All those one-armed bandits, drowned! Enough to get the crocodile tears flowing!
When Hurricane Katrina leveled the Gulfport and Biloxi area, it silenced about 18,000 slot machines at Mississippi's floating casinos. Some of the one-armed bandits were washed into the sea. Looters ran off with others. And the vast majority — about 75 percent — were destroyed.
... Inside the Copa, battered and broken slot machines littered the casino floor, forming row after row of metallic corpses. All the favorites were there: The Wheel of Fortune, Lobster Mania, Enchanted Unicorn and Cleopatra. A pair of Regis Philbins were still standing in one corner. "It's hard to write off Regis," said McClendon, casino services manager in IGT's Gulfport office.
...And in one area of the casino, a dozen or so buckets were filled with thousands of nickels. "Quite frankly, the priority was getting the paper money out," Quinn said.
Dan Lee, chairman and chief executive of Pinnacle Entertainment Inc., said thieves sneaked into his casino and tried breaking into the machines and security carts that hold money. He said they almost got lucky — coming close to discovering roughly $400,000 that was inside a locked cash cart and left in the casino during the storm. Pinnacle recovered the money, Lee said. Armed guards now protect the casino.
... With people always devising ways to cheat the machines, IGT may have to rewrite the slots' software. The fear: People could have broken into some of the machines and stolen the software with hopes of coming back to a casino and rigging a jackpot.
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