Officer’s Bid for Indian Bingo Job Told : San Diego Agent Who Probed Games Resigns From Department

LAKESIDE, Calif. — A San Diego Police Department criminal intelligence officer who helped uncover corruption at the Barona Indian Reservation’s bingo games has quit her job and asked the Indians to hire her to run their troubled, high-stakes bingo operations.

Law enforcement officials in San Diego say they were surprised that the undercover officer, Kathy Thaxton, wants to manage the same bingo games she had helped investigate.

San Diego Assistant Police Chief Bob Burgreen said he learned on Wednesday that Thaxton, a 12-year department veteran, was interested in managing the bingo games. He said he confronted her and gave her an ultimatum to either drop the idea of managing the bingo games or resign from the department.

“We feel her doing this is a conflict of interest and that she utilized her position, because of the criminal investigation into Barona, to her own advantage. We’re not happy about that,” Burgreen said.

But Thaxton said she did not work in an undercover capacity during the investigation. She said she had played bingo at the reservation for three years and, in 1985, began noticing “some very flagrant things” in the bingo operations.

She said she then “brought these things to my department’s attention and initially they weren’t very enthused about an investigation. . . . I wasn’t sent out there to uncover it.”

The department got a second surprise a day after Thaxton resigned when it discovered that another criminal intelligence officer had become Thaxton’s business partner.

That officer, James P. Maynor, 45, a 17-year veteran, then also resigned.

Burgreen said he is confident that no other police officers are involved with the Barona bingo operations. “We’re reasonably convinced we’re at the end of the trail,” he said.

Several hours after her resignation, Thaxton, 40, appeared before the Barona Indian Tribal Council, asking that it hire her to run the bingo games and promising that she could return to the Indians a profit of $100,000 a month. The group has not acted on the proposal.

Thaxton--but not Maynor--was part of a multiagency criminal task force, led by the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, that investigated alleged fraud at the bingo games. Thaxton played bingo during undercover assignments and developed contacts in the bingo hall to obtain information about the operation of the games.

The investigation helped lead to a raid at the hall, the seizure of bingo records and, last March, a county grand jury indictment against the former general manager of the bingo games, Stewart Siegel, a one-time Las Vegas casino consultant, on six felony counts of grand theft. Authorities alleged that he fixed six different bingo games in which $139,000 in prize money was awarded to shills--players whom Siegel preselected to win the games by rigging the outcomes.

Pleaded Guilty

Siegel has pleaded guilty to four counts of stealing about $96,000 in prize money and is scheduled to be sentenced in August.

Bingo has not been played at the Barona reservation in northeast San Diego County since April 27, when the management company, American Management and Amusement, said it wanted to reorganize management and renovate the bingo hall.

The tribal council responded by suing American Management in San Diego federal district court, alleging that the company kept a double set of financial books, failed to prepare monthly operating statements, undercapitalized the bingo games and did not pay its fair share of bingo operating expenses.

American Management countersued, claiming that the Indians were acting without cause in voiding the bingo management contract. Both suits have since been frozen in court, because American Management is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.