backfield last year, Kekoa’s plan pretty much presented itself all on its own. All he’d had to do was pull out his phone say three words: “Keep it close.”

This type of tampering was not—and is not—unknown here. It is, as Kekoa discovered, easy. But easy, alas, does not guarantee results, as Kekoa and company ultimately find out by the end of the prologue. Undesired results in sports betting plague not only racketeers and their hangers-on, but also those who dwell in the corridors of state power. Panek gives us the case of State Senator Russell Lee:

Worse still: it was right. On both counts. Senator Lee had indeed been glued to a seat downtown at the Extra Pint all the way to the end of a meaningless UH game that had been decided in the third quarter.

Just had to see it through, ah Russ? Even though you knew your committee clerk long ago booked you to speak at the Hokulani Drug Treatment Center’s annual fundraiser. You know, the one that started half hour ago? Even though you knew the game’s end would put you in the thickest hour of the Saturday evening rush, you sat right there to watch, all because you’d bet…fifty thousand dollars. On a college football game. A UH game. Russ!

Fifty thousand dollars!

That racketeer Kekoa Meyers and Senator Russell Lee had bet on the same game is a true reflection of sports betting, and gambling in general, here in Hawai‘i. The impulse to wager large amounts whose loss would be catastrophic for the chance to move up in life (where ever “up” is—it’s largely subjective—but you get the point) truly infects every walk of life here. Everyone thinks they have a chance at something better.

I will not examine Hawai‘i and its theme of gambling any further than the opening pages. No spoilers here. If you haven’t read the book yet, you should. But suffice to say that it’s more than a study of our politics and our culture corrupted by want of more. Panek captures the essence of our collective denial and self-delusion, laying bare the loss leader, self-help schlock on the front shelves of Barnes & Noble that a lot of us here want desperately to believe. Lose weight without diet or exercise. Find the love of your life without fundamentally improving yourself. Get rich quick without working. A lot of folks here love to think that it’s possible to be the one savvy insider to cash in while the world around them idiotically keeps its nose to the grindstone because it’s made up of suckers.

This is the grand illusion. The shame and guilt that dirties narcotics and prostitution doesn’t cling to gambling here because its practitioners justify their indulgence by telling themselves that perhaps they have a higher purpose in their pursuit of winnings. Times are hard, and everyone can use a serendipitous windfall. In the end, though, gambling preys on its victims as viciously as the other vices do, and it lines the pockets of criminals more consistently than it does any “winner” of its games.

There is a certain logic in seeing gambling as a last chance, the sole remaining means to live in these overpriced islands as one pleases. Winning means security, luxury and peace of mind impossible to attain through hard work alone.

Ultimately, though, we should all bear in mind that even where there is a winner, there are many, many more losers.

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Image by Carl Raw.