Card Clubs

A ballot measure authorizing card clubs in the city will be considered at a special meeting of the City Council tonight. Owners of the Indoor Swap Meet of Stanton approached the council Tuesday with a proposal to turn their swap meet, on Beach Boulevard, into a club where people could play poker and other card games. Taxes on the club could generate up to $5 million a year for the city, according to Hratch Derderian, one of the swap meet owners.

Voters in Baldwin Park will have a chance to decide next April whether to allow legalized gambling in the city, thanks to a 3-1 vote of the City Council that reversed an earlier decision. Last June, the council rejected a proposal to bring card clubs to the city after a storm of protest by residents. But after Councilman Herschel Keyser said he had nearly enough signatures to get the issue on the ballot, the council agreed to put it to a public vote.

A citizens' finance committee is recommending a card club in Baldwin Park to generate badly needed revenue. Card clubs, which already operate in the cities of Bell, Bell Gardens, Commerce, Cudahy and Gardena, can generate as much as $10 million annually for the city, the 11-member committee said in a report released at Wednesday's City Council meeting. Establishing a card club would require voter approval.

The Azusa City Council abruptly decided this week to hold a special election Dec. 12 on card clubs--an idea that's less than aces to some residents. Hoping to beat a three-year state moratorium on card club votes that begins in January, the council played its hand late Tuesday night, voting 4-1 to put the issue on the ballot.

The City Council has unanimously approved a resolution "adamantly and categorically" opposing the opening of casinos, card clubs or other gambling establishments in Orange County. The resolution, approved last week, blames gambling for increases in homicides, assaults, loan sharking, prostitution, money laundering, drug sales, extortion and robberies in other cities.

The City Council approved an ordinance Tuesday regulating card parlors in Compton. The ordinance requires a criminal investigation of potential card club owners, lists of games to be played and full descriptions of any related activities to be held in the club. The city is negotiating with developers who want to build a seven-acre, $9-million entertainment center on the site of Compton's near-empty auto mall.

Haig Kelegian did the federal government a big favor some years back by taking an embarrassment off its hands: the Bicycle Club casino in Bell Gardens, a card club the feds had acquired, somewhat absent-mindedly, through an asset seizure in a 1990 money-laundering case. After buying out the government's interest in 1999, Kelegian and his partners spent a few million restoring the Bike so it could reassume its status as one of the leading poker clubs in the state.

Three council members said Wednesday that they would welcome a Las Vegas casino managing a card club at Los Alamitos Race Course if the club is approved by city voters next month. "I would not have a problem with that," Councilwoman Joyce C. Nicholson said. "It is not going to be glitzy . . . or a Las Vegas review. This is a classic, well-done club. If Vegas is so bad, why does everybody go there?"

The lawyer who reconstructed much of a 19th-Century Iowa courthouse in a somewhat isolated area of north Torrance is giving two Gardena card clubs a new deal. "There are no jokers," the attorney, Dudley W. Gray Sr., said. "My project is in the cards." His project is turning the defunct Rainbow and Monterey clubs into a $17.5-million corporate headquarters and research-and-development park. "We closed escrow in January and I expect to break ground in the next 90 days," he said.