David G. Schwartz

Studies in chance: a selective guide to gaming industry resources

The potential for substantial revenues from gaming has moved gambling from an underworld activity to a legitimate mainstream business. This selective list of portals, Web sites, and print resources is intended to guide local communities, librarians, and researchers to a variety of sources (statistics, regulations, history, and industry trends) focused on the business of gaming.

Satan's playground: mobsters and movie stars at America's greatest gaming resort

Being naughty has long been a favored American pastime. Knocking back a highball, luxuriating with a lap dance, or taking a chance on the roll of the dice is nothing new*as Bruce Daniels’ seminal Puritans at play (1995) demonstrated, the good times predate even the founding of the Republic, in ostensibly dour New England. So it is no surprise that Southern Californians, in the first third of the twentieth century, had intense appetites for both liquor and gambling*appetites that frequently could not be slaked within the bounds of the law. For years, Los Angeles had offshore gambling yachts that featured high-rolling action. San Diego’s gambling habitués, however, did not need to leave terra firma to indulge their fancy*they could simply slip across the border into ‘Old Mexico’, which had no fewer pretensions to public morality than the United States, but whose officials were slightly more amenable to relaxing anti-gambling dictates. In Satan’s playground, Paul Vanderwood looks at one of the most celebrated nightspots of North America, Tijuana’s Agua Caliente resort. Thanks to his extensive expertise in the political and social history of Mexico, he is able to put the resort into a greater national*international, in fact*context. American desires for adventure, gambling, and (from 1920 to 1933) liquor were only one half of the equation that created Agua Caliente and other gambling enterprises in Tijuana and its environs: Mexican desires for economic development and political spoils were just as important, if not more crucial. In the end, it was not a decline in popularity that did Agua Caliente in*it was reform, in the form of a moralising but not necessarily disinterested edict by Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas. Vanderwood’s split focus, then, is quite sensible. There are, in fact, three main strands to Satan’s playground. The book opens with an account of the 20 May 1929 hold-up of a money-car ferrying the Agua Caliente casino’s weekend haul to a San Diego bank. This thread includes a brief survey of the bootlegging underground in both Los Angeles and San Diego during the Prohibition Era, as a foundation for the investigation into the hold-up, and the trial of the men ultimately apprehended for it. Vanderwood starts here and then returns to the story of the 1929 stickup and its aftermath throughout the book. This strategy gives the reader a window into the criminal underworld of the 1920s, a demimonde in which Agua Caliente to some degree competed. This competition included forays into the politics of law enforcement in San Diego during Prohibition. Journal of Tourism History Vol. 3, No. 2, August 2011, 201 216