BINGO! : Indians Hold Winning Ticket as Big-Money Satellite Game Catches On

Shrouded in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke, Barbara Redding of Beaumont fiddled nervously with her white plastic earring and begged for the number that could change her life forever.

“Come on I-16!” Redding shouted, thrusting a fist in the air for emphasis. “Come on, baby! Do it for me, just this once!”

Around her, the 1,299 other players packed into the Morongo Indian bingo hall on this hot July night hunched protectively over their cards and made similar pleas, their eyes fixed on a television screen where a hand appeared every so often to display a numbered bingo ball.

“I’m not usually this emotional,” Redding said. “But heck, we’re talking big money here!”

Indeed we are. Unlike bingo games at churches or the local Elks Club where prizes of a couple hundred dollars are the norm, this new version--dubbed MegaBingo--lures players with a jackpot of $500,000.

Launched Feb. 17 by an investment group headed by the former director of the California Lottery, MegaBingo is filmed live each night at the Creek Nation Bingo Hall in Tulsa, Okla. The single 15-minute game is beamed by satellite simultaneously to players on 20 Indian reservations in nine states.

With its Las Vegas-size jackpot--the largest nightly prize in bingo history--MegaBingo has propelled Indian-administered bingo to new heights and has quickly won a loyal following among players.

MegaBingo’s handsome caller, a 20-year-old former high school football star from Tulsa who is part Choctaw Indian, has even become a cult hero of sorts and has traveled to far-flung bingo halls to meet adoring female fans.

“Our people love MegaBingo,” said Marc Kaplan, general manager of Tesuque Pueblo Bingo in Santa Fe, N.M., where attendance has jumped 25% since the game’s debut. “Just think about it. For the price of a $5 card, you have a shot at retiring for life. It boggles the mind!”

Despite such glowing reviews, law enforcement officials are keeping a close watch on the game, and the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs carefully reviews the contracts that MegaBingo’s sponsors negotiate with individual reservations.

Joel Starr, who is in charge of Indian gaming for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, said the FBI screened the principals in Gamma International Ltd., the Dallas-based partnership that created MegaBingo, and remains on the lookout for signs of corruption.

“We’ve never had a simulcast game of such magnitude in Indian country before,” Starr said. “We want to encourage video gaming because we think it can benefit reservations, but we want to make sure it stays clean.”

California authorities, who have fought unsuccessfully through the years for regulatory control over Indian bingo, have the same concern and say MegaBingo’s use of a satellite makes it particularly vulnerable to abuse.

‘Impeccable Credentials’

“I don’t think it takes an Einstein to figure out that electronic signals can be manipulated,” said Deputy Atty. Gen. Rudolph Corona. He added, however, that “there is no evidence of manipulation” so far and said Gamma’s president, former state lottery director M. Mark Michalko, has “impeccable credentials.”

Although the states strictly regulate church and charity bingo, setting limits on payoffs, the courts have prohibited state control over games played on Indian reservations. Despite arguments by California and 19 other states that such unregulated gaming provides an easy target for organized crime, the Supreme Court in 1987 ruled that states may not limit the tribes’ right to sponsor gambling ventures on sovereign Indian lands.

Most tribal leaders are enthusiastic about MegaBingo and say it has lured new players to their halls, which generate dollars used for housing projects, medical clinics and scholarship funds. Some reservations have seen state lotteries and other forms of legal gambling cut into their bingo hall attendance in recent years, and MegaBingo was welcomed as one way to revive interest.

On the Morongo reservation east of Banning, for example, bingo was cut back from seven nights a week to four as attendance dipped. But MegaBingo has attendance on the upswing again, luring about a 1,000 new players a month, many of them no doubt attracted after a Morongo regular became California’s first jackpot winner.

“MegaBingo has been a positive force both in terms of profitability and the number of people now attending,” said Dennis Miller, tribal chairman on the Morongo reservation.

Terry Totenhagen, advertising manager at the Little Six Bingo Palace in Lake Prior, Minn., agreed, noting that attendance there has climbed 10% since MegaBingo was added to the nightly menu.

“Even people who don’t like bingo are coming in because of that shot at half a million,” said Totenhagen, adding that until the recent approval of a state lottery, Minnesota had few legal gambling options other than bingo.

In addition to providing more income for tribal needs, MegaBingo has established a network through which the nation’s widely scattered tribes can communicate on issues of the day, tribal leaders said.

“There are tribes we are linked with through MegaBingo that I had never heard of before,” Miller said. “So a big side benefit of this is it opened the door for us to start a dialogue among tribes on a national level. That is very unusual.”

But MegaBingo is not for everyone. At least one tribe, the Seminoles in Florida, dropped out of the network because MegaBingo was taking too much time--and thus money--away from games sponsored solely by the reservation. With huge, sellout crowds already routine at their hall, the Seminoles did not need MegaBingo as a draw for players.

Gamma, the gaming management company formed by Michalko in 1987, staked 15 months of research and nearly $5 million on the prediction that MegaBingo would be a hit. The firm projected first-year gross revenues of $25 million and anticipated that they would double in 1990, said spokesman Bill Seaton, adding that earnings are slightly below expectations so far.

“In 1987 we were approached by some Indians in Alaska who wanted us to make their bingo games more exciting, and it got us thinking about ways to create more enthusiasm,” Michalko, 35, said in a telephone interview. “What we came up with was the idea of tying together a number of halls and letting them simultaneously participate in one large bingo game.”

Controlled by a sophisticated master computer that tracks each printed card and knows there is a bingo before the players do, MegaBingo was authorized by the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. The law also created a three-member commission to monitor Indian bingo, but the panel has yet to be appointed.

Although players rave about game caller Brian Foster, MegaBingo’s prime attraction is clearly its whopping jackpot. Gamma can offer big bucks because of the large pool of players participating through the satellite hook-up.

Each MegaBingo card costs $5--five times that of standard bingo cards. Of that, 70% is returned to players in prizes, 15% goes to the individual tribes and their bingo management companies and 15% is collected by Gamma.

The game differs little from traditional bingo, but to win the half-million-dollar jackpot, a player must “black out” a 25-spot card in 50 numbers or less. If no one manages that, play continues until someone bingos and takes home a consolation prize of $10,000. MegaBingo is broadcast nightly at 7:35 p.m. and lasts about 15 minutes.

So far, Gamma has paid out more than $6 million in prizes, with $3.5 million going to seven jackpot winners. The first jackpot was won Feb. 22 at the Fortune Bay bingo hall in Tower, Minn. California’s first winner was Margruete Meador of Winchester, near Hemet, who bingoed in 47 numbers at Morongo on June 23.

That was a night Meador, who plays bingo at least five times a week at a cost of about $700 a month, will never forget.

“The place went wild, and I was trying to keep cool,” recalled Meador, 78. “I just couldn’t believe it. Everyone wanted to touch me for good luck.”

Annual Payments

Meador’s only “splurge” was trading in her Honda Civic for a Honda Accord. Like other jackpot winners, she will collect her half-million dollars in annual payments of $25,000.

Two days after Meador hit the jackpot, Francis Noyola, a 61-year-old cook, became California’s second big winner at the Table Mountain Indian bingo hall near Fresno.

Despite the concerns of law enforcement authorities, Gamma officials say they have taken pains to safeguard their game from tampering. Michalko said cards are printed at each hall just hours before the nightly game and are numbered and tracked by a computer, preventing counterfeiting.

“As for the satellite broadcast, it’s all done live so people can watch the caller as he draws the numbers,” Michalko said. “There is no way to manipulate the game unless you want the whole world to see.”

Compared to the California Lottery, which critics say created a whole new class of gamblers, MegaBingo has expanded the ranks of bingo players only modestly so far. According to Gamma surveys, players come from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and play as much for the camaraderie as for the thrill of winning.

However, tribal leaders and Gamma officials hope to broaden the player base further with the lure of MegaBingo, and individual halls are marketing the game aggressively. Promoters emphasize both the large prize and the excitement of competing alongside folks tuning in from other corners of the nation.

At Morongo, Lisa Kessler summed up her interest in MegaBingo this way: “I like that big hunk of an Okie (Foster), and I figure although I’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, somebody’s going to take home that prize.”

The first Indian bingo hall was established by the Seminoles in Hollywood, Fla., in 1979. Since then, at least 130 Indian bingo halls--one-fourth of them in California--have sprouted on reservations in more than 30 states.

A 1987 survey by the Bureau of Indian Affairs estimated that gross revenue from Indian bingo that year was $255 million. Agency officials said that figure would reach at least $350 million this year.

Times staff writer Louis Sahagun contributed to this article.