San Diego Estate Planning Lawyer Blog
In San Diego, there are many casinos. The below example happened in Las Vegas. Local casinos also may offer lines of credit or other incentives to gamble. In San Diego County alone, the casinos include Sycuan, Barona, Viejas, Harrahs and many others. Our law firm of Law Office of Scott C. Soady, A Professional Corporation offers a complimentary consultation by phone or e mail. Our law firm does not endorse, represent or support any of the casinos listed above and these are used for illustrative purposes only and were not the casino in the below example and no allegations regarding the misconduct in the below case is attributed to these casinos.
Steven was a multimillionaire businessman with a fondness for high-stakes gambling. His reputation as a high roller led a Las Vegas resort to recruit him to gamble at the grand opening of its new casino. The enticement from the casino was a $2 million line of credit.
When Steven was just getting warmed up in what figured to be a long stretch of gambling, casino officials informed him that he had used up the line of credit, plus several million dollars of his own money. Steven had been gambling not with chips but with a “player card,” and cameras had been recording his betting results. He strongly disputed how much in the red he really was, but the casino made him leave the premises.
Steven sued the gaming company that operated the casino, and a jury added more millions to his net worth. He convinced the jury that the casino’s goal on opening night was to improve its bottom line by forcing him to quit while he was in the hole. The casino officials knew that an experienced gamer like Steven could recoup his losses, and then some, in the same night, so they created the conflict over the amount of the gambling debt as an excuse to ask Steven to leave. This breached the agreement between the parties.
Evidence of underhanded tactics of the casino no doubt made an impression on the jury. Steven produced gambling debt invoices that the casino had generated even before he began to gamble. The videotapes from the night in question, which were key to proving just how much gambling debt Steven had incurred, had been destroyed by the casino. These tactics cast a cloud of suspicion over the casino’s version of the events.