Campaign coffers fill with money gained through gambling

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Nov/Dec 2006 by Wistrom, Brent D

Before the 2006 Kansas legislative session began, many lawmakers were betting their political chips on gambling's ability to revive the state's public education system, which the state's Supreme Court ruled was funded at an unconstitutionally low level.

It would avoid a tax hike and let the thousands of Kansans who gamble in neighboring Oklahoma and Missouri spend their dollars in the Sunflower State. Gambling also was an idea that had come up annually for a decade, pushed quietly by an industry that contributed heavily to many candidates' campaigns.

But, in Kansas, if anything can be construed as a moral debate, it probably will be - especially in an election year.

Conservative Republicans rallied against the idea, saying the state should not promote an addictive behavior, especially to fund children's futures. Meanwhile, Democrats, including Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, worked quietly to garner the votes they would need and keyed on funding education, not casino profits or campaign cash.

The debate focused not so much on the potential crime around casinos, the profits that the state might reap and what that money would pay for, but on whether gambling is an activity the state should not only allow, but encourage.

The answer for many, mostly conservative Republicans, was a firm "no." But that didn't stop them from accepting some of the mounting cash flows gambling entities were showering on politicians.

Gaming money

Early into the three-month legislative session, as gambling became the year's biggest issue, investigative reporter Dion Lefler wrote a story about this apparent contradiction between moral high ground and campaign cash.

It generated an uproar in the statehouse.

Legislators stopped by our tiny office under one of the capitol's staircases almost daily to make sure we understood that they opposed gambling, that the contributions they were accepting came mostly from tribal gaming interests (who were seeking to protect their monopoly in the state), and that the contributions they received were probably only a fraction of what their liberal opponents were taking.

Lawmakers wanted to clarify that in no way were their votes for sale. And they suggested that gambling interests sprayed money at basically anyone running for office. Our veteran statehouse reporter, Steve Painter, had noticed many gambling-related donations, but the true extent of gaming money in campaigns had not been quantified. And, after several years of failed gambling bills, it was unclear if casino owners were still betting on their cause.

We found they were, and the ante had risen threefold, but it took us a few weeks to be able to write that with confidence. We had to identify not only all of the gambling groups, but as many of their husbands, wives and children as we could find because many of them were giving maximum donations to candidates as well.

Equipped with some basic skills learned at an IRE Better Watchdog Workshop and IRE's Computer-Assisted Reporting Boot Camp, I made contact with the state's office for governmental ethics and asked how we could obtain several years' worth of contribution data dumped onto a disk as a commadelimited file.

I was surprised to find no resistance and a lot of explanation about the data. A state data analyst began e-mailing the text files the same week. No open records requests. No fees.

I spent several days in my apartment linking multiple tables together with some long-distance help from our CAR expert, Hurst Laviana, in Wichita. Once I became confident that the data was free of errors and did not contain non-gambling entities with similar names, I put my new structured query language skills to use. We needed to know the annual sum of contributions in which the contributors matched any one of about 15 organizations and all the variations of their names and families' names. So I carefully wrote queries and vetted my results to ensure the accuracy of our analysis. Several nationwide groups like the Institute on Money in State Politics (vvww. followthemoney.org) had already compiled campaign-funding totals by trade groups, but we needed to make sure we got not only the obvious donors, but people's spouses and children who were maxing out their annual contributions to several campaigns, including the governor's.

This is where a resident expert on state politics comes in handy. With a few phone calls, Painter fleshed out his already long list of gambling names. In addition to seven major entities in favor of expanded gambling, we found several contributors giving maximum contributions who were relatives of Phil Ruffin, a businessman who is developing a Las Vegas casino with Donald Trump and also bought several pari-mutuel tracks in Kansas in hopes of installing slot machines. All told, Ruffin and his ring of influence spent at least $196,025 on Kansas campaigns over the last four years. We identified five groups that favored keeping gambling the way it is - a business operated solely by American Indian tribes.

The previous years' returns were huge. Pro-gambling groups had spent $501,473 from 2000 to 2004, and those opposing expanded gaming contributed $381,050. We also knew there still could be advocates and multi-client contract lobbyists donating beyond the scope of our analysis. We told readers our analysis represented the low side of how much gambling-related money might have been contributed to Kansas campaigns.