Just a few months after Milton McGregor reopened his casino at VictoryLand in Macon County, State Troopers raided the electronic bingo complex again, this time under the orders of Attorney General Luther Strange.
Strange announced the raid Tuesday morning as his office began a wider campaign against electronic bingo of all types.
A suit was filed in circuit court against Poarch Creek Indian Casinos in Wetumpka, Montgomery and Atmore.
The troopers served a search warrant seeking the seizure of several hundred gambling machines and an undisclosed amount of cash from VictoryLand, according to a press release from Strange’s office.
The casino reopened to fanfare and a crowd of thousands in December.
Former Tuskegee Mayor Johnny Ford spoke with media near the roadblock state troopers created at the VictoryLand entrance. He said he planned to confront Gov. Robert Bentley at his office in Montgomery in hopes he would be arrested.
“We want to go to court; that’s our only hope,” Ford said. “We’re prepared to protest until we go to jail, until we go to federal court. Once we’re in federal court, we can get everyone under oath: me, (former Gov.) Bob Riley and Luther Strange.”
He then proceeded to visit a number of government offices in Montgomery in an attempt to be arrested.
At the reopening on Dec. 18, 2012, owner Milton McGregor expressed a desire to get the facility reopened so some of his 1,200 employees could get a paycheck in time for Christmas.
Strange said in the statement that the search warrant was the “culmination of an investigative process over the last several months.”
State law enforcement agents determined the new electronic bingo machines were also illegal under state law, despite the finding by Macon County Sheriff David Warren and a gambling machine expert that the newest machines at VictoryLand fit the Alabama Supreme Court’s definition of charity bingo and were therefore legal.
In his statement, Strange did not address the specifics of Warren’s certification. He said he’d been working “since my first day in office, to “ensure that illegal gambling laws are enforced consistently across the state.”
Strange, who ordered the troopers to descend on Shorter, blamed the operators of “large scale illegal gambling” for forcing law enforcement “to expend valuable resources to deal with the growing problem.”
He urged the Alabama Legislature to create an effective deterrent, calling current anti-gambling laws only a “slap-on-the-wrist misdemeanor.”
“The Legislature must change that weakness in our law and create a badly needed deterrent for large scale illegal gambling by increasing the penalty for operating an illegal slot machine casino to a felony,” Strange said.
