When Manuel Osvaldo Nacrur stepped off a plane in Miami last year, he got a rude surprise. Instead of catching his connecting flight home to Los Angeles, Nacrur was handcuffed, jailed 10 days, then hauled around the country in a prisoner van for more than two weeks.
Finally, a federal lawsuit charges, he was delivered to the Las Vegas authorities who had issued a warrant for his arrest.
His alleged crime? The San Fernando Valley resident owed the MGM Grand casino $45,000 in gambling debts.
Nacrur's experience, critics say, represents a troubling trend in the way gambling houses are collecting their unpaid markers--vouchers that allow gamblers to keep playing when their cash runs out.
Rather than treating these debts as civil matters, casinos in the nation's three largest gambling states--Nevada, New Jersey and Mississippi--are turning to police and prosecutors as enforcers, threatening gamblers with jail time unless they pay up.
"This borders on misusing the criminal justice system," said I. Nelson Rose, a gambling law expert at Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa. "The criminal justice system was not designed for private debt enforcement."
Now two Los Angeles attorneys have launched what is believed to be the first challenge to this practice. In a series of four class-action lawsuits filed in Los Angeles and Las Vegas federal courts, the lawyers allege that Nevada prosecutors have been using their state's bad check law to collect markers for some of the state's biggest casinos, including the MGM Grand, Caesars Palace and the Las Vegas Hilton.
"Why are we keeping people in jail to collect gambling debts?" asked Richard Fine, who filed the cases with colleague Gerald Werksman. "It's a horrible use of public funds, and it's an unconscionable means to collect debts."
But Clark County Dist. Atty. Stewart Bell, whose territory includes Las Vegas, contends he is merely enforcing Nevada's laws, which make it a crime to write a bad check to "obtain credit extended by any licensed gaming establishment."
"These [markers] are checks under Nevada law," Bell said. "When you present an instrument for payment, and it's not honored, it's a crime."
Representatives for the casinos named in the suits said they could not discuss pending litigation.
Markers, printed by the casinos, look like checks, right down to the signature line. They list a player's name, bank account numbers, and a dollar amount, which can range from a few hundred dollars up to $1 million.
