Saturday, February 10, 2007

There are sights you just don't see anymore in La Salle County. For example:
In the 1950s, La Salle County State's Attorney Harland Warren brought the
hammer down on gambling in the county. One day during that time, he and one
of his assistants, Craig Armstrong, raided Becker & Currie's Cigar Store in
Peru, where sporting gentlemen took pleasure in placing wagers upon such
elegant games of chance as craps. Warren and Armstrong, who both served in
World War II, rousted about 20 gamblers and lined them up military-style in
two columns on the sidewalk in front of the joint. They then marched the sad
sack gamblers to the cop shop a few blocks away, as if the group was a
platoon of recruits. But such sights are a thing of the past. The good
old-fashioned La Salle County gambling raid has gone the way of the Dodo
bird, rotary dial phones and leisure suits. The last time there was a
gambling raid in these parts was April 1996 -- that's pre-Google to show how
long ago that was. Since then, there have been only a handful of minor,
accidental gambling charges, such as when police make a traffic stop and
find pull tabs. But gone are bona fide police-barging-in-with-search warrant
raids. Today is a good time to talk about gambling raids -- or the lack
thereof -- in the county, because we're in between the biggest wagering days
of the year, Super Bowl Sunday and the March 11 NCAA March Madness
basketball picks.
Gambling raids were common in these parts through the mid-1990s -- almost as
regular as milk deliveries from Pitstick Dairy. It's not that there aren't
any gambling dens to raid anymore in the county. There are plenty, with some
towns or their outskirts having more than others. In the past, raids were
often spearheaded by outside killjoys, such as the FBI, the Internal Revenue
Service and the State Liquor Control Commission. Local agencies also made
raids on their own, too. In particular, Ottawa Police hassled gamblers in
the early 1990s, often in response to complaints from the relatives of bad
luck gamblers who had blown paychecks on too few jacks or too many lemons.
In 2007, police at every level have greater priorities than swinging axes at
video poker machines -- those priorities namely being drugs and on the
federal level in particular, terrorism.