Hawaiian Gardens Plans Yearly Audits of Bingo Operations

By RALPH CIPRIANO

Dec. 14, 1986 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

HAWAIIAN GARDENS — City Council members say they plan to seek an annual audit of two city bingo operations, including one run by Cooper Fellowship Inc. that is grossing about $2 million a month.

The audit would ensure that the city is getting its 1% share of the gross receipts due the under Hawaiian Gardens’ 1983 bingo ordinance, Mayor Kathleen Navejas said. The city receives about $20,000 a month from the seven-night-a-week Cooper Fellowship operation and has become “very dependent” on those revenues, the mayor said.

Under the bingo ordinance, the mayor said “we just take their word for it” that the money received is, indeed, 1% of gross revenues. Her proposed amendment, which is supported by three of four other council members, would make the bingo hall pay for the audit.

The mayor’s proposal for an annual audit would apply only to bingo operations that gross more than $50,000 a year, she said. The only other bingo game in the city that would fall under the ordinance is a two-day-a-week operation run by the Lakewood Elks Lodge.

$650 a Month From Elks

The Elks game grosses about $70,000 a month, according to city records. Like Cooper Fellowship, the firm pays the city 1% of its monthly gross, excluding the first $5,000. The Elks’ monthly payments amount to about $650.

Shirley Batistic, office manager of the Lakewood Elks, said her organization would have “no problem” complying with the audit.

William J. Thon, a spokesman for Cooper Fellowship officials, declined to be interviewed about the organization’s bingo operation.

The council is scheduled to consider the proposal at its Dec. 23 meeting. In interviews, two other council members, Richard Vineyard and Rosalie Sher, said they support the mayor’s proposal while Councilman Venn Furgeson said he was undecided.

Councilman Donald Schultze said he also would vote for the proposal in order to support the mayor. Schultze, however, said in an interview that an audit of a cash operation such as Cooper Fellowship might be a “waste of time.”

Concern Over ‘Bad Image’

“All it is going to show us is what they want us to see,” he said.

Navejas said she proposed an annual audit because she was concerned about a number of allegations surrounding Cooper Fellowship’s operation, which she said has given the city a “bad image.” But none of the other council members said they agree with Navejas on that point, with Furgeson saying Cooper Fellowship is “one of the better” bingo operations in the area.

Cooper Fellowship’s founder and executive director, Jack Blackburn, was arrested last year on misdemeanor charges of illegally using bingo proceeds to pay wages to himself and other employees. Two other Cooper Fellowship employees, Larry Hayden and Robert Ellis, were also arrested and charged with receiving illegal salaries from the bingo operation. The three cases, which are pending, followed a 17-month investigation by the Los Angeles County district attorney and a state attorney general’s audit, Deputy Dist. Atty. James Koller said.

Since February, 1984, Cooper Fellowship, a private, nonprofit organization, has used proceeds from the Hawaiian Gardens bingo operation to run an alcoholism treatment center in Santa Ana.

One of State’s Largest

The Hawaiian Gardens bingo hall is said by county and state officials to be one of the largest bingo operations in the state. It is open for at least six hours a night and stays open until 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday, often packing in capacity crowds of up to 600 people.

The operation is so successful that it grossed more than $20 million in 1985 and more than $18 million in the first nine months of 1986, according to city records. That is considerably more than some area poker clubs, such as the California Bell Club, which is averaging $1.2 million in monthly gross receipts, and the Huntington Park Casino, which is grossing about $500,000 a month, according to city officials in those cities.

Both the Elks lodge and Cooper Fellowship augment their regular bingo games with sales of a lottery-style game known as “pull-tab” or “break-open” bingo. The pull-tab game is played throughout the county but is banned in nearby Long Beach.

The game went to court recently when two Catholic churches and two Jewish congregations tried to have the Long Beach ban thrown out. But Superior Court Judge William H. Winston Jr. said, “There’s just absolutely no way this (pull-tab bingo) could be adequately policed.”

A sheriff’s vice official said he also had some concerns about the game.

‘Susceptible to Corruption’

“Pull tabs in our estimation are easily susceptible to corruption,” said Lt. James Ware of the sheriff’s vice bureau in Los Angeles. “A good pull-tab fixer can alter one in 15 seconds at the most.”

Ware said deputies have no evidence of any wrongdoing in Hawaiian Gardens games. Policing bingo halls, he said, is “not one of our major responsibilities at this point.”

Batistic, the Elks lodge office manager, said that pull-tab bingo in her opinion is “no more susceptible to corruption than any other form of bingo.” She added that the Elks lodge has never had any problem with the game and that it is highly lucrative, accounting for about half of that club’s gross revenue.

Break-open, or pull-tab bingo is similar to the state’s instant lottery game. With the cards used at Cooper Fellowship, when a player pulls tabs on the back of the cards, combinations of diamonds, gold bars, bells, oranges, plums, cherries and lemons are revealed.

Three diamonds in a row are worth $200; three gold bars, $100; three oranges, $25; three plums, $10, and three lemons, $1.