Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Driving down Highway 61 from Memphis, Tennessee to Tunica, Mississippi, the
fields are flat, with occasional bursts of swampland, and cotton balls
blowing on the tar. As you edge south, the billboards grow more insistent,
offering endless variations on the notion of chance: "Best cash back!",
"Best dealers", "$10k Fridays". Follow your luck, and you end up riding
towards Mississippi's tallest building, the Gold Strike, and into the
parking lot in front of the old Vegas frontage of the Horseshoe. A vintage
car is marooned between red ropes and the foyer echoes to the sound of "96
Tears". There, I ask a security guard for directions to the historic town of
Tunica. "It's not very historic," he replies. "The old town, then?" "You're
not going to see much there," he says. "Have y'all been up to Memphis to see
all the Elvis Presley stuff?" Traditionally, the traffic along Highway 61
has gone north. Long before Bob Dylan celebrated the roving gamblers of the
road in song, Mississippi's black population was heading out towards Memphis
and Chicago in search of work and freedom, taking their music with them.
That migration spawned soul and rock 'n' roll. But today, if you keep
driving along the casino roads, out past the western facade of Sam's Town,
with its saloon and its bathhouse, and on beyond the RV park, you come to a
point where the tarmac ends in a circle. It is a junction between the
commerce of Tunica's present, and the colour of its recent past. Twenty
years ago, this area would have been nothing but fields; the view across the
levee would have been as it was when the most famous of the delta bluesmen,
Robert Johnson, lived here. The centre of the Johnson myth is the crossroads
where, in exchange for the gift of his talent, he sold his soul to the
devil. The location of this mythical gamble is understandably imprecise, and
several delta crossroads lay claim to it, but Dick Taylor, executive
director of the Tunica Museum, believes the cemetery, out where the
Crosstown Road meets the Bonny Blue Road, has as good a case as any. "If
Robert Johnson's ghost is still walking around his birthplace then he can
look at the casino lights any night," he said. "He was born right there next
to the levee at Robinsonville, and grew up right there. He would see Sam's
Town, looking right across the levee. "I have no iron-clad proof that he
sold his soul to the devil at the Crosstown cemetery but he was very well
acquainted with it, and my experience with the devil is that you don't have
to travel tremendous distances to meet him. All you have to do is express
some kind of desire to see the cloven hooves and the horns and the
pitchfork, and he'll come to you. Crosstown cemetery probably has the best
claim on being the most sincere place that he would have found the devil."

A certain pragmatism on matters of public morality has long been a feature
of life in the Mississippi delta, so it is perhaps not surprising that the
area embraced gambling with evangelistic fervour. The economic impact of
that decision, which crept though the legislature in a little-noticed
amendment to a spending bill in 1991, is as obvious as the statistics of the
"Tunica Miracle" are startling.

In 1985, when the Rev Jesse Jackson visited Sugar Ditch in the town of
Tunica, he proclaimed it a national disgrace, dubbing it "America's
Ethiopia". The mechanisation of agriculture meant that unemployment was
endemic. "Sugar Ditch was as much a mindset as a physical location," said Mr
Taylor. "It was the depths of despair that caused our citizens to say, here
we are and it's hopeless. The influx of casino money and the jobs and
opportunities and the hope that the casinos brought for some people has
broken this never-ending circle of poverty."

When the first casino, Splash, opened at Mhoon Landing in 1992, there was no
indication that gambling would transform the economy. Corporate studies had
detected no appetite for gambling in the delta, and the founders of Splash,
Rick and Ron Schilling, were unable to persuade the power companies to
supply electricity to their converted barge. (A peculiarity of Mississippi
gaming law is that the casinos must be partially built over water).

James Gravenmier, now graphic designer at Sam's Town, worked on the first
advertisements for Splash, and recalls the impact of that casino. "They
opened for about three days, then the gaming commission shut it down for a
couple of days 'cause they had so much money piled up," he said. "Great big
bales - they were putting it in stacks and tying it together. They couldn't
count it fast enough. They made more money than they had any dreams of. They
made $850,000 (£430,000) just on the admission. Ten bucks a head. They made
$150m in their first year."

Mr Taylor added: "People would wait at the Splash for up to eight hours for
the opportunity to come onboard. There was one lady whose job was to welcome
you, and click a little clicker, and when it got to 800 she said, 'Not until
somebody leaves'. Now they did keep you well-oiled while you waited, so it
wasn't a terrible ordeal, but it was a long wait."

The success of Splash alerted the gaming corporations to an untapped market,
and a gambling gold rush followed. The price of land rocketed. "They started
throwing money in here and they went to these landowners and offered 'em so
much money for these cotton fields that they couldn't say no," said Mr
Gravenmier.

Not all the casinos have been successful. Some have closed, and some have
been re-branded. Circus-Circus came and went, and Fitzgerald's is currently
moving upscale with the slogan "gambling just got better".

There are nine supercasinos in Tunica, and each makes a pitch for a
particular market. The ideal visitor to Sam's Town is said to be a cowboy
boot-wearing, Nascar racing fan. Hollywood offers a kind of Hard Rock
proximity to fame; the Batmobile and the DeLorean car from Back to the
Future are parked by the one-armed bandits. The Horseshoe has a blues museum
where you can admire Neil Sedaka's 1998 microphone and one of Albert King's
favourite hats (circa 1986).

No one visits a casino to admire the scenery but the numbers are impressive.
Webster Franklin was president of the local Chamber of Commerce during the
early years of the "Tunica Miracle", and is now president and CEO of the
Convention and Visitors' Bureau. Under his watch, Tunica has gone from being
the poorest county in the US to the country's third biggest gaming centre,
behind Atlantic City and Las Vegas.

"No one ever dreamed, when Splash opened, that 15 years later, this would be
a $1.3bn-a-year industry employing 16,000 people. That's more people than
live in Tunica County. We only have a residential population of 10,000, and
a workforce of 5,500 that live in the county."

Before the casinos came, there wasn't a stop-light in Tunica County. Now
there is a new Interstate, I-69, and the two-lane highways have been
broadened to four. There are new schools, sewers and drains, and the airport
has been expanded.

The casinos pay a 12 per cent gaming tax, with 8 per cent going to the
state, and 4 per cent to the local economy. That 4 per cent comes to $45-50m
a year. In an attempt to diversify the economy, a 2,200-acre site has been
prepared, so the area can tender for industrial projects, such as a proposed
Rolls-Royce aeroplane engine factory. "Never in our wildest dreams would we
have thought of putting Tunica and Rolls-Royce in the same sentence had it
not been for the opportunities created by gaming," said Mr Franklin.

The poverty of Tunica County overrode moral and religious objections to
gambling in a way that was not replicated in neighbouring counties. Clearly,
the benefits have not been shared equally. Despite the casino jobs,
unemployment is still about 10 per cent, and there are some alarming
statistics, such as a 1,600 per cent increase in court cases in the first
five years of legal gambling. Mr Franklin said the crime figures can be
explained by the huge increase in visitor numbers. "I live in the town of
Tunica," he said. "I rarely lock my doors. There is little to no crime.
Sure, the bicycles get stolen, just like any other place."

Mr Taylor said the benefits outweighed the bad side-effects. "Having been
raised as a Baptist, my imagination led me to believe that this was the
worst thing that could happen," he said. "In my mind I could see the bars
and the liquor stores, tattoo parlours and topless dancing ladies, and all
of the vices I associated with gambling and organised crime. None of that
has materialised. We laughed before the casinos came and said if we could
have organised crime at least we'd have some organisation. But that didn't
occur.

"I'm sure there are people that have become habitual gamblers, and perhaps
are addicted to it - and that would weigh on the bad side. But the fact that
we have allowed most of the population to be employable, and we have been
able to improve the basic lot of all of our citizens makes it more good than
bad."

These arguments will be welcomed by the British government as it prepares to
nominate a site for the first British supercasino. But Mr Franklin added a
note of caution. One supercasino isn't enough, he says. Success requires
competition.

"If we had said one casino, or even two or three, could locate here, you
would not have seen the infrastructure improvements, the four-laning of the
roads, the new buildings, the factory-outlet shopping, the golf courses, the
entertainment facilities. You would not have seen an area that has grown
from cotton fields to what it is today."

What would Robert Johnson make of it? In life, he was a gambler. In death,
he has three graves, none of which is guaranteed to house his bones. The
odds are, he isn't spinning in any of them.