Gambling News by Gambling Headquarters

There are sights you just don't see anymore in La Salle County. For example: In the 1950s, La Salle County State's Attorney Harland Warren brought the hammer down on gambling in the county. One day during that time, he and one of his assistants, Craig Armstrong, raided Becker & Currie's Cigar Store in Peru, where sporting gentlemen took pleasure in placing wagers upon such elegant games of chance as craps. Warren and Armstrong, who both served in World War II, rousted about 20 gamblers and lined them up military-style in two columns on the sidewalk in front of the joint. They then marched the sad sack gamblers to the cop shop a few blocks away, as if the group was a platoon of recruits. But such sights are a thing of the past. The good old-fashioned La Salle County gambling raid has gone the way of the Dodo bird, rotary dial phones and leisure suits. The last time there was a gambling raid in these parts was April 1996 -- that's pre-Google to show how long ago that was. Since then, there have been only a handful of minor, accidental gambling charges, such as when police make a traffic stop and find pull tabs. But gone are bona fide police-barging-in-with-search warrant raids. Today is a good time to talk about gambling raids -- or the lack thereof -- in the county, because we're in between the biggest wagering days of the year, Super Bowl Sunday and the March 11 NCAA March Madness basketball picks. Gambling raids were common in these parts through the mid-1990s -- almost as regular as milk deliveries from Pitstick Dairy. It's not that there aren't any gambling dens to raid anymore in the county. There are plenty, with some towns or their outskirts having more than others. In the past, raids were often spearheaded by outside killjoys, such as the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and the State Liquor Control Commission. Local agencies also made raids on their own, too. In particular, Ottawa Police hassled gamblers in the early 1990s, often in response to complaints from the relatives of bad luck gamblers who had blown paychecks on too few jacks or too many lemons. In 2007, police at every level have greater priorities than swinging axes at video poker machines -- those priorities namely being drugs and on the federal level in particular, terrorism.