Those Gulfport chips tho (1 Viewer)

[2plus2]

I've been meaning to write this story for a bit and recent developments have coaxed me into action.

The year was 2005 and between ESPN and the internet, poker was enjoying unprecedented popularity. My buddy had a small business in Tempe called the One Arm Gambler (it has since been sold and relocated to PHX). The gig was buying used slot machines at auction in Nevada and refurbishing them. I had been helping him out which meant spending a lot of time in Vegas which was great for feeding my poker habit.

In the same strip mall, right next door, was a gaming supply shop called Gambler's World. The owner, Dave, had decided to make a change and was looking to sell the place. We got a good deal on the inventory which was comprised mostly of books. This was my first introduction to Sklansky, Caro etc. The job itself would have been fairly boring if not for the opportunity to read all the world's knowledge on sports and card betting. That plus playing poker online (PartyPoker ftw!).

At this time there was also a proliferation of online sports books. While the poker books and chips brought new folks into the store, the regulars came by to pick up weekly rags with spotty wagering advice such as the Gold Sheet. I found that between Vegas, customers, local bookies and online books (of which there were dozens, many offering sign up bonuses that were off the hook ranging from 10 to over 100%) opportunities for arbitrage were in abundance.

Katrina comes along and in addition to my usual routine of reading, playing online poker, sports betting and handling the occasional customer, I'm glued to the news stories about the aftermath. The good, the bad and the train wreck. Bobby comes over and says he got a call asking if he wanted to go to Biloxi and bid on the slot machines from these destroyed casinos. Uh, yes! My girlfriend holds down the fort, his father covers the store next door and we're off.

It's a beautiful drive which makes arriving on the scene that much more surreal.

The first signs that anything was amiss were, ironically billboards.

Where there was only nature, very little seemed out of place.

As with many small business endeavors, our first hurdle to overcome was the state. The national guard had set up checkpoints with razor wire to stop looters, and us apparently. It was about as effective as most government programs both at keeping us out and at stopping the looters.

After a long drive, our destination appeared.

Few things are glamorous once the facade falls off.

To be continued...

 

[RocAFella1]

@Changster
@superchromix
@Dwight87

 

[Changster]

Nice piece of history... can’t wait for part 2.

 

[Numerobis]

Thanks for sharing

Following...

 

[CraigT78]

What is this a HONY series?? Come on with part 2!!

 

[wonderpuddle]

following

 

[Dwight87]

We are super lucky to have the Grand Casino, Gulfport chips. Thanks for sharing the story, part II will be worth the wait.

 

[2plus2]

Once on scene we located our contact. He was able to get us a spot up the road at the Isle of Capri which was great because rooms were at a premium

and we weren't looking forward to staying at one of the many camps for volunteers, salvage workers and refugees.

Pretty much any space not covered in rubble was put to use. Yes that's a tent pitched on an indoor racquetball court. lol

Once we were settled in, we decided to get some dinner. That proved a bit more challenging than expected.

And of course the Waffle House was sorely missed by all.

We eventually found a casino that was still serving, buffet no less. I don't recall if it was Boomtown or the Imperial Palace. Those two were on the inside of the cove and mostly protected from the tidal surge. I do remember the poker room was still open, if that narrows it down. While the guys held our place in the substantial line, I went to railbird the plo game. Watched a guy call off 1,200 with crap, shrug his shoulders and say "whatever, it was fema money anyway". A lady at the table commented that she was planning to get breast enhancement surgery with her check. I never once got to play in that game, it's my biggest regret of the trip.

The next morning at the auction we had a tough decision to make. The slot machines were fairly worthless it turned out. Even those that hadn't been directly doused by the surge or rained on through the gaping holes in the walls or collapsed ceiling were corroded from just the high humidity and salty air. Fortunately, the sale was for any gaming equipment we could take in a two week period. Our bid held up at under 20k, but that was, of course, just the beginning of the expenses.

more to follow...

 

[Bulldog]

My townhome (that was about 200 yards off the beach) was less than a 1/2 mile from that Outbacks.

@2plus2: I would bet it was the IP. This casino is located on the back bay.

 

[CacheCreekCollector]

Fantastic how this story is accompanied by so many photos. Makes the trip down memory lane a much more visual history.
Following as well...

 

[2plus2]

Fantastic how this story is accompanied by so many photos. Makes the trip down memory lane a much more visual history.
Following as well...

This whole thing is taking so long because I have so many pictures taken by various members of the crew and stored in different media. I've been needing to sort this stuff both digitally and physically for quite some time now.

 

[mike32]

Thanks for posting this, it’s a very interesting read. I saw a brutal documentary a few years ago about the post Katrina camps and the life (if you could call it a life) of the squatters there. Really makes me count my blessings.

 

[2plus2]

We were going to need labor, and lots of it. We scoured the camps but most everyone was busy with their own agenda. The volunteer operations were awesome to behold, mostly operating out of any churches left standing.

We did find a couple of young adults staying at the Chua-Van-Duc Buddhist temple who had hitchhiked in to help and weren't happy with the conditions in the camp. We told them it was a good idea to first help one's self (they were penniless with good intentions but more likely to be a burden to recovery efforts) and they came to work with us. That wasn't going to be enough so we flew in a crew of friends and family from Arizona and Colorado.

Six guys in a room, hadn't done that since spring break. Didn't do it again till the Ross Ulbricht trial.

It had a great view though.

We took silly amounts of pictures of the destruction. No point in ever posting most of them as after the first dozen all the piles of rubble just blend together except for the places where people spray painted the address for rescue workers and insurance adjusters. I guess there were a few poignant ones. I can't find one picture in particular, a destroyed home had a big F state farm sign in the front yard. I stopped to talk to him, he said he owned his home outright and paid insurance premiums for decades. SF told him that he had hurricane insurance but the damage wasn't caused by wind but rather the tidal surge which was considered flood damage, no rider etc. Bottom line was he had no home, no job and they offered him 30k which was nowhere near enough to rebuild. His options were to take the check now or go to court and maybe get a better settlement down the road so he was abandoning ship after a lifetime in the gulf region. He figured if he'd had a mortgage the bank would have negotiated with the insurance company and he would have gotten a better deal.

While rubble is rubble, the personal effects and... former pets, were a little macabre.

Up next, on the barge, not to be confused with DeBarge.

 

[Venturalvn]

I'm in both absolute awe and anticipation over this thread. Thank you for sharing.

 

[joepro]

Yes, these are great photos and stories. I remember my brother wanted to drive down from PA to help volunteer with the recovery but they said they didn't want that. One of the most memorable natural disasters of our time.

 

[2plus2]

So here's where things get a little fuzzy due my lack of organization. I tried to gather the pics everyone had taken (I took almost none myself) and they're not well labelled and I know I'm missing at least one batch as there are some specific photos I don't see. We salvaged two casinos, the Grand Biloxi and the Grand Gulfport.

Both barges had been picked up by the tidal surge and unceremoniously dumped. The Grand Gulfport barge ended up mostly across the highway but partially blocking it. The Grand Biloxi barge took out the partially completed Ohr-O'Keefe Museum Of Art as well the historic Tullis-Toledano Manor. The President barge also ended up on the wrong side of highway 90 smashed into some condos and the Copa barge ended up in the parking lot of the Grand Gulfport. Here are some barge pictures.

I'm jumping ahead a bit here, but in this picture you can see slot machines and chairs we deemed worthy stacked by the holes in the wall. We expanded those a bit for better access which seemed a bit risky given the lack of structural integrity.

The Hard Rock barge stayed in place and so got submerged by the 28' tidal surge. I would love to have gotten in there as it was brand spanking new, set to open its doors for the first time the following week. But we had our hands full as it was.

I can tell you the Gulfport barge smelled the worse what with a few tons of rotting bananas nearby.

 

[2plus2]

I know these first two pics are the Biloxi, this was actually before we had bid.

Some stairwells were collapsed and others were blocked. Sometimes we went from level to level with ladders through holes in floor / ceiling, other places were easier to access by scaling the outside. The interior pics all run together, you get the idea.

A few singular items really stick out in my mind. I vividly remember loading that big six wheel as well as selling it.

Same thing for this glass. Had to take so much care. It did make the trip in one piece went to a nice home in north Phoenix.

The place was a bit moldy but luckily the cooler temperatures prevailed which slowed the decay a bit. It was still really gross and having one shower between us was loads of fun. Note, under normal conditions slot machines were rather disgusting given that most casinos were smoking back in the day. If you didn't wear gloves while cleaning them you would undoubtedly end up in the hospital given the amount of nicotine you'd absorb through your hands. Thick yellow brown gunk. There were other crews working here as well. Some had bought the generators in the basement, others the surveillance systems, the scrap wiring etc.

 

[2plus2]

Everyone wanted these barges scrapped asap. Whose insurance pays when a hurricane dumps your casino barge on someone else's historic house? I have no idea but being on a time crunch, we pretty much worked sun up till sun down. Check out these slackers... ;-)

While we were working here, The home crew was working to get it sold. As transportation and handling was going to be a large part of the cost, there way no way we could have taken everything back home, then unloaded, stored, cleaned, sold and reshipped it profitably. We only sold by the truckload, 24' Penske or a semi depending on the size of the order. We'd gather what they wanted and stage it, then lower it off with pulleys and onto the truck. The craps tables were definitely the biggest pain the patootie.

When we weren't working on a specific order we had a side gig. Many of the slot chairs that weren't salable had solid aluminum skids which we'd unbolt and toss down into a rolloff. There was lots of brass too. We shipped some trucks filled with nothing but slot machine stands. Casinos cycle their slots more often than the stands they sit on, so those can be difficult to come by in the secondary market. The poker tables went fast as well as the poker chairs and snack carts.

In the end we took back one semi truck worth of stuff back with us, mostly the smaller more valuable items which included crates of chips and slot tokens, shufflemaster machines, stacks of new felt gaming layouts, roulette wheels, card peeks, shoes and other hardware from damaged tables etc.

 

[2plus2]

The trip was a grand adventure as well as a mental and physical trial. I removed so many bolts from chairs one day that when I woke up the next morning I had lost movement in my arm. I basically got repetitive stress injury over the course of a few days. It took years for that nerve damage to completely heal. None of us were used to working that hard, I'm not sure it's something one can get used to. Some however weren't used to working hard at all which certainly led to interpersonal stress what with the hustlers feeling they should get paid more than previously negotiated. One guy quit in the middle of the work day, which is no big deal, but he began demanding that we stop what we were doing and pay him immediately, lol. That didn't go well for him.

One evening towards the end of the gig we had decided to take an early dinner and come back to work after. Upon return we found looters in the process of stealing our lights and generator. One jumped off the barge when we almost caught up to him, running around this wreckage in the dark. He did a nice tuck and roll and ran off. Nothing like a bit of adrenaline to pump you up for a few more hours of work. Where were these guys when we needed them?

While working on the Gulfport they had already started disassembling the Biloxi barge.

The hotel went too, but that was later. We didn't stick around for the Gulfport implosion but we did stop in New Orleans on the way home for some much needed r n r.

This was at LAFITTE'S BLACKSMITH SHOP BAR

I did my part!

Luck for us there was a self storage center directly behind the slot store. I don't remember how many units we got, but it took us the next 18 months to sort and sell everything. Not that we were doing that full time, we still had other businesses to run.

Here's a complete craps, roulette and poker table with shufflemaster rake slide and drop box we set up back in our showroom.

And a bj table with new craps felt in the background. Doesn't Amy look cute when she's thrilled?

Some random goodies.

 

[2plus2]

Here's a link to some more pics. Not from us but hilariously on page 7 there's a picture of some of the slot chairs we had staged.

 

[2plus2]

Thank you everyone for following, the kind words and the platform!

Supplemental - I found my bookkeeping. The entire operation from gas to get there to storage units back home and everything in between was 52k over a two week period.

I spaced working this into the narrative but gaming had already been through and cleaned out the cage plus cleared the majority of the tables. The chips were set to be destroyed. The ones we found came from a few places. The ncv chips were in a closet in the poker room. The cash chips were ones they didn't want to work to get to i.e. still locked in the chip wells on gaming tables that were overturned or behind collapsed walls etc. The rarest coins were the high roller $25 slot token which were solid silver. Whoever bought them has not put them back on the market that I've noticed.