All of the ashes he flicked off his cigarette hadn’t fallen to the ground before he dashed across the floor again. It was clamped between his ring and pinky fingers because he held a wad of cash for payouts between the middle and index.
“The bigger the crowd, the faster the pace is going to be,” said Matt West. “Everything kind of comes naturally; you treat people like people, you take their money and you pay them out.”
The 30-year-old has been a runner and caller at bingo parlors for nearly a decade. He said he has worked as an employee at Mr. Bingo, located at Old Business 98 and Tyndall Parkway, since it opened six years ago and has learned the game is “something people do in their spare time.”
West is right. Most bingo parlors are open seven days a week, mornings and evenings. Just about any “spare time” available could be spent playing at the halls — including playing instant winner pull tab games for those who have only one second to spare.
All cigarette smoke and high hopes aside, while state lawmakers have created laws to curb the expansion of gambling, there remains obvious loopholes and little oversight for Air purifier.
Florida laws prohibit a gaming establishment from operating for the sake of gaming. But for bingo, this rule calls for each game to be sponsored by a nonprofit organization that has been in existence for at least three years.
And, because state law requires all proceeds from bingo games to be allocated to sponsoring organizations — minus operating costs — local parlors have donated hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to charities.
Chief Assistant State Attorney Gregory Wilson said bingo owes its legal status to past times, when churches would host bingo games as fundraisers. He said because bingo was established before state gambling laws were created, lawmakers wanted to make sure some exceptions were made to let bingo continue. The caveat was that bingo proceeds must be donated to charity.
However, the state statute that regulates bingo, FS 849.0931, does not require parlors to submit a financial report — to the state or any oversight agency — that shows operating costs and donation amounts.
“We work from trust,” said George Hughes, sponsor’s representative at Bingo Paradise. “We do our thing and they do theirs. We take our (money) to the lodge and then give it out to the people.”
Hughes’ lodge, Ira Lindsey Masonic Lodge 365, has used bingo money to make donations to local causes since 2000.
He said sponsoring games has allowed his lodge to make “sizeable donations” to the community, from giving money to help Franklin County men hit by the oyster crisis to helping fund the late Kayte Karen Taunton Hollingsworth’s trip to India for a life-saving surgical procedure.
“There was a need for my lodge to arrive at some way to make some money, so we can put the money back out on the street,” he added.
However, the quid pro quo relationship operators have with charitable organizations has led some bingo halls to take advantage of what State Attorney Wilson dubbed the “very general guidelines.”
State law requires “no charitable, nonprofit or veterans organization serve as a sponsor of a bingo game or instant bingo conducted by another, but such organization may only be directly involved in the conduct of such a game. …”
In other words, bingo games must be run by the charitable organizations that get the proceeds. However, all five bingo halls in Bay County hire their own paid employees, while the sponsors often watch without direct involvement. This means customers pay to play games and some of the money goes toward paying employees, rather than to supporting charities.
State Attorney Wilson said he interprets the section of law as meaning “they don’t have to be the one calling out the bingo numbers, but there has to be a representative from the civic organization or charity present at the game, doing something.”
Within the general guideline concerning who conducts bingo games, volunteers play bingo and other games — Wilson plays pull tabs — but are not required to operate the games in any way.
State Attorney Wilson: “the vendor has to provide to the charity, a portion of the proceeds. … The exact amount that they have to provide is not specified. But they have to provide some proceeds …”
“They are authorized to deduct all the expenses associated with (playing the game),” he added.
Though the amount of the jackpot is displayed for all to see, how much each game has raised is undisclosed.
And, you can’t determine what the actual overhead is without doing a forensic audit, Wilson said.
“The charities will sometimes ask law enforcement to look and make sure (the law) is being complied with correctly,” he said. “It’s when you have multiple charities that are taking part in (bingo parlor games) and you’ve got one facilitator that’s rotating them out that you have to look a little more closely about how the operation is funded.”
If local law enforcement receives a complaint or perceives fraud, a forensic accountant is assigned in order to verify the parlor is complying with the law.
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