West Hollywood Card Club Proposed
The owners of a small, private bridge and rummy club in West Hollywood are seeking city permission to turn the club into a glittering approximation of a Las Vegas casino, offering public gambling on all legal card games.
Under the proposal, the Cavendish West Hollywood Club on Sunset Boulevard, where the city borders Beverly Hills, would double in size and become the first legal casino on the Westside. It would be similar in concept and only slightly smaller than the large Eastside card clubs in Bell and Commerce.
The partners behind the Cavendish Club have quietly lobbied West Hollywood city officials and community groups for several months about the expansion. The City Council will hold a public hearing on the plan Monday night.
The club currently occupies a mezzanine floor of a high-rise office building. If the expansion is approved, it would occupy an additional floor, turning the dowdy 30-table bridge and rummy club into a casino with 70 tables, valet parking, an atrium and an expensive restaurant.
The club’s general partner, Philip Marks, said plans for the new club have been drafted to reflect the affluent image of the Westside, and he insisted that it would have none of the crime and corruption problems that have plagued some other area clubs.
“This is something the people of West Hollywood will be proud of,” said Marks, who operates legal gaming aboard two cruise ships and is chairman of the board of Kettering Industries Inc., a New Jersey manufacturer of toys and promotional items. “We want to help them improve their image. The whole nature of the operation is extremely upscale.”
West Hollywood City Council members--three of whom openly scoffed at the idea of allowing legalized gambling in the city during elections three years ago--are skeptical of the plan but say they are willing to hear the Cavendish partners out.
“I’m not sure I would give odds on approval,” City Councilman Paul Koretz said. “But it would supply a very substantial amount of money to the city, whereby the city could add additional (Sheriff’s Department) patrol people and actually reduce crime.”
In recent individual meetings with each City Council member, Jerry Gould, the Cavendish Club manager and a limited partner in the business, and lobbyist Bruce Decker have contended that the city could receive more than $6 million a year in fees from the operation after the first year, which is equal to about 20% of the city’s operating budget.
In addition, the would-be developers have already established a charitable foundation that would channel 2% of the club’s annual gross toward human services, and they have lobbied more than 20 health and social service groups seeking support.
Under California gambling laws, cities and counties have the option of allowing clubs where patrons may play for money against each other in a variety of “games of skill,” a category that has been interpreted to include card games such as poker, rummy and pan.
Games of chance, including most of the popular forms of Las Vegas gambling--slot machines, craps, blackjack and roulette, for example--are not permitted.
While casino gamblers in Nevada and Atlantic City play against each other and against the house, in California they play only against each other. There is no house; the clubs act only as a host, providing tables and a dealer.
The clubs make money by renting seats to players, with higher seat rent for tables playing for bigger stakes.
Gould said if approved, the club would charge between $8 and $40 an hour for rental on more than 500 seats.
Although some Los Angeles-area card clubs, such as those in Gardena, have been operating for more than 40 years, most of the clubs have been approved since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978.
Governments in cities such as Bell and Commerce, which were hard hit by the tax-cutting initiative, turned to the legal casinos, with their promise of huge revenues, to balance their books. The casinos also offered hundreds of jobs.
To obtain local government approval, casino operators promised large cuts of their gross revenues, sometimes as high as 13%, which instantly resulted in millions of dollars for municipal treasuries.
But as more of the clubs opened, the mostly blue-collar and Asian clientele was spread more thinly, and profits began to fall. Cities that had grown dependent on the gambling revenues to pay for services suddenly found their jackpots drying up.
Charges of widespread cheating and corruption also followed the card club boom in the early 1980s. A Times investigation in 1982, for example, found extensive evidence of organized cheating, loan-sharking and other illicit activities at several clubs in Bell and Gardena.
In addition, fierce competition between clubs resulted in a number of scandals involving some club owners and city officials.
In the early and mid-1980s, 14 people in Bell and Commerce, including three city councilmen and a former mayor, were convicted or pleaded guilty to charges of bribery, illegal gambling and racketeering that grew out of an investigation of activities at the two cities’ card clubs.
Despite those difficulties, many card club proponents saw the legalization of the state lottery three years ago as a sign that public opinion toward gambling was changing, and card club proposals began to surface again.
But under a 1984 state law, ordinances allowing gambling in cities must be approved by voters. Voters in Cathedral City, near Palm Springs, and Stanton in Orange County have recently rejected proposals to allow card playing for money.
The Cavendish backers say that if the City Council refuses to put the proposed expansion before the city’s voters, they will consider a petition drive of their own to force a vote.
Marks and his allies say they believe that the club’s location will help them draw an affluent crowd of players from the Westside and the San Fernando Valley.
“We are looking for those same creative people and entertainment folk that go to Nicky Blair’s (restaurant) and the L’Hermitage Hotel,” Marks said.
Operators of some Eastside clubs say they are concerned about losing business. George Hardie, operator of the Bicycle Club in Bell Gardens, estimated that up to 30% of his business is from Westside patrons.
Andy Kopel, executive director of the California Card Club Owners Assn., agreed that the Cavendish Club’s location would make it a strong competitor for customers.
“If they pull it off, a major card room would be a real coup for the partners. A card club in that area that might draw in people from the San Fernando Valley would be a gold mine,” Kopel said.
West Hollywood residents and neighbors of the club, many of whom have learned of the Cavendish expansion plans only in the last few days, are trying to quickly organize opposition to the expansion.
