in Mahagonny Poker Drink Salon

I'm very uncomfortable about legal gambling. It touches the small but permanent part of me that's Puritanical, that's oppressively Calvinist, and makes me want to forbid and prohibit wicked things, things that huge numbers of people clearly enjoy, for the Public Good.

The reason I don't actually demand that government stop these wicked things is that I once visited a place where government prohibited all wicked things. It used the force of law and police and prison to prohibit all naughty and wicked things. It was Prague under the Socialists (Communists), and it was the most unhappy place I have ever seen, the total collapse and total failure of a government to respect its human community. My friends who lived across the Wall from Socialist East Berlin and Socialist East Germany have similar memories of its governments.

The Communists are gone now, and I've been back to Prague, and there's all sorts of naughty and wicked things going on there now. And there's authentic happiness. And authentic freedom. The police and the government are much more restrained about the things they feel they need to ban and prohibit.

One of the problems with a city whose big legal industry is gambling is that gamblers don't just go for the gambling.

They go because wherever there's gambling all day and night, there's also prostitution, child prostitution, and addictive and powerful drugs, all available with a certainty and reliability, speed and ease the "sports" and the high-rollers can't get in their permanent homes.

Alcohol, which is legal -- well, there's no such place as a casino without huge amounts of drinking, and usually while you're throwing large sums down the toilet, the drinks are free. Gambling goes best with a fuzzy head and bad judgment -- at least the house feels it goes best that way.

In the last 25 years, the American media has made Donald Trump into a national superstar, for the sole virtue of making millions of dollars and putting on a disgusting public spectacle of how he makes it and spends and wastes it. In America, when you see Donald Trump on television, you see a man loudly hailed by all as a Winner, someone children should admire and hope to become someday. Children are encouraged to grow up to become Donald Trump.

I hope someone will Leave A Comment and remind me of the Good Things, of just one Good Thing Donald Trump has done for America or for the world. In how he makes his money, and how he spends it, one might compare Trump with Bill Gates. You can follow Bill Gates around for a decade and not get much closer to child prostitutes or crack or powder cocaine or heroin. And if you want to bash Windows or Microsoft, compare these wicked things with Trump's casino industry. Compare the way Gates takes your money, and the things he gives back in return, with the way Trump takes your money, and the things his enterprises give back in return.

But here's a snapshot of what life and death are like in the shadow of one of Donald Trump's three Atlantic City casinos, the Taj Mahal.

When Atlantic City legalized casino gambling in 1978, and became the first place east of the Mississippi River where gambling was legal, I detoured there a few times on trips from Massachusetts to Washington DC to see it and try my hand at blackjack. All the casinos are along the Atlantic shore on a brightly illuminated Boardwalk.

I walked one block inland from the Boardwalk and was horrified. Just a block from the casinos was the worst urban blight, poverty and devastation I had ever seen in America, and it matched photographs of European cities after the war ended in 1945. Enemy bombers could have made Atlantic City worse, but not much worse. AIDS hadn't yet ended the practice, but a block from the Boardwalk was a commercial blood bank open around the clock paying $25 to anyone who sold them a pint of blood. There was a waiting line. People were that desperate for cash.

A quarter century later, and barely a dollar has floated west from the Boardwalk casino strip to benefit the rest of the Atlantic City human community. Here is what the great American hero and winner Donald Trump, who owns three Atlantic City casinos, has helped to do and has grown rich from.

If your American city has fallen on hard times, someone inevitably will promise that legalized casino gambling can turn it around and save it and bring back Happy Days and Good Times, lots of jobs, a big new tax base, prosperity. Politicians love it because it's "voluntary taxation" -- people trudge through a blizzard to pay gambling taxes to the government.

The guy selling you the Miracle Resurrection of Casinos is lying. Just visit Atlantic City, at any hour day or night, and walk a block west of the glittering Boardwalk. When you come home again, Leave A Comment. Tell Vleeptron what you saw.

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The New York Times (USA)
Saturday 25 November 2006

Broken Lives and Victims
in Shadow of Taj Mahal

by Nicholas Confessore and Nate Schweber

Sometimes, when troublemakers enter Papa Joe's diner on Tennessee Avenue, Joe Boccino glares at them until they leave. Other times, he pulls out his black Easton baseball bat and raps it hard -- once, twice, three times -- on the counter.

"You're in the middle of crack city," Mr. Boccino said yesterday at his restaurant, surveying this blighted corner of Atlantic City, where the authorities think at least some of the four women found dead in a drainage ditch on Monday were known and spent much of their time.

Not far from the Boardwalk, it is the kind of neighborhood where trouble puts its feet up. Drugs and prostitution are the main pursuits of those who visit here, and of those who stay.

Up the street, on Pacific Avenue, prostitutes lean against pawn shop windows lined with engagement rings, scouting for customers.

When they want to eat, some come to Papa Joe's. When they want to sleep or shower or shoot drugs, most walk around the corner to Ocean Avenue, a blocklong stretch between Pacific Avenue and the Boardwalk where crumbling homes and dilapidated boarding houses languish in the shadow of the nearby Trump Taj Mahal.

"These people have nowhere to stay. They just crash where they can," Mr. Boccino said. "But they're pretty good people. They're like family."

By yesterday, though, fear and a sense of resignation had settled in.

Kim Raffo, 35, from the Canarsie area of Brooklyn, was part of that family and was the first of the four murder victims identified.

Yesterday the authorities announced that they had identified a second victim, Tracy Ann Roberts, 23, whose last known address was on Tennessee Avenue. They said both she and Ms. Raffo had had prostitution arrests.

The Atlantic County prosecutor, Jeffrey S. Blitz, said a task force of almost two dozen investigators from the F.B.I., the state police and local agencies had been brought in to compare photographs, DNA samples and markings on some of the bodies.

Earlier, some of the regulars along Ocean Avenue said they feared the body of a woman with a butterfly tattoo, found wrapped in a red hooded sweatshirt, was that of Ms. Roberts, whom they described as a young, blond and boisterous Philadelphia native.

"I used to let her stay in my apartment, and I remember her sleeping 18 hours because she was so tired from ripping and running," said Charles Coles, 40, who said he works in construction. He said detectives had shown him photographs that he recognized as being Ms. Roberts.

Mr. Coles said he last saw Ms. Roberts on Oct. 27 outside the Sands casino, where she told him that she had recently been hospitalized after a man assaulted her and hurt her throat.

His sister, Shakira Coles, said Ms. Roberts had family in Georgia and had spent time there herself. Ms. Coles said she had a "country accent" despite being from Philadelphia.

Jannette Brown, 47, said that the first and last times she ever saw Ms. Roberts she was asking for crack cocaine. Ms. Roberts had been a dancer at a strip club on Pacific Avenue called The Playground, she said, until her addiction began affecting her looks and she turned to prostitution.

Ms. Brown, who was a prostitute herself until last year, said Ms. Roberts had left a child in Philadelphia but wanted to quell her addiction, leave prostitution and go back to being a mother.

"'I can't do it; how did you do it?'" Ms. Brown said she had asked her.

Mr. Coles and other neighborhood residents also said they believed another victim to be a woman they knew, a timid Boston native with a daughter she never saw and a vicious crack habit she could never quite break. She slept on friends' couches, they said, and every day slathered makeup over her acne so strangers would pay her for sex. In recent days, they said, the police had been asking about her.

"Fifteen dollars was a good date for her, isn't that sad?" said Ms. Brown, 47, who knew both her and Ms. Raffo.

Ms. Brown said that she had once taken the Boston woman with her to perform oral sex on a customer in a parked van for $50 each. "Afterward she said, 'Oh my god, that was the easiest money I've ever made in my life,' " Ms. Brown said.

For many of the prostitutes who live on or near Ocean Avenue, addiction leashes their bodies twice over -- to the drugs, and to the place where they can be most quickly found.

It is rare for them to accompany customers to the motels on the Black Horse Pike, where the bodies were found, Ms. Brown said, because it is too far from their dealers.

Instead, they do their work in a nearby alley where old syringes and glass pipes crack underfoot, or in a vacant lot off Ocean Avenue, where a hand-painted sign urges, "Repent to Jesus."

"Every penny they got they bought either heroin or cocaine," Ms. Brown said. "They would not even buy a roof for a night because that would take away from their drug money."

Most people on Ocean Avenue are just passing through. The lucky ones work in the casinos. The rest whip back and forth between odd jobs like waitressing and less savory ones like prostitution.

Dee Roman, 31, who lives above Papa Joe's, said she saw vials and bags of crack on the street "all the time." She added, "You can't get away from that stuff."

Ms. Brown said she feared that another of the victims was the daughter of a friend who had used crack since she was 17 and later began using heroin.

The woman worked a strip of Pacific Avenue known as "The Track," as did the Boston woman, Ms. Brown said.

She said she had last seen her friend's daughter this month wearing a denim miniskirt, a bra and a mesh blouse, an outfit that matches a police description of one of the victims.

"I remember telling her, 'It's not summertime,'" so take off the miniskirt, Ms. Brown said.

The police would not comment yesterday on the unidentified victims.

The police have been showing a computer-generated composite picture of one woman, and Mr. Boccino said they had been asking people about the Boston woman, whom he nicknamed "Christmas Tree" because of her height.

She would come in for breakfast around 2 a.m., he said, ordering a sausage, egg and cheese sandwich on a bagel with an orange soda before working the streets, ignoring his pleas for her to get clean.

"She just got her sandwich and said, 'I'll see you later, Papa Joe,'" he said.

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Copyright (c) 2006 The New York Times Company