Riordan Beats Woo in Mayoral Race; O.C. Voters Reject Card Club Measures : Gambling: Proposals to allow casino wagering are defeated overwhelmingly in both Cypress and Stanton after some of the costliest campaigns in either city’s history.

Orange County voters dealt the casino industry a losing hand at the polls Tuesday, rejecting multimillion-dollar proposals in both Cypress and Stanton to bring card clubs back to the county after an absence of more than a dozen years.

In Cypress, where owners of the Los Alamitos Race Course had spent more than half a million dollars to sell the city on a card parlor at the track, opponents whooped for joy at a local pizza parlor/campaign headquarters as the margin of defeat widened through the night.

“Bravo!” Joe Mansolino cheered as the latest numbers went up on the board. “I feel awesome. We’re going to keep crime and bums out of the city.”

In heavy turnout in Cypress, about 64% of more than 13,000 voters rejected the club.

In Stanton, meanwhile, voters rejected their own card-club measure by a margin of nearly 4 to 1.

Ard Keuilian, the local swap meet owner who was the main backer of the Stanton club measure, blamed the apparent loss on a campaign of emotions and accused anti-gambling activists of raising groundless fears about crime and gambling.

“I’m disappointed,” Keuilian said as he tracked the results from his campaign headquarters, across the street from his Indoor Swap Meet. “I think it got more emotional than mental. We couldn’t get people to think it (through). . . . I wish the people who were so aggressively against it would have a proposal to straighten out the city, because they don’t.”

Los Alamitos Race Course owner Lloyd Arnold, the strongest backer of the Cypress proposal, refused to talk about the dim results Tuesday night. But Mayor Gail H. Kerry, a supporter of the measure, said she believes voters simply don’t recognize the city’s financial straits.

“People don’t know the truth,” she said.

In Orange County’s only other election, meanwhile, property owners in Three Arch Bay in Laguna Beach voted to assess themselves as much as $150 a year to help pay for security guards in their community. Nearly 70% of the voters favored the measure.

The card club industry appeared to fare no better in Los Angeles County, which is already home to six parlors. Voters there rejected a call for legalized card gambling in Pico Rivera, and a similar measure appeared headed for defeat by a wide margin in West Hollywood as well.

The Orange County card campaigns proved among the costliest in the history of either city, as activists on both sides of the volatile issue raised a total of more than $600,000 in Cypress and Stanton to wage a bitter war of words on the merits and dangers of gambling.

The issues were posed in dramatic fashion by campaigners on each side: the millions of dollars in potential revenue that clubs could bring cash-strapped cities versus the threat of prostitution, money laundering, drugs and corruption that they also might bring.

In the end, the fear of crime appeared to win.

“Because of the crime it might attract and the violence, I voted against it,” Cypress resident Leah Opena, a computer programmer, said as she left the polling place Tuesday evening.

The issue pitted political allies against one another. Club opponents took to the streets in protest marches. Campaign leaders fired volleys of expert testimony back and forth in the media, each hoping to outdo the other with a plethora of statistics and studies.

And one hotel owner in Anaheim threatened to sue for defamation after he was dragged unwittingly into the Stanton campaign by an anti-club mailer that predicted gambling would lead to prostitution--and that showed two scantily clad women standing outside his motel.

The election drew wide interest around the county as a potential harbinger of voter sentiment on the gambling issue. Watching with particular interest were officials in Anaheim, where the Commerce Club in Los Angeles has been lobbying to build a major card club and entertainment center.

No formal proposals have been aired, but Anaheim Mayor Tom Daly said Tuesday night that the votes might well influence debate on the proposal in his city.

“If the city right next door to us, Stanton, has turned down a card club so resoundingly, that would have to be taken into account in Anaheim, and it would probably have some impact on the community decision in Anaheim,” Daly said.

Proponents of the card-club proposals wielded the financial clout in both Cypress and Stanton. In cities where a few thousand dollars is often enough to wage a successful campaign for council, club backers raised a combined total of nearly $580,000 and outspent their opponents in Stanton and Cypress by a margin of more than 23 to 1.

That afforded club supporters the chance to put out slickly produced videos, trumpet their message on local billboards and pursue some of the most ambitious campaigning that either city had ever seen.

In Cypress, Deputy City Clerk Lillian Haina said the half a million dollars spent on the campaigns, almost all of it by gambling proponents, was the most ever spent on a local election. In Stanton, meanwhile, city officials said the campaign there ranked as the costliest in recent memory as well.

The message was simple: In a time of shrinking resources for local governments, card clubs represent a powerful new financial tool in the offing. (In exchange for licensing local clubs, cities take a share of the revenue--generally between 10% and 15%.)

In Cypress, owners of the Los Alamitos Race Course had promised that the Derby Club, the name they were touting for their proposed club, would generate 2,500 new local jobs and as much as $12 million in city revenue--this for a city with an annual budget today of just $17 million. They also pledged to establish a $1-million student scholarship fund as part of the package.

In Stanton, meanwhile, developer Keuilian promised as much as $3 million a year in public revenue, or more than a third of the city budget, and said he would donate several hundred thousand dollars to local nonprofit groups if the initiative was approved.

So great was the potential revenue from the card club, Stanton City Councilman Sal Sapien suggested at a fiery council meeting last month that the city might even revoke a utility tax of 6% that it recently imposed on residents.

Club opponents, portraying themselves as David fighting a financial Goliath, waged grass-roots campaigns in each city that relied largely on door-to-door publicity.

While club backers made the economy the framework of their entire campaign, opponents focused just as narrowly on a single issue: crime.

By opening their quiet enclaves to legalized gambling, campaign leaders insisted, voters also would be opening their communities to prostitution, extortion, money laundering, political corruption, and all the other criminal vices that come with it.

Throughout the campaign, gambling opponents were quick to rattle off a history of criminal convictions and fines that have plagued the card-club industry in Los Angeles County, including a $4.6-million fine by the Internal Revenue Service last year against the Bicycle Club in Bell Gardens over unreported cash transactions.

The largest and most prominent of the state’s clubs, the Bicycle Club, also was temporarily closed and partially seized by federal regulators in 1990 because of its reported links to a Florida drug-money laundering operation.

Prominent Orange County law enforcement officials such as Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi spoke out stridently during the campaign against the clubs, arguing that any business relying so heavily on huge amounts of cash would be prone to rampant criminal abuse. “If they’re such a good neighbor,” Capizzi said, “let’s leave them in the neighboring county.”

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Times staff writer Matt Lait and correspondents Willson Cummer, Bob Elston, Tom McQueeney and Lynda Natali contributed to this story.

FINAL O.C. ELECTION RETURNS

Cypress

A--Card Clubs 100% Precincts Reporting: Votes (%) Yes: 4,888 (36.0) No*: 8,673 (64.0)

Stanton

A--Card Clubs 100% Precincts Reporting: Votes (%) Yes: 771 (20.3) No*: 3,028 (79.7)

Three Arch Bay

B--Security Guards Tax Requires Two-Thirds Vote 100% Precincts Reporting: Votes (%) Yes*: 256 (69.2) No: 114 (30.8)

Winning side of measures is in bold (*) type.