MINOT — A recent story about a man who embezzled nearly $70,000 from the West Fargo Hockey Association caught my attention.
You see, I went to high school with the man who just pleaded guilty to that crime. Steve Lyon and I weren’t exactly friends. Acquaintances would be a more accurate term, but only barely. I played in his yard a couple times, and we attended some of the same sleepovers. I didn’t know him well, but it was still a shock to see a face from my childhood in a mugshot.
Lyon has pleaded guilty to felony theft, and the story behind his crime is a sad one.
“Lyon told investigators in January that he had begun to gamble, both online and at local blackjack tables and e-tab machines, in 2023,” Forum reporter Tasha Carvell wrote. “When he started losing money, he said he would use the association’s e-tab proceeds from earlier that day to cover his losses. A pattern formed in which he would then pay that day’s count back with the next day’s proceeds, but ’it spiraled out of control.’ ”
As losses mounted, the amount of manipulation needed to cover the money he was taking to cover them grew.
I found Lyon’s story compelling, not just because of the personal connection, but because I’m afraid his story will become a common one as the gambling industry continues to boom in our state.
The legalization of electronic pull tab machines, which function essentially like slot machines, has generated a tidal wave of revenues, both for the nonprofits that are allowed to host gambling under state law and for the for-profit gambling companies that provide services to those nonprofits.
It’s a gold rush. One that’s happening without a lot of transparency with the public, a state of affairs owing to the fact that the volume of gambling in our state has exploded while oversight from state officials hasn’t kept up.
Charitable gaming is regulated through the Gaming Division in the Attorney General’s Office. Division Director Deb McDaniel is excellent, but it’s unclear whether she and her staff have the necessary resources to regulate what has become a multi-billion-dollar industry in our state.
There appears to be no formalized tracking of crimes involving gambling in our state — things like embezzlement, fraud or robbery. While McDaniel’s office is very responsive to requests for information, there’s little published for public scrutiny. The Gaming Division used to publish a quarterly report of basic gaming statistics, but no reports have been published on the division’s website since December 2022.
Even the division’s newsletter has been published just twice, in February and May of 2024.
The public is owed more.
Charities across the state are now holding a firehose that’s spewing cash.
Are they spending that money appropriately? Many are buying for-profit businesses, such as bars, to protect their turf. Any curious citizen should be able to find, with a few clicks of a mouse, some basic reports about the volume and scale of gambling in their community, as well as information on the spiderweb of businesses owned by the host charities, and how much revenue they’re raking in.
Like it or not, large-scale gambling is here. What we need now is transparency.
Rob Port is a news reporter, columnist, and podcast host for the Forum News Service with an extensive background in investigations and public records. He covers politics and government in North Dakota and the upper Midwest. Reach him at rport@forumcomm.com. Click here to subscribe to his Plain Talk podcast.
