A Gamble Goes Bust : Maverick Promoter’s Luck Is All Bad as Latest Plan for Casinos in California Fails

It seemed a marriage made in gamblers’ heaven: Robert W. Wilson and Adelanto, California’s eccentric never-say-die casino promoter and this desert city open to most any moneymaking scheme, to prisons, dumps and--why not?--Wilson’s plan to turn it into another Las Vegas.

But three months after Wilson renewed his campaign to legalize full-scale gambling in the San Bernardino County community, the marriage has collapsed in bitter divorce.

Wilson’s main local backer, a prominent real estate developer, had second thoughts about investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a man who had been vainly pushing gambling initiatives for three decades--and who was arrested after he tried to establish a “worldwide lottery” from a South Pacific island. Adelanto’s mayor, in turn, led a move to repeal a city ordinance that promised Wilson licenses to operate 10 casinos.

Then there was the outside force anxious to see the marriage crumble--the Nevada gambling establishment.

The transformation of Adelanto, Calif., into America’s next gambling oasis may have been a long shot, but Las Vegas executives were taking no chances. After Wilson unveiled his latest People’s Experimental Gaming Act, their lobbying arm called an emergency meeting, warning of a “devastating impact” on Nevada’s lifeblood. The nation’s largest public relations firm prepared a $235,000 program to plot the strategy to defeat the initiative.

These days, however, there’s not much of a campaign left to fight.

Although 350,000 signatures were obtained on petitions in an early rush of activity--more than half the number needed to qualify for the November ballot--workers have stopped gathering signatures. The campaign’s bank account is empty. Petition circulators occasionally show up at the headquarters in Studio City, angrily looking for money owed them, only to find the place empty, its doors locked.

“I had to leave,” the 65-year-old Wilson said. “I’ve been threatened.”

Wilson alternately blamed his former backers, the mayor and “our being victimized by Nevada gaming interests.” But one thing seemed clear. Eighteen years after he began promoting Adelanto as a gambling haven, they were taking his wild idea seriously--and he was being squeezed out of the picture.

It was to be “one last campaign,” Wilson said, a reunion with his partner from the turbulent 1960s.

Wilson was a San Gabriel Valley cement contractor back then, installing swimming pools, when a job took him to the home of a young trial attorney named John Paul Brown. They discovered a shared passion for gambling, and an Odd Couple friendship began: Wilson, rarely out of jeans and boots, a man who roams city parks collecting four-leaf clovers for use in paintings; and Brown, whose style is coat-and-tie, tailored suits.

In 1964, with New Hampshire having instituted the nation’s first lottery, they proposed one in California. Proposition 16 became front-page news, with opponents spotlighting how it specified that the two men’s firm, American Sweepstakes Corp., would run the lottery--and keep 13% of the take.

After Proposition 16 was trounced at the polls, they launched their own international lottery. Drawings were to be held on an obscure island south of Hawaii, and tickets were marketed in countries where such gambling was legal.

That endeavor ended when sheriff’s deputies discovered tickets being sold in Los Angeles. Wilson pleaded guilty to violating state lottery laws and was sentenced to three years on probation.

Together and separately, the men then campaigned for lotteries in California, Nevada and Arizona, again without success.

In 1974, Wilson discovered a place that openly invited ventures no one else wanted: a power switching station, an airport and “a little tiny prison,” as the current mayor, Ed Dondelinger, put it.

Wilson proposed an initiative to legalize full casinos in Adelanto, slots and all--a leap beyond the poker clubs found elsewhere in California. He would appeal to voters by limiting the vice to this remote community, while promising the state a share of the revenue.

In return, Wilson asked Adelanto for the right to operate some of the casinos. The City Council agreed, giving him two casino licenses at first, then 10 in 1980.

Dondelinger cast a dissenting vote. He said he was unhappy because Wilson sold off his licenses to investors “to raise money . . . to run another stupid initiative that’s never going to pass.”

Indeed, the early Adelanto initiatives failed to make the ballot.

“I don’t think Bob ever hit it at the right time,” said former City Administrator Pat Chamberlaine. “Except for this time.”

The 1992 People’s Experimental Gaming Act was unveiled in January as gambling burgeoned around the nation, on riverboats, with lottery video machines, in casino proposals from Chicago to Connecticut.

When someone delivered a copy to San Francisco attorney Barry Fadem, author of California’s successful 1984 lottery initiative, he decided it was “an amateur effort.” While pledging to end California’s role as “a year-round Santa Claus” to Nevada, Wilson’s initiative guaranteed the state meager $225,000 yearly fees from each Adelanto casino. “I laughed and put it in a file,” Fadem said.

He learned it was no joke, however, when he was hired to make sure the campaign met state reporting requirements. At the same time, leading petition-circulating firms were promised top dollar--$1 for each signature--to get the 615,000 signers needed to qualify for the ballot.

Wilson claimed to have more than $5 million in pledges for his campaign, with his main investor being Redlands-based developer Jane I. Un MacDonald. Just 29, she was prominent in local society, serving on museum, hospital and opera boards.

Un MacDonald was trying to develop a $200-million “commerce park” in Adelanto, and the 137-acre site was right on California 395--an ideal spot for casinos.

“You’re talking tripling, quadrupling, maybe even more” in land value, noted Brown, now 65, gray-bearded and practicing law in Oxnard. “If (the initiative) passed . . . you got the only city in California where open gaming is. You just use your own imagination.”

Folks in Las Vegas were using their imaginations, too.

On Feb. 24, the Nevada Resort Assn. called a special meeting on the initiative. Casino executives were sure the effort involved more than two grizzled gambling promoters hoping to set up a cluster of casinos in a town no one had heard of. The explosive element, a participant explained, was “the Indian factor.”

Under federal law, if California allowed slots and casino games anywhere, they also could be offered in Indian gambling halls, now limited to bingo, poker and off-track betting.

“The impact would be much more than legalizing gaming in Adelanto,” said Los Angeles political consultant Ken Rietz. “There would be casinos in Palm Springs . . . and every other place Indians have reservations.”

A vice president of the huge Burson-Marsteller public relations firm, Rietz prepared a 16-page memo for the Las Vegas meeting, outlining a $235,000 “pre-campaign” to combat the threat.

The memo suggested a strategy for Nevada casinos to turn the public against it: By encouraging educational and religious groups to point out the “evils” of gambling, telling how “it will bring with it all the things that follow--increased crime, prostitution, laundering drug money, etc.”

Wilson was ecstatic when someone leaked him the memo. It would be “my best ammunition,” he said--evidence of Vegas hypocrites trying to crush competition. Californians would rise in anger and support him.

First, though, he had to get on the ballot. And snags were developing.

Dondelinger asked the city attorney to study whether Adelanto was bound by its 1980 ordinance promising Wilson casino licenses.

The mayor said he was worried Wilson may have sold the same licenses more than once; first to early investors, now to new supporters. Wilson denied that, but Dondelinger complained that he did not get a full accounting of who stood to benefit.

“You’re not going to play in this city without me knowing all of the players,” he said.

Wilson and Brown, in turn, accused the mayor of pressuring them to “cut a deal”--seeking their support in upcoming elections. They said they won’t let the city renege on its casino agreement. “We’ll sue ‘em,” Brown said.

A more immediate problem, though, was the financing.

Wilson said Un MacDonald, after giving $300,000, canceled $150,000 in new deposits to the initiative’s bank account. The bank froze the account and “started bouncing my checks to petition circulators,” he said.

One petition firm was out $75,000. The crews stopped working. With the April 17 deadline approaching to make November’s ballot, “the campaign’s sort of ended,” Wilson acknowledged.

Un MacDonald declined to discuss the initiative. But Fadem, the San Francisco attorney, said the “potential funders” became convinced there were “fatal flaws” in it, including a late start, confusing language and the certainty that Nevada interests would “spend a tremendous amount to defeat it.”

With the state guaranteed only $225,000 per casino, he asked, “Why would Joe Sixpack in Stockton, Calif., vote yes on this?”

Last Friday, the City Council voted to repeal its ordinance promising Wilson casino licenses.

Only Mayor Pro Tem Mary L. Scarpa dissented, warning colleagues they might be liable if they “yanked” the ordinance before the initiative drive was officially over. While November’s ballot is out of reach, Wilson could extend his bid for signatures to June to qualify for 1994 state ballot.

“This initiative is dead and buried,” Dondelinger said. “. . . Wilson just ain’t gonna fly.”

Wilson’s vision of Adelanto, however, is far from dead.

“We want the gambling,” Dondelinger said. “We see it as revenue, jobs--and it’s good for the environment. . . . The same as prisons.”

So the mayor scheduled a meeting this week with Wilson’s former backers, represented by Fadem, who are considering their own campaign for the 1994 ballot.

“They want to do everything the right way,” Fadem said, noting that any initiative would promise the state “maximum revenue.”

Dondelinger said the new group has picked up a promising money source to bolster the effort, a man already involved in casinos: “A guy from Nevada.”