The legislation allowing 15 riverboat casinos was passed in 1991 during the administration of Gov. And Edwards himself went down, now serving a 10-year federal prison sentence for extorting riverboat applicants. A downtown casino in New Orleans went bankrupt twice. Four riverboats in New Orleans either failed or were canceled. Edwin Edwards, got a small share of a New Orleans boat that he eventually sold for $26 million.Īs a result, Mississippi's industry boomed while Louisiana's often staggered. Gus Mijalis, a longtime crony of former Gov. The Louisiana projects had to have local investors, some of which sold out for millions even before the wagering began. Industry analysts have said Louisiana took a wrongheaded approach, first by limiting the number of riverboat casinos, which made the licenses themselves valuable and subject to corruption, and then restricting land based gambling in New Orleans.ĭuring the same time, Mississippi took a market-based approach to dockside gambling, rather than limiting the number of licenses. While the state was preoccupied with gambling, the 1990s economic boom across the United States largely bypassed Louisiana, which lost thousands of manufacturing and oil jobs and now finds itself in an almost-desperate game of catch-up with other states in attracting new business in a much-slower environment. Three Indian reservation built gambling institutions - free from state taxation- and their location on land was considered more attractive to gamblers. The Shreveport and Lake Charles areas, originally slated to have only a small piece of the action, instead became Louisiana's tourist gambler stops, entertaining millions from Texas. New Orleans failed as a tourist destination point for gamblers, while the once-quiet beaches of Biloxi, Miss., and miles of impoverished cotton fields in Tunica, Miss., became the Deep South's key destination points for players.

Although more than 18,000 people are employed in the business, almost nothing has turned out the way that gambling supporters expected, while unfortunately, many of the warnings that opponents voiced from the start have come true.

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