When Indiana Live! opened to
the public on Monday, Gomes said he was extremely pleased
with the lack of problems that developed during the day,
calling it "one of the smoothest openings" that he could
remember. He remarked on the "great team of people" working
at the facility under the day-to-day management of casino
general manager Mark Hemmerle and mentioned the "strong
Indiana work ethic."
"What I like about people from
around here, the people we have working here, is that they
are what they say they are," Gomes said. "They
don't have a hidden agenda. If they tell you that they are
excited about their jobs and glad to be working at the casino,
they really mean it."
He said that prior to the opening
of the casino, he talked to several of the cocktail servers
who told him how nervous they were, and Gomes was impressed
that the women were worried about doing a good job.
"They
were so serious and so concerned because they wanted to do
so well," he said. "I told them not to worry. You
will do a good job if your heart is in the right place."
Gomes
expressed his confidence in David Gentile, a former FBI
agent who is Indiana Live!'s head of corporate security
and surveillance, and it is a job he is certainly qualified
to critique. Gomes started his career in casinos as a law
enforcement officer in Las Vegas, working for Nevada Gov.
Michael Callahan, who recruited Gomes to "clean up the casinos" in the
early 1970s. Gomes said he knows what is necessary to keep
a casino in compliance with state laws and free from corrupt
influences.
Gomes dreamed for years about a career as an FBI
agent and became an accountant expressly so he could get
a job with the federal agency, which insisted at that time
that its agents were educated as lawyers or accountants
before they could apply. Even though he was working with
a prestigious accounting firm after becoming a certified
public accountant, Gomes hated the job where he was tied
behind a desk, and he jumped at the chance to work in law
enforcement.
He was willing to give up a lucrative job in
accounting with an international firm because saving the
underdog and defeating bullies always appealed to him.
"My father was cheated
by a man who stole from his business," Gomes said. "That
man never went to justice, and this made me mad. Someone
has to protect the innocent."
Life on the edge
Gomes took
on organized crime in the Las Vegas casinos at the age
of 25, but he said he never really thought about how dangerous
it was or that he should be afraid.
What did surprise Gomes
was the brutality of the mob element and "the lengths
that these people would go to get what they wanted. I had
no idea how rough it would get," Gomes said.
The 1995
Martin Scorsese movie "Casino" is based on the
real-life story of Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, who
ran the Stardust, Fremont and the Hacienda casinos in Las
Vegas for the Chicago mob from the 1970s until the early
1980s. The film is based in part on the investigation of
the Stardust Casino that Gomes led while he was working with
the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and he said the movie does
a good job of explaining what he and his investigators were
up against at that time.
The murdering sociopath Tony Spilotro
is portrayed in the movie by Joe Pesci as a sadistic killer
who leaves a trail of dead and tortured bodies in his wake,
and Gomes said the real Spilotro was even more ruthless
than the movie portrayal."
My wife was worried about me," Gomes
said, "but the mob was killing their own people, not
the cops."
He remembers one "snitch" who always
met him in the Nevada desert to give him information, but
one day the informant showed up in Gomes' office."
I
told him to get out and never come back, that the mob would
kill him if they saw him in my office, but he wouldn't
listen," Gomes
said.
Later, Gomes said the man's body was found in the desert,
and his head was found on the freeway in New Jersey."I
was 25; I thought I could do anything," Gomes said
with a laugh. "I liked the rush of adrenaline, life
on the edge."
Doing what was right
Despite his boredom
with accounting, Gomes said his accounting background made
him more efficient in his job as chief of audits and special
investigations with the Nevada Gaming Control Board. Gov.
Callahan wanted Gomes and his team to find out how organized
crime was skimming money out of several Nevada casinos
and stop it.
"Michael
Callahan was my hero," Gomes said. "He was all
about ethics and doing what was right."
When he was
growing up during the 1950s and 1960s, Gomes said it was
common knowledge that the mafia was involved in some of
the casinos and that a number of them were fronts for the
mob. He said the Las Vegas games themselves were considered
legitimate and fair in most cases, but the mafia was skimming
off money from the gambling profits, which led to less
money going to the state of Nevada's tax coffers.
The mob
stranglehold on some of the casinos was largely broken
by using the information about the mobsters and what was
going on in the casinos that was supplied by Gomes' network
of paid informants. He was also able to convince the Nevada
Legislature to authorize more agents to help him monitor
the casinos.
Gomes and his agents discovered that money
was being funneled from the Stardust back to the Chicago
mob through the use of illegal scales that were used to
weigh the change from the slot machines in the Stardust
accounting room. A surprise raid on the accounting rooms
at the casino exposed what they were doing and led to the
vice president of slots leaving the country in a hurry
and the arrests of many of those involved.
Gomes said the
only way to avoid the kind of graft that formerly plagued
the Las Vegas casinos is to enforce strong internal controls
on the handling of the gambling money. Thorough background
checks can keep unsavory types of criminals off the casino
payrolls and constant supervision helps keep people honest,
he said.
Gomes said he helped devise some of the internal-control
procedures that are used in casinos today. This includes
constant surveillance when money is transferred from the
slot machines to the cage to be counted and specific procedures
to get people in and out of the counting room.
"There
are people constantly thinking of sophisticated new ways
to cheat," Gomes admitted, "so we have to stay
ahead of them."
These internal-control procedures are
very important, Gomes said, because "legitimate citizens
need to know they are getting their fair share" of
the slot machine money owed in taxes to their state, city
and county governments.
Gomes is pleased his son, Aaron,
has followed him into the casino business and is currently
vice president of operations and marketing for The Gomes Gaming Management Companyand is working in Shelbyville
with his father. After working for the MGM Mirage and completing
internships in gaming, Aaron is considered to be an expert
in slot marketing and selected the $30 million worth of
slot machines needed for Indiana Live! |
