See, she lacked self-control and that's not her fault. Hell, her losses are a conspiracy! Read on...
ATLANTIC CITY, New Jersey (March 8) AP - She was an ambitious lawyer and TV commentator who started going to Atlantic City casinos to relax, and soon was getting high-roller treatment that included limousines whisking her to the resort city.
Arelia Margarita Taveras says she was even allowed to bring her dog, Sasha, to the blackjack tables, sitting in her purse.
But her gambling spun out of control: She said she would go days at a time at the tables, not eating or sleeping, brushing her teeth with disposable wipes so she did not have to leave.
She says her losses totaled nearly $1 million.
Now she is chasing the longest of long shots: a $20 million racketeering lawsuit in federal court against six Atlantic City casinos and one in Las Vegas, claiming they had a duty to notice her compulsive gambling problem and cut her off.
"They knew I was going for days without eating or sleeping," Taveras said. "I would pass out at the tables. They had a duty to care of me. Nobody in their right mind would gamble for four or five straight days without sleeping."
Experts say her case will be difficult to prove, but it provides an unusually detailed window into the life of a problem gambler.
"It's like crack, only gambling is worse than crack because it's mental," said Taveras, 37, a New Yorker who now lives in Minnesota. "It creeps up on you, the impulse. It's a sickness."
She lost her law practice, her apartment, her parents' home, and owes the IRS $58,000. She said she even considered swerving into oncoming traffic to kill herself.
In interviews with The Associated Press, Taveras admitted she dipped into her clients' escrow accounts to finance her gambling habit. She was disbarred last June, and faces criminal charges stemming from those actions, but is trying to work out restitution agreements in order to avoid a prison term.
Her lawsuit names Resorts Atlantic City, Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort, the Tropicana Casino Resort, the Showboat Casino Hotel, Bally's Atlantic City, as well as the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
The casinos deny any wrongdoing, maintaining in court papers that Taveras brought her problems on herself. Casino representatives either declined to comment for this report or did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Read the rest here.
Thoughts? I've often wondered how the casinoes have kept themselves out of court while gun manufacturers, cigarette companies and taverns all have been creamed in court. I mean, it's not like there's any shortage of money-sucking attorneys in Vegas.
Of course, it looks like this particular test case is a bit flawed as the plaintiff is an attorney with a bit of an checkered history anyhow. Apparently she's been charged with stealing money from the survivors of 9/11 victims. Nice.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Friday, March 7, 2008
That Big Thing I've Been Hinting At...
The trouble with hyping something is that heightened expectations are so easy to disappoint. And the importance of this story may not be readily apparent to everyone. You might recall earlier this week I beat up on a snooty critic who felt himself clever reciting the hackneyed old view of Vegas as, in his words, "a steroidal temple of tackiness."
Well, in the same pages as that phrase appeared, I'm breaking on Saturday an exclusive in The New York Times about a $40 million public art program at MGM Mirage's CityCenter. You can read all about it here.
Why is this such a big deal?
To start with, the artists involved are the Elvises (Elvi?) of their worlds. None is more amazing than Maya Lin, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial sculptress. She's creating a $3 million, 130-foot cast-silver representation of the Colorado River. Some pieces are being created, others are being acquired. Among the artists is Jenny Holzer, Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, Henry Moore, Richard Long and Nancy Rubins.
Don't worry; I wasn't that familiar with all of them either before I caught wind of this story. That's why I grabbed some images of what some of the pieces will look like.
First, here's the Henry Moore piece, which MGM Mirage paid $7 million for:
This here is the Claes Oldenburg piece, called "Typewriter Eraser X"...
The wackiest of the pieces may be the Nancy Rubins piece. She takes boats and stuff and turns them into a gargantuan tree, and this one will be 85-by-65-feet big. The images below show roughly where it'll be and what it looks like, which provides if nothing else a pretty cool new visual perspective on CityCenter. The Times has a slideshow, but these weren't included:
But the big deal here is that this plan has the potential to kick off an arts arms race in Las Vegas that really could turn the town into a destination for cultural tourists. Sure, we've had small Strip museums -- Bellagio and Venetian and, before he realized Rolexes provide better profits, Wynn Las Vegas -- but those are one aspect.
This collection -- along with the impressive architects involved with CityCenter -- singlehandedly changed the view of Las Vegas for art critic Joan Altabe, who I had quoted in a piece in the Times in 2002 railing against putting great art in a city where everything is so fake. How, she wondered, would people even know they were looking at the real thing with all the reproductions of famous cities and frescos around them?
In a comment that got cut from the Times piece because of space constraints, she said: “This is going to put Vegas on the map in a totally different way. Someone with an art mind is working here. I’m dazzled by this. It’s a step away from what I thought was a failing idea.”
You can hear a longer conversation with the wonderful Maya Lin next week on "The Strip Podcast." And I guess that's one other reason I'm so jazzed; every time Vegas goes in a new and unexpected direction, it provides me with an opportunity to learn something new from nothing less than the biggest names in their fields.
Well, in the same pages as that phrase appeared, I'm breaking on Saturday an exclusive in The New York Times about a $40 million public art program at MGM Mirage's CityCenter. You can read all about it here.
Why is this such a big deal?
To start with, the artists involved are the Elvises (Elvi?) of their worlds. None is more amazing than Maya Lin, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial sculptress. She's creating a $3 million, 130-foot cast-silver representation of the Colorado River. Some pieces are being created, others are being acquired. Among the artists is Jenny Holzer, Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, Henry Moore, Richard Long and Nancy Rubins.
Don't worry; I wasn't that familiar with all of them either before I caught wind of this story. That's why I grabbed some images of what some of the pieces will look like.
First, here's the Henry Moore piece, which MGM Mirage paid $7 million for:
This here is the Claes Oldenburg piece, called "Typewriter Eraser X"...
The wackiest of the pieces may be the Nancy Rubins piece. She takes boats and stuff and turns them into a gargantuan tree, and this one will be 85-by-65-feet big. The images below show roughly where it'll be and what it looks like, which provides if nothing else a pretty cool new visual perspective on CityCenter. The Times has a slideshow, but these weren't included:
But the big deal here is that this plan has the potential to kick off an arts arms race in Las Vegas that really could turn the town into a destination for cultural tourists. Sure, we've had small Strip museums -- Bellagio and Venetian and, before he realized Rolexes provide better profits, Wynn Las Vegas -- but those are one aspect.
This collection -- along with the impressive architects involved with CityCenter -- singlehandedly changed the view of Las Vegas for art critic Joan Altabe, who I had quoted in a piece in the Times in 2002 railing against putting great art in a city where everything is so fake. How, she wondered, would people even know they were looking at the real thing with all the reproductions of famous cities and frescos around them?
In a comment that got cut from the Times piece because of space constraints, she said: “This is going to put Vegas on the map in a totally different way. Someone with an art mind is working here. I’m dazzled by this. It’s a step away from what I thought was a failing idea.”
You can hear a longer conversation with the wonderful Maya Lin next week on "The Strip Podcast." And I guess that's one other reason I'm so jazzed; every time Vegas goes in a new and unexpected direction, it provides me with an opportunity to learn something new from nothing less than the biggest names in their fields.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Do Comics Owe Us Corrections, Too?
I've been busy focusing on the mainstream media a lot this week, but I wondered if Bill Maher owes us a correction. I just heard the podcast edition of his Feb. 29 episode of "Real Time with Bill Maher" on HBO. Here's what he said:"I know we're fighting them over there so they can't get us here, but today in Las Vegas they found a vial of deadly ricin gas. Sure, it could be terrorism. They say it may be terrorism, it may not be terrorism but it's Vegas, they don't like to judge. Yeah, they found this gas at a motel. There were eight people passed out on the floor. Well, seven from the ricin and then there was David Hasselhoff, he was just eating a hamburger."
It apparently takes a LOT of important factual errors -- it was ricin powder and nobody was found passed out -- to mold one really unfunny punchline.
Do comedians owe it to anybody to get it right?
Further Tales of The Las Vegas Sun Disaster
(UPDATE: THE 12TH ENTRY IN THE COMMENTS SECTION APPEARS TO BE FROM THE WOMAN REFERENCED BELOW WHO WROTE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR. IT IS TELLING THAT SHE OFFERED HER VIEWPOINT BUT NEITHER SUN M.E. MIKE KELLEY NOR JOE SCHOENMANN HAVE RESPONDED TO REQUESTS FOR COMMENT. THIS FROM A NEWSPAPER THAT RAN A PETTY FRONT-PAGE PIECE IN SEPTEMBER ABOUT HOW GOV. BILL RICHARDSON WAS DUCKING INTERVIEWS WITH THEM. HMM.)
Like many of you, I've wanted to know more about what happened to create the disastrous story by Las Vegas Sun reporter Joe Schoenmann that led to a 535-word correction in Tuesday's newspaper. Since I blogged about it the other day, the correction has risen to No. 9 on the most-read list on the Sun's website and has garnered the attention of several news outlets including Editor & Publisher, the industry trade, which wrote this.
There's more.
I just got off the line with Tom Warden, the spokesman for Summerlin, who opened up about what happened, how his company reacted and how that shocking correction came to exist.
The original Feb. 26 story depicting Summerlin residents as racists ran in the wake of a shooting that killed a white teenage boy. Warden's first reaction was to call Schoenmann that day to complain about what he saw as factual errors and reporter bias. As the correction notes, Schoenmann had quoted anonymous racist postings from the Review-Journal site by people who claimed to be Summerlin residents, although there's no way of knowing and sources within the Review-Journal have told me that the posters' IP addresses showed that they probably were not. (Also, more than one posting came from the same IP address, I'm told.)
Schoenmann didn't budge about this or any other clear-cut mistake. "He thought it was a good story," Warden said. "I would not call it a productive conversation. I told him there were factual errors in the story. He didn’t think there were."
Oh, but there were. And as Warden prepared to contact Schoenmann's boss, Managing Editor Mike Kelley, he opened the Feb. 27 issue of the newspaper to find a Mike Smith cartoon and a letter to the editor from a Susan M. Gaffney of North Las Vegas that asked Summerlinites: "Do you honestly believe that hte location or size of your home, what you drive, how you look or where your children attend school protects you from reality?"
Here is the cartoon:
Warden said Summerlin folks felt kicked in the gut a second time. He and Summerlin executive Kevin Orrock went to Kelley's office for a half-hour conversation two days later, on Feb. 29. Schoenmann was not present; Warden would not say who, besides he, Kelley and Orrock, was.
Warden stressed repeatedly that the conversation was cordial and Kelley promised to look into the list of complaints he brought. There was no threat of advertising or access withdrawal and Warden said his side stressed from the beginning that they have great respect for the Greenspun family of companies. (That family includes the branch that developed Green Valley, the other major master-planned community in the region.)
Sun sources tell me Kelley himself wrote the March 4 correction. I've reached out to both Schoenmann and Kelley, but I have not heard back. (In fairness, I only reached out to Kelley within the past hour because I wanted to hear from Warden first. I contacted Joe yesterday and received no reply.)
The Summerlin brass are sated. "I had never seen a correction of that length," Warden said. "They took into account every single one of the issues I brought up. We’re gratified that the leadership stepped in and acknowledged the shortcomings."
That said, I have a minor correction to make myself. In my March 1 blog entry, I credited Joe with having quoted a Summerlin executive. Sadly, this, too, is not true. Schoenmann did NOT contact anyone in any official capacity for his piece; the person I thought was a Summerlin executive in a very quick reading was actually a consultant who has not done work for the developer for a while. It is shocking anew that a journalist did not give the developer a chance to respond to such a characterization of their community but then would refuse to even acknowledge shortcomings of the story when called on it.
Warden isn't quite sure how this story happened and said he was not given an explanation by Kelley. His theory: "I would say that there may be a bit of a blind spot out there amongst some of the younger journalists that anonymous blogs are not valid news sources. I was surprised that they would use an anonymous news site as a source for statements unattributed. Blogs can be excellent pubic forums for discussion, but there’s a different standard that you would use for a news piece."
That's charitable, but Schoenmann is in his 30s and has been in this business for more than a decade.
Should Schoenmann face some disciplinary action? "That’s not for us to say," Warden said. "That’s for the Sun’s leadership to determine. I will say we certainly wouldn’t mind if the reporter called to apologize."
Joe?
Like many of you, I've wanted to know more about what happened to create the disastrous story by Las Vegas Sun reporter Joe Schoenmann that led to a 535-word correction in Tuesday's newspaper. Since I blogged about it the other day, the correction has risen to No. 9 on the most-read list on the Sun's website and has garnered the attention of several news outlets including Editor & Publisher, the industry trade, which wrote this.
There's more.
I just got off the line with Tom Warden, the spokesman for Summerlin, who opened up about what happened, how his company reacted and how that shocking correction came to exist.
The original Feb. 26 story depicting Summerlin residents as racists ran in the wake of a shooting that killed a white teenage boy. Warden's first reaction was to call Schoenmann that day to complain about what he saw as factual errors and reporter bias. As the correction notes, Schoenmann had quoted anonymous racist postings from the Review-Journal site by people who claimed to be Summerlin residents, although there's no way of knowing and sources within the Review-Journal have told me that the posters' IP addresses showed that they probably were not. (Also, more than one posting came from the same IP address, I'm told.)
Schoenmann didn't budge about this or any other clear-cut mistake. "He thought it was a good story," Warden said. "I would not call it a productive conversation. I told him there were factual errors in the story. He didn’t think there were."
Oh, but there were. And as Warden prepared to contact Schoenmann's boss, Managing Editor Mike Kelley, he opened the Feb. 27 issue of the newspaper to find a Mike Smith cartoon and a letter to the editor from a Susan M. Gaffney of North Las Vegas that asked Summerlinites: "Do you honestly believe that hte location or size of your home, what you drive, how you look or where your children attend school protects you from reality?"
Here is the cartoon:
Warden said Summerlin folks felt kicked in the gut a second time. He and Summerlin executive Kevin Orrock went to Kelley's office for a half-hour conversation two days later, on Feb. 29. Schoenmann was not present; Warden would not say who, besides he, Kelley and Orrock, was.
Warden stressed repeatedly that the conversation was cordial and Kelley promised to look into the list of complaints he brought. There was no threat of advertising or access withdrawal and Warden said his side stressed from the beginning that they have great respect for the Greenspun family of companies. (That family includes the branch that developed Green Valley, the other major master-planned community in the region.)
Sun sources tell me Kelley himself wrote the March 4 correction. I've reached out to both Schoenmann and Kelley, but I have not heard back. (In fairness, I only reached out to Kelley within the past hour because I wanted to hear from Warden first. I contacted Joe yesterday and received no reply.)
The Summerlin brass are sated. "I had never seen a correction of that length," Warden said. "They took into account every single one of the issues I brought up. We’re gratified that the leadership stepped in and acknowledged the shortcomings."
That said, I have a minor correction to make myself. In my March 1 blog entry, I credited Joe with having quoted a Summerlin executive. Sadly, this, too, is not true. Schoenmann did NOT contact anyone in any official capacity for his piece; the person I thought was a Summerlin executive in a very quick reading was actually a consultant who has not done work for the developer for a while. It is shocking anew that a journalist did not give the developer a chance to respond to such a characterization of their community but then would refuse to even acknowledge shortcomings of the story when called on it.
Warden isn't quite sure how this story happened and said he was not given an explanation by Kelley. His theory: "I would say that there may be a bit of a blind spot out there amongst some of the younger journalists that anonymous blogs are not valid news sources. I was surprised that they would use an anonymous news site as a source for statements unattributed. Blogs can be excellent pubic forums for discussion, but there’s a different standard that you would use for a news piece."
That's charitable, but Schoenmann is in his 30s and has been in this business for more than a decade.
Should Schoenmann face some disciplinary action? "That’s not for us to say," Warden said. "That’s for the Sun’s leadership to determine. I will say we certainly wouldn’t mind if the reporter called to apologize."
Joe?
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Just In Time For Our First Anniversary...
Miles and I will be celebrating our 1st wedding anniversary this month with a vacation to Switzerland. (Yay, us!) But before that, I revisited our wedding for a special Vegas issue of The Advocate, the GLBT newsmag.You can read that essay here. The issue covers all things Vegas, with an exuberant Bette Midler on the cover.
Also, I'll be appearing at The Advocate's issue party on Monday, March 10, at 10:30 p.m. at Ivan Kane's 40 Deuce bar at Mandalay Bay. On Monday nights, they have male burlesque dancers; the rest of the week it's ladies.
It's free and open to the public.
More on the Las Vegas Sun mess
I've reached out to Joe Schoenmann about that epic correction and hope to hear back from him. That said, one of the commenters did raise a point that is extremely disturbing.
Damon Hodge, a writer for the Las Vegas Weekly where I do a column, wrote this short piece in July 2007 about having his confidence betrayed by a friend and fellow journalist. He does not name Schoenmann in it, but he gives loads of detail that lead directly to Joe for anyone who knows him. Not to mention, Hodge states he was directly quoted and named in a piece about messy 2007 NBA All-Star Weekend in Vegas after he explicitly said the conversation was off-record.
According to Hodge: "This guy published his friend’s comments along with his friend’s name, leaving his intentions on after-hours’ voicemail: “[blah, blah, blah] cool ... [blah, blah, blah] ... thanks ... [blah, blah, blah] Oh, and I’m going to use your quotes.” Ain’t this a bitch."
I did find the piece he's referring to and, yes, it was Schoenmann who wrote it. You can read it here on this PDF. But you can't read it on the Sun's actual website. For some reason, it's no longer there. See? (UPDATE: A commenter found the correct link on the Sun site. It's here.)
I fear a disturbing pattern is beginning to emerge here. Pulling that sort of switcheroo is a major ethical foul to begin with. Now stir in the calculation that, as a fellow writer at another publication in the same group there wouldn't be much Hodge could do about it. And add the fact that Schoenmann has, once again, opted to reach media insiders -- in addition to Hodge, he also quotes a Kansas City writer -- for comment, which is a pretty easy way to operate. (In the Summerlin piece, Joe quoted the wife of the owner of one of the largest PR firms in Nevada.)
I don't know where this is going. I do know that Joe has been viewed and treated for some time as a golden child at the Sun and that many of his colleagues were aghast when the Summerlin piece ran, as they should have been. It's all very disturbing.
Damon Hodge, a writer for the Las Vegas Weekly where I do a column, wrote this short piece in July 2007 about having his confidence betrayed by a friend and fellow journalist. He does not name Schoenmann in it, but he gives loads of detail that lead directly to Joe for anyone who knows him. Not to mention, Hodge states he was directly quoted and named in a piece about messy 2007 NBA All-Star Weekend in Vegas after he explicitly said the conversation was off-record.
According to Hodge: "This guy published his friend’s comments along with his friend’s name, leaving his intentions on after-hours’ voicemail: “[blah, blah, blah] cool ... [blah, blah, blah] ... thanks ... [blah, blah, blah] Oh, and I’m going to use your quotes.” Ain’t this a bitch."
I did find the piece he's referring to and, yes, it was Schoenmann who wrote it. You can read it here on this PDF. But you can't read it on the Sun's actual website. For some reason, it's no longer there. See? (UPDATE: A commenter found the correct link on the Sun site. It's here.)
I fear a disturbing pattern is beginning to emerge here. Pulling that sort of switcheroo is a major ethical foul to begin with. Now stir in the calculation that, as a fellow writer at another publication in the same group there wouldn't be much Hodge could do about it. And add the fact that Schoenmann has, once again, opted to reach media insiders -- in addition to Hodge, he also quotes a Kansas City writer -- for comment, which is a pretty easy way to operate. (In the Summerlin piece, Joe quoted the wife of the owner of one of the largest PR firms in Nevada.)
I don't know where this is going. I do know that Joe has been viewed and treated for some time as a golden child at the Sun and that many of his colleagues were aghast when the Summerlin piece ran, as they should have been. It's all very disturbing.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
We'll Never Learn
THIS...
...DRIVES...
...ME...
...BANANAS!!!
The AP, Fox, MSNBC and CNN have already called Vermont for Barack Obama and John McCain. The polls have only been closed for 13 minutes there and not a single vote total has been released. I know they've got their exit polls and all that jazz, but I really thought these TV stations had learned not to do this. It serves absolutely NOBODY'S interest to call races before ANY votes have been counted. And every single time these projections prove wrong, the networks promise not to do it again.
So pathetic. It's NOT OK, just because polling shows something to be so.
...DRIVES...
...ME...
...BANANAS!!!The AP, Fox, MSNBC and CNN have already called Vermont for Barack Obama and John McCain. The polls have only been closed for 13 minutes there and not a single vote total has been released. I know they've got their exit polls and all that jazz, but I really thought these TV stations had learned not to do this. It serves absolutely NOBODY'S interest to call races before ANY votes have been counted. And every single time these projections prove wrong, the networks promise not to do it again.
So pathetic. It's NOT OK, just because polling shows something to be so.
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