Gambling in Alabama: A high-stakes game of political intrigue

In September 2008, Milton McGregor, the bombastic owner of VictoryLand, the state's largest casino, was summoned to the governor's office for a lunch.

Gov. Bob Riley's purpose for that meeting wasn't clear, but the request to meet wasn't particularly unusual. While McGregor and Riley weren't exactly close pals, the two were friendly enough at the time and various meetings had occurred between the two over the years.

VictoryLand had been open for more than two decades at the time — the last five years of which McGregor's casino along Interstate 85 in Shorter had been operating electronic bingo machines. In an airplane hangar-sized room at VictoryLand, the Quincy's 777 game room had more than 6,000 blinking and dinging bingo machines, and more than 2,300 employees kept the place going.

McGregor was doing very well.

As he entered the governor's office that September afternoon, McGregor noticed that two small Chick-fil-A boxes had already been set out on the governor's long conference table. He asked if Riley was on a diet, but McGregor said he knew the small lunch was a sign that this meeting would be less about food and more about whatever it was Riley wanted to discuss.

"(Riley) wanted me to hire his son, Rob," McGregor said. "He didn't make any bones about it. He said to me, 'I know you're doing well. I've seen your numbers. I think any business doing that well during a Riley administration should benefit the Riley family in some way.'"

McGregor said he responded by asking Riley if the governor was implying that VictoryLand's success was a result of Riley's policies. Riley said no, but McGregor said that didn't quell the demands that Rob Riley, an attorney, receive a job working for McGregor.

"It wasn't a request, it was a demand," McGregor said.

After McGregor declined more than once, he said Riley told him that he had seen the McGregors' personal tax returns, even cited income numbers that McGregor said were "pretty doggone accurate."

In a matter of minutes, the two men were in a heated argument, their voices so loud that eventually Riley's secretary popped open the door and asked if everything was OK. She was waved away and the argument continued for more than an hour, with Riley's later appointments, including a group of county commissioners, stacking up in the waiting area outside his office.

In McGregor's mind, the whole ugly scene was the catalyst for many of his subsequent troubles — the raids, the court rulings, the arrest and unsuccessful prosecution of him on federal charges and the slow crumbling of his business.

In Riley's mind ... well, there's where the story takes an interesting and all-too-common turn in this fight over gambling. Because in Riley's mind, which he, like McGregor, swears is the "real, honest-to-God truth," that whole story relayed by McGregor never happened.

Oh, the meeting happened. Riley recalled the lunch with the boxes of Chick-fil-A and McGregor at his conference table. But that's where the two stories diverge — sharply.

Riley isn't sure what the meeting was about, but he guessed it had something to do with his plans to go after gambling entities. He was only a few months away from forming his gambling task force and there were rumblings throughout the state that the governor was preparing for some level of action.

"I met with Milton three or four times and they were usually about the same things — what he thought his business could do to help the state," Riley said. "That particular meeting, I don't recall exactly what it was about. But we usually didn't call Milton, he called us to set these things up. And whenever he was in my office, the door was open and at least two people were listening. I guarantee you that two people were listening that day to whatever we said."

And those two people definitely never heard the former governor try to strong-arm McGregor into hiring Rob, said Bob Riley.

"It simply didn't happen," Bob Riley said. "Why on earth would I ask Milton McGregor to hire Rob? That makes no sense."

There also was no heated exchange in Riley's recollection of the meeting. No secretary asking if things were OK. No other appointments stacking up outside. And it, by all means, wasn't the catalyst for anything.

"We came to realize that what was going on was illegal," Riley said of his decision to go after electronic bingo parlors and casinos around the state. "At that juncture, when you determine that it's illegal, you either have to enforce the law or turn a blind eye to what's happening. The latter wasn't an option."

This is the fight over gambling in Alabama.

From its earliest days, when McGregor and Paul Bryant Jr. were ushering dog tracks into Macon and Greene counties, through the era of sweepstakes machines and Birmingham horse racing, to the first incarnation of electronic gaming machines, to the electronic bingo machines that attorneys for the state and attorneys for the casinos are fighting over in active court cases today, there is no shortage of fantastic stories, half-truths, outright lies, bickering, backstabbing, soap opera twists and characters that seem to have leapt from the pages of a John Grisham novel.

There is another side to every story, another player in every deal, and a secret motive behind seemingly every move. With hundreds of millions of dollars on the line and egos and elections at stake, each side has apparently been willing to stretch the bounds of ethics and the law to pick up victories along the way.

The fight has pitted an attorney general against the governor who appointed him, lawmakers in the same party against one another, AG's office attorneys on opposite sides and has split powerful law firms. It has conjured up conspiracy theories by the dozen, even among those intimately involved in the fight who should know better.

The single best example of how a sprinkle of truth and a mix of imagination and suspicion have distorted this tale played out earlier this month during an interview for this story. In his Homewood office, where he now works as a lobbyist for Bob Riley & Associates, sharing office space with his son, Rob, Bob Riley pondered a question for a moment and then stood.

Riley left the circle of soft leather chairs where we had been talking for the better part of three hours, walked to his desk and hit an inner-office speaker button on his phone. In another office a buzzer sounded and a second later Rob Riley said, "Yes?"

Bob Riley, the former governor of Alabama, a former Congressman and still a cattle farmer in Clay County, bent closer to the phone and said in a polite, nonchalant tone, "You have a second to come up here and talk about the Russian mafia?"

The beginning of gambling in Alabama wasn't much different from its current state — besieged by lawsuits, investigations and corruption.

The first true gambling operation — a Mobile greyhound dog racing track — sprang up in 1973 after more than two years of legislative haggling and backroom deals. Rep. Maurice "Casey" Downing was the successful bill's usher and is credited for opening the doors of the Mobile Greyhound Park, the state's oldest race track.

It was quickly followed by another greyhound track in Greene County, appropriately named Greenetrack. Greenetrack was operated by Paul Bryant Jr., son of legendary University of Alabama football coach Paul "Bear" Bryant, who opened the facility in 1978 in the predominately African-American county.

The tracks were instant successes, but no track drew the crowds and money like McGregor's location along Interstate 85 in Shorter, dubbed VictoryLand. Three years after VictoryLand opened its doors in 1984, it was the most successful dog-racing venue in America.

And no area needed it more than Macon County and the City of Tuskegee. To put it politely, the county and city were broke. The year before the building of VictoryLand was approved, the school system had shut down for three days because it didn't have the money to operate. There were concerns it would have trouble remaining open the following year.

Unemployment in the predominately black county was at 15 percent, and with no industry to speak of, those numbers weren't likely to improve anytime soon. The county's largest employer, by a wide margin, was Tuskegee University.

But the people of Macon had already turned down a proposal for a dog track in 1980, voting it down nearly two-to-one. They saw the gambling enterprise as surefire corruption coming to town. Helping to bolster those beliefs, state Rep. Thomas Reed and a Tuskegee activist, Ronald Williams, were indicted on bribery charges related to the dog track bill. They were recorded offering a bribe to state Sen. Dudley Perry, and were convicted in 1977.

That turned an already resistant public even more against the track. However, facing growing financial problems, and with a promise of 5 percent of profits going to local schools — a deal that voters were told would see $2.5 million per year go to schools —in 1983 voters passed the referendum by an almost 2-1 margin.

"We were a very poor community," Tuskegee Mayor Johnny Ford said recently. "We were desperate for any sort of industry, and being a predominately black county in that time, we weren't getting a lot of help from the Legislature. Our options were limited. We saw what the dog track in (Greene County) was doing for those people. It was a step out of poverty for us."

Ford, as much as anyone, was responsible for getting the track approved and helping keep it successful. He's served two stints as mayor in Tuskegee, beginning in 1972 through the early 1990s, when he was elected to the state Legislature; he was re-elected mayor after his term as a state representative ended. He's Tuskegee's current mayor.

With the track approved, the true legal and political maneuvering began, starting with choosing the owner of the new track and where it would be built. Ford played an active role in both choices. It was his crafty work that allowed Tuskegee to cash in on the track while also allowing the track to operate in a prime location just off I-85 in Shorter.

Ford concocted a plan that included annexing a 14-mile strip of land consisting entirely of public roads to connect the 180-plus acres on which VictoryLand sits to the western edge of the Tuskegee city limits. This, of course, did not sit well with the inhabitants of then-unincorporated Shorter, where the track was to be located.

In order to block the annexation and hold onto a portion of the tax money, a group of Shorter residents filed incorporation papers, allowing them to have first dibs on tax dollars and to charge for business licenses and set zoning requirements for any additional businesses that might spring up. There was, of course, litigation over all of this.

Shorter residents sued to stop the Tuskegee annexation. Tuskegee countered to stop Shorter's incorporation. In the end, the two sides split the baby — Tuskegee would provide fire, water, sewage and electric service to the track (none of which Shorter could provide anyway) and Shorter would get to keep local tax revenues and award business licenses and zoning permits. Tuskegee also got its share of the school money.

The money was about to start rolling in fast and furiously, as were businessmen with grand ideas and big visions. According to a story in the Miami Herald, which covered the opening of VictoryLand and the fight over it, Shorter residents, despite fighting to get the track, remained wary of it and the criminal element they suspected it would attract.

At the height of the dog-racing hysteria, someone paid $180,000 for land near the track that wasn't valued at a tenth of that price the year before. The buyer wanted to install an airplane landing strip. "Why you think someone wants to put a landing strip way out here?" Bud Segrest, a landowner and Shorter resident, asked the Herald in a 1984 story. "Dope. They want to fly in dope."

While those fears never really played out — VictoryLand, even in its most successful years, never dramatically increased crime rates in Macon County — the track did bring in two things: people and money. On its opening night, Alabama State Troopers paid a visit to report a problem. Traffic on I-85 was backed up for miles in both directions.

It was the first real indication for Milton McGregor that his life was about to change dramatically.

There are two things to know about Milton McGregor right from the start. The first thing is he's incredibly well liked. Even among the people he's fought bitterly with over the years, it is usually grudgingly admitted that McGregor is a nice enough guy.

During a stroll through VictoryLand in May with McGregor, he stopped 11 times to carry on personal conversations with employees and customers.

"Hey, how's that boy of yours doing?" he shouted at one female employee.

"Hey, big man, how's your daddy doin'?" he asked a middle-aged black man, then genuinely brightened when the man told him he was improving.

He called everyone by their first names. When he asked about their family members, he called them by name. He is extremely personable — with everyone. And people love him for it.

The second thing about McGregor is that he is hopelessly optimistic. The next court case will be the big winner, the next ruling will be the one that finally puts him on top for good. On the day verdicts were announced in his federal corruption case, his attorneys were nervous wrecks. McGregor just winked and said, "Got it in the bag, big man." And they did.

But it is that mindset that leads him to continue fighting, to continue pouring millions of dollars into legal battles and seemingly hopeless attempts to beat the Alabama legal system. It's not arrogance or stupidity or greed, but optimism. He believes he'll eventually win — "We have to, we're right," McGregor insists.

And why not? He always has.

McGregor came up as a regular, middle-class kid in Hartford. He graduated Geneva High in 1957, had college stints at Troy and Auburn in between military service in the Army, and eventually ended up in Huntsville working first for Brown Engineering and later Boeing. In the late 1960s he moved back to Hartford to care for his ailing mother and take over the family grocery store.

Along the way, McGregor became involved in video game distribution. He opened Happy Tymes video arcades in Dothan, Enterprise and Ozark. He leased Pac-Man machines and other games through his McGregor Gaming distribution business — in which he partnered with Bryant Jr. — to convenience stores all over the Southeast. It was a lucrative business. The video game industry was booming through the late 1970s, but in the early '80s, home video game systems started to grow in popularity and McGregor could see the end coming.

"Within two weeks of me closing the loan to build VictoryLand, the curve started to turn on those games," McGregor said. "The good Lord was looking out for me."

McGregor was also looking out for himself. And when it comes to cutting business deals and assessing the political landscape, few are better.

McGregor said he read a story in his local newspaper about Macon County passing a referendum to approve a dog track, and he wanted in. There was a process for obtaining the single racing license that would be issued. He needed to submit the necessary financial paperwork and a plan for the track, and then appear before a newly-formed racing commission for public interviews.

McGregor began putting together his team of investors, and he stacked the deck — including a couple of Macon County politicians and announcing that famed civil rights attorney and Tuskegee resident Fred Gray would be the track's attorney. Then, as icing, he told the commission that Paul Bryant Jr., who was already operating a successful track in Greene County, would be hired to run his track.

It also didn't hurt that McGregor met with Ford and agreed to a long list of the mayor's demands, including agreeing to hire a certain percentage of workers from Tuskegee. With Ford's blessing, McGregor got the license.

Immediately, two lawsuits hit the courts from bidders who weren't selected and who alleged the process was rigged. Those lawsuits were a bit of foreshadowing for the road ahead. A third suit, filed four years later, was the clearest indicator of the convoluted world McGregor had entered.

That third lawsuit — one of the oddest ever filed in Alabama courts — came from Gerald Wallace, the brother of former Gov. George Wallace. Gerald Wallace alleged he was owed a 5-percent stake in VictoryLand because he cut a deal with McGregor. The alleged deal: In exchange for interest in the track, Gerald promised he wouldn't tell his governor brother to veto the dog track bill. In court documents, Gerald Wallace proclaimed this a good deal, because "Mr. McGregor knew I could tell my brother to kill the bill, and it would've been killed."

Not surprisingly, a judge tossed the suit quickly, but not before the whole ordeal made it into every newspaper in the state.

Lawsuits aside, times couldn't have been better for McGregor, his family and his partners. Three years after literally betting the farm on VictoryLand — McGregor mortgaged all of his family land to secure the $10-$12 million in loans needed to build the track — he had the most successful track in the country. And it stayed that way for the next four years.

"It was a risk worth taking, but that didn't make it easy," McGregor said of securing the money for the track. "But I believed it would work. I knew it would work."

The line of cars on opening night settled any lingering doubt, and the massive amounts of income the next several years made it seem like a no-brainer. Within two years, VictoryLand had quadrupled expectations, becoming the first track to gross over $200 million per year. The McGregors — Milton and his wife, Pat, and two daughters — moved to the top of the tax bracket.

"It was successful a lot faster than I ever dreamed," McGregor said. "The experts told us we could expect $50 million per year, and I didn't believe it. That first year, we were both wrong — we did $164 million. That was a pleasant surprise."

The six years after VictoryLand opened in 1984, Milton McGregor was an Alabama version of King Midas. Everything he touched – real estate deals, nursing homes, land deals and his race track – turned immediately into more gold than he could pocket. In 1991, he made a shrewd deal to purchase the struggling Birmingham Race Course, Alabama's only horse racing venue, buying the track for just $19 million.

He turned it into a combo track featuring both horse and dog racing for a couple of years, before the high costs of operating a horse racing track proved too much. What was left, at the time, was a highly profitable dog racing venue situated a few miles between two interstates, one of which connects Birmingham with Atlanta.

"We had a very good run there, and we created a lot of jobs and helped a lot of people and paid a lot of taxes," McGregor said, as he points to a list of tax dollars paid by VictoryLand to state, county and city coffers over the years. "But when the casinos started, we couldn't compete."

But they were going to try.

Between 1990 and 1992, greyhound racing in Alabama began taking body blows. Georgia and Florida started statewide lotteries, offering their citizens chances to win millions with a $1 ticket. In Mississippi, casinos opened along the coast in Biloxi, and almost overnight the buses that used to arrive daily at VictoryLand from Atlanta were redirected to the Gulf Coast. Locally, the Poarch Band of Creek Indians began offering video poker at its casino in Atmore.

"We couldn't compete," McGregor said. "It took us by surprise how fast it turned on us. I would send guys over to the Mississippi casinos to do parking lot surveys — to count the Alabama tags on the cars in the lot. It was half the lot most of the time. We were getting crushed."

The numbers backed that up. In 1989, according to tax records reported by the Birmingham News, the tracks in Mobile, Shorter and Eutaw provided more than $22 million in state and local taxes. By 1992, those receipts were down to $17 million. By 1995, they had lost another 20 percent.

Mississippi was the main problem. In 1992, the state allowed its first two casinos to open. By 1994, there were 30. Mississippi's coast towns were bringing in more than $1 billion annually, as travelers flocked to the new gaming operations and glitzy hotels. Up north, in Tunica, Miss., a new casino named "Splash" was pulling customers by the hundreds from Birmingham and northward.

"I went to Splash one time, and I swear to God, I rode through a damn cotton field down an unpaved road to get there," McGregor said. "This was just after it opened. We pulled up out front and there were all these people out there. I thought the place was closed and they were waiting on it to open. No, they were waiting to get in. It was too full. And there was a $10 entry fee.

"That's what we were up against."

To compete, the track owners told legislators, they would need something to level the playing field, something to stop the flow of patrons to the more attractive alternatives. They settled first on video gambling.

And with the first push for additional gaming, McGregor and his counterparts at dog tracks, and others who would come along with dreams of gaming hotels and resorts in towns across the state, started down a road that is still winding today. That road has led to jail time, lawsuits and heartbreak, to millions of dollars for some and millions in losses for others, and it has supported more law firms than tobacco lawsuits.

McGregor led the way, as he started pumping money into the campaign coffers of politicians — on both sides of the aisle — and hiring some of the best lobbyists in the state to make his wishes known. He became a sort of kingmaker, or at a minimum a political-career killer. McGregor and his partners couldn't get any bill they wanted passed, but they could certainly make political life miserable for those who voted against them.

In one year, campaign-finance records showed McGregor personally donated more than $650,000. The next year, he spent over $500,000. In later election cycles, those figures nearly doubled.

The result: Between 1993 and 1999, the Alabama Legislature was inundated with pro-gambling bills. Most focused on allowing video gaming of one sort or another, but there were also attempts at passing bills that would have cleared the way for full-fledged casinos to open in various locations around the state.

Most of those bills failed before reaching the floor for votes, either languishing in committee or just missing the call before the session expired. The closest McGregor and other gambling supporters got to passing a bill came in 1999, when a video-poker bill slipped past the House with a one-vote victory and seemed destined to pass the Senate.

Lawmakers opposing the bill, which would've allowed the state's four dog tracks to use video poker and video blackjack machines, filibustered — speaking well into the night before a vote to end the filibuster was taken. Those opposing the bill all but conceded, chiding the other lawmakers for passing the video poker bill and allowing then-Gov. Don Siegelman's lottery proposal bill to pass on the same day.

But a short time later, the final vote came in: 20-14 against. It was a surprise even to those who opposed it. Today, McGregor contends the bill was upended by a surprise influx of cash at the last minute by Mississippi gaming interests. That move helped turn two votes against the proposal, and a plan that would've offset those losses failed to materialize.

Shocked Greenetrack CEO Nat Winn told the AP that night that his track would "... just try to survive."

It was the end of a long fight for Winn, McGregor and others who insisted the tracks were in the midst of a slow death, unable to bring in enough revenue to sustain themselves without additional gambling options. They had battled their opposition — the Christian Coalition, Baptists, Mississippi gaming interests and a number of lawmakers — in some of the state's most memorable and bitter political wars.

The fight had cost two men the governor's mansion. Gov. Guy Hunt, found guilty in 1993 of ethics charges relating to a $200,000 transfer of funds from his inaugural account for personal use, blamed McGregor for his woes. In a post-trial press conference, Hunt, who had opposed gambling legislation, said his problems began when McGregor's "best friend" was appointed to the Alabama Ethics Commission.

Supporters of Hunt told the New York Times that the plan to oust the governor was hatched between McGregor and prominent Democratic and Republican lawmakers at a Montgomery pizza restaurant — leading some in the state to dub the ordeal "The Pizzeria Conspiracy." The conspiracy theory was that Hunt's anti-gambling stance led to the McGregor-plot. To this, McGregor said only, "I think he's hallucinating."

With Hunt gone, in his place stepped Lt. Gov. Jim Folsom Jr., a popular candidate and a supporter of "responsible-gambling" legislation. A year later, in the campaign for governor, Folsom held a double-digit lead over challenger Fob James.

Then Folsom and his family took a trip to the Cayman Islands. On McGregor's plane. The ensuing uproar over the sitting governor being flown around at a reduced price by a guy pushing gambling legislation was enough to jumpstart a seemingly dead James' campaign.

By election time, Folsom was out and James was in. The fight for gambling legislation had another speed bump in the way, with the anti-gambling James in the governor's mansion.

That was a bad blow for the dog track owners — made especially bad by a brand new threat to business. And this one was in-state.

If there were no signs, the fact that you are standing on an Indian reservation in Atmore, some 120 miles south of Montgomery down I-65, might be lost on you. The buildings are modern. The furnishings inside council offices, save for a few portraits of past chiefs and leaders, are not particularly Native American in their style. There is a modern police department, fire department, sewer and water system, health care facility and court.

The residents all enjoy health insurance at no cost. The cop cars look new. The reservation services, such as police and sewer, are provided to the rest of Atmore at no cost. The town, once no more than a turn-off point on the way to Holman State Prison, is seeing remarkable growth.

"We are doing very well," says Robbie McGhee, the treasurer for the tribe's council. "The town and county are doing very well because of our success here."

That success is due to a gleaming, 17-story, 236-room structure called the Wind Creek Hotel & Casino. It has a 50,000-square-foot gaming floor filled with electronic bingo machines that function and play much like traditional slots.

Wind Creek in Atmore, and its sister location in Wetumpka, are not unlike most other upscale hotels and casinos. At the Atmore location, there are nice restaurants, an ice cream parlor, a bowling alley, a movie theatre, a resort-level spa and an amphitheater. The location in Wetumpka has similar amenities.

They are nice, and they are popular. On holiday weekends, the hotels are routinely booked solid. There is steady occupancy throughout the week, and on a typical weekday, the gaming floors, while not crowded, draw a solid crowd.

The numbers back that up. The Poarch casinos increased revenue by 64 percent in 2010 and increased it another 30 percent in 2011. According to its annual report, in 2012, the tribe took in more than $600 million and annual profits increased to $332 million. Annual payouts to each tribe member were into the tens of thousands of dollars.

"We are providing for ourselves here," McGhee said. "Not only do we provide for ourselves, we provide for the entire county. We paved the roads. We put in fire hydrants. We installed traffic lights. Pretty much anything Atmore has needed it has been able to get with our help."

The tribe is hauling in so much money, it's giving it away in what is basically an effort to buy good will and friendship. Elmore and Montgomery counties each get $100,000 annually from the tribe. It has donated millions to local school systems as well as the schools in Atmore.

Indirectly, the new casino in Atmore has been an economic development magnet. An interstate exit that had a run-down casino and one hotel now has five restaurants, two more hotels and a gas station. Walmart is set to open a store in Atmore as well.

It wasn't always like this, though. Less than 30 years ago, the Poarch Creek tribe was struggling to find a foothold and keep its head above water.

In 1983, the Creeks opened their first bingo hall, Creek Bingo Palace, attracting a mostly elderly clientele to a smoky hall where players bought paper bingo cards, daubed numbers to match a specific pattern and hopefully screamed "bingo!" every 10 minutes. The bingo games, primitive as they were, brought in a steady stream of cash, and like everyone else, the Creeks wanted more.

As Milton McGregor and others were fighting for video poker machines through the '90s, the Creeks were waging their own battles on both the state and federal levels. In 1993, after signing a deal with Harrah's to build a $60-million casino in Wetumpka, the Creeks sued the state in an attempt to force Alabama to enter into a gaming compact.

The suit followed the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988, which set up rules for the types of games tribes could operate on their lands. The Act established three classes of gaming: Class I, which includes social games played for prizes of minimal value; Class II, which includes bingo played in paper or electronic formats, and any card games allowed under state law; and Class III, which includes all other forms of gaming.

Basically, the IGRA stated that tribes can only conduct gaming within the boundaries of classifications legal elsewhere in the state. So, if an Alabama county permits bingo in any form, the Creeks can legally operate Class II games.

The IGRA was necessary because states and tribes all over the country were engaged in legal fights over what games the tribes could operate. In some locations, the tribes, believing their lands to be sovereign, simply opened up full-fledged casinos and started welcoming customers. In California, two tribes filed lawsuits when sheriffs tried to stop them, and the cases worked their way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court ruled the Indian lands to be sovereign and out of reach of state laws. In response, Congress passed the IGRA to give states some authority over what happens within their borders.

"Basically, it did what Alabama has refused to do so far — set clear rules and boundaries," McGhee said.

But as the Creeks found out, the IGRA did not require states to enter into compacts with tribes. A federal appeals court ruled against the Creeks in the case, but as McGhee and several legal scholars have noted, the loss might have turned out to be a win. In the decision, the court laid out how the tribes could legally bypass state governments and apply to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior for gaming rights.

That's exactly what the Creeks did.

After several years of battling Alabama lawmakers in court and at various hearings, the tribe took advantage of state constitutional amendments that allowed for bingo. In the early '90s, the Creeks installed an electronic version of "pull-tab" games, which were paper games that required players to remove pieces of paper from certain sections of the game ticket to reveal numbers or letters that might line up to award a prize. The electronic versions of the games functioned like a traditional slot machine.

However, the National Indian Gaming Commission, assigned with writing the rules under which tribes and states must abide, determined that pull-tab games fall into the Class II gaming category which requires states and tribes to reach an agreement, or compact, before the games are legal. That ruling resulted in the games being yanked from the Creek facilities in 1994.

But other forms of video gaming came and went quietly from the tribe's locations, including video poker and blackjack, and the tribe kept its lucrative bingo hall operational. In the late '90s, a new machine hit the market — electronic bingo.

According to the manufacturers, it was bingo in electronic form, meaning it could pass the test for a Class II game and also be installed and played in any state that allowed traditional bingo games without seeking a compact. The games were a hit, and they were about to change the political landscape of Alabama forever.

Milton McGregor remembers well the first day he saw an electronic bingo machine. In July 2001, he went to lunch with a couple of his attorneys and suggested they ride to Wetumpka to see the Poarch Creek setup. The Creeks had recently installed electronic bingo machines and there were rumors that business was booming.

"They had their setup at that time — it was before they built their first casino out there — and they were in modulars, and I swear to you, the place looked like it was on fire from all the smoke billowing out of the place," McGregor said. "They had the front doors open and the cigarette smoke was pouring out from all the people in there."

McGregor and his attorneys strolled around the casino, which he said was about three-quarters full in the middle of the day. The reality of the situation wasn't lost on McGregor.

"The place was a dump, and they were doing good business," McGregor said. "I told my attorneys, 'If you did this in a nice location, with modern conveniences and a tasteful setup, it could be very popular."

Boy, could it ever.

The electronic bingo craze hit Alabama in 2003, with Tuskegee's Johnny Ford striking the first blow. A state representative at the time, Ford had pushed a "bingo for books" amendment in the 2002 legislative session, but the measure failed. In 2003, he returned with a plan — instead of filing one bill, he filed three.

The three bills each allowed for bingo, but each was slightly different. Ford's plan was to distract lawmakers with the demands in two bills, such as allowing full-fledged casino gambling, and then quietly slip a "harmless" bingo bill through that included a Trojan horse. And that's essentially what he did, slipping a bill through that didn't define bingo or include prize caps.

Without caps, bingo players could potentially win unlimited pots — a setup that would allow VictoryLand to advertise huge pots and compete with true casino-style slot machines. The amendment also spelled out that the Macon County sheriff would determine the legality of any bingo games played in the county.

During the same session, Greenetrack owner Nat Winn also managed to get a bingo amendment passed, but his capped winnings of a single pot at $10,000.

Both amendments required votes by county residents for approval, and supporters and detractors set about lobbying voters. In newspaper ads and TV commercials and on dozens of fliers scattered about Macon County, those for and against electronic bingo urged voters to see it their way. In the end, the fight was pointless. Both amendments sailed to easy wins, with about three-quarters of voters in each county in favor.

Once on the books, almost overnight, VictoryLand once again became a major player. Electronic bingo machines, which look and act remarkably like slot machines, started to roll in, and with them came money. By July of 2004, McGregor had more than 1,500 machines up and running at VictoryLand. Within three years, he would have 6,000 machines.

"We were finally able to compete again with the Indians and with the folks over in Mississippi," McGregor said. "And we were following the law."

To make sure of that, also in July 2004, newly-appointed attorney general Troy King stopped by VictoryLand and most of the gambling facilities in the state to get a firsthand look at the machines. King said he had received complaints that the machines were possibly illegal and he wanted to take a look for himself.

He ended up doing much more than that. King began a "study" of the games to determine their legality.

"I had two sides telling me two different things and they both sounded credible to me," King said. "So, I broke down what these machines do and took a look at what the law was out there at the time.

"I ended up going to Walmart one night, went to the toy aisle and bought a children's bingo game so I could get the instructions out and use them."

King also factored in federal law and recent court rulings. He used it all to issue a set of findings, in the form of a press release, outlining the guidelines for "legal bingo" in Alabama. Those guidelines, released in November 2004, required that bingo machines include a 5x5 bingo card, have a random ball drawing, include a predetermined pattern and multiple players — all tenets of traditional bingo games.

"We wrote those findings out because we had sheriffs and law enforcement people from all over the state coming to us and saying, 'Look, we're spending thousands of dollars we don't have chasing down the bingo operations, and it's only a misdemeanor,' " King said. "They needed guidance. That's what we provided, and to this day, nearly 10 years later, no one has challenged the findings we put in that report — no one has disputed them."

DEEPER DIVE: See court exhibits from VictoryLand bingo trial

King's report, while not a crushing blow, didn't sit well with the bingo casino owners. For most, McGregor included, it meant ditching machines that didn't comply with the law. For some, such as the White Hall gaming hall in Lowndes County, it meant complete shutdown.

But the takeaway for King was that bingo, like blackjack and solitaire and most other games, can be played in an electronic format.

"When I truly became convinced that these (electronic bingo) games weren't traditional slots or video poker games was when they allowed me to play a five-card stud poker game," King said. "On the machine, as I'm playing, there's a pay table — two-of-a-kind is this much, three-of-a-kind is this, whatever — and then off to the side there's a pay table that's for traditional bingo. The payout was based on the bingo card every time. You were winning or losing bingo."

What King came to believe — and what has been the central argument of the casino owners around the state — is that electronic bingo machines are built to look and function much like a slot machine on the outside, because that's what consumers want. But on the inside, where the games are actually played, the computer operating the console is playing the game of bingo.

"These machines would not be used in areas which allow traditional slot machines," said Richard Williamson, a gaming expert who has worked in testing labs assuring the quality and function of gaming devices. Williamson testified for VictoryLand attorneys in a recent court hearing.

In that testimony, Williamson detailed how an electronic bingo machine functions differently than a slot machine. The differences are necessary in order to meet state and federal bingo requirements, he testified. He referred to each machine as a "player station," and said several machines are hooked together through a computer server that allows players to play against each other.

Responding to King's 2004 report, McGregor, Winn and others rid their locations of noncompliant machines. In mid-January 2005, King reported that he re-visited VictoryLand and Greenetrack and found their machines to be in compliance with his guidelines.

"They had done what we asked of them and they had complied with the law," King said recently. "I still believe that to this day. They spent thousands of dollars to change out those machines and comply with what we asked. They were legal. They are legal."

Not everyone would agree with that.

For roughly a four-year stretch, the legality of electronic bingo seemed to be mostly settled. Those who disagreed with it begrudgingly conceded that the casino owners had located an adequate loophole after two decades of searching and were resting comfortably on piles of ill-gotten cash within that crack in the legal door.

The conceders included Bob Riley, who was into his second gubernatorial term by that point. Riley had long been against gambling, believing it to be a drain on the poor. He famously told McGregor, "I don't like how you're making your money, but I can't stop you."

This was not just an Alabama phenomenon. Across the country, several states that had fought both Indian tribes and regular casino owners over the legality of electronic bingo consistently were coming to accept a world in which bingo games could be played electronically.

In Oklahoma, for example, with a law on the books that contained the line, "This act shall not permit the operation of slot machines," voters in 2004 approved the use of pull-tab games and two-button bingo games (meaning players had to hit a button to start the game and another button to claim a win). In 2006, the state approved games similar to the machines operated at VictoryLand and Greenetrack.

California, Louisiana and Maryland also allow some form of electronic bingo while also outlawing straight slot machines.

In that climate, and with the AG's blessing, McGregor set his sights on building an entertainment center at VictoryLand. The new facility would have a luxury hotel, restaurants, a new gaming center, a spa and a 1,500-seat entertainment venue. But the heart of the new facility would be a massive new gaming room, with 6,000 bingo machines pumping out the cash necessary to sustain it all.

Renovations to expand the game room came first, followed closely by construction of a 300-room hotel, The Oasis. The result was a golden, glittering structure surrounded by palm trees and a Vegas-style water fountain. There were 2,300 employees keeping up with the bingo machines, the hotel, the steakhouse located within the restaurant and dog racing facility.

Total bill: $200 million.

"A lot of that was my money, but it wasn't all my money," McGregor said. "A lot of people invested in this — companies like Bally's — and do you think they would've invested without doing their homework and making sure it was all legal? Of course it was legal."

Had it just been McGregor and Winn, and maybe even Ronnie Gilley, who was pushing hard to open up a massive entertainment venue in Enterprise called Country Crossing, the whole electronic bingo craze might have been OK. After all, the attorney general had ruled on it and Gov. Bob Riley had other things going on.

The problem, according to Riley and those who were working closely with the governor at the time, was that it wasn't just those facilities operating electronic bingo games. The games were in seemingly every business in the state. Rural gas stations had them. Rundown strip malls had them. And sheriffs and police chiefs were asking for answers on how to deal with it.

Riley said a visit from state Sen. Charles Bishop, who complained about fly-by-night bingo parlors opening in Walker County, prompted him to assign a young staff attorney, Bryan Taylor, to look into the legality of it all.

Taylor returned a few days later with a message that Riley said surprised him: "(Taylor) says, 'they're all illegal — all of them.' "

Taylor explained that a 2006 Alabama Supreme Court ruling, which prevented electronic bingo games to be played in Birmingham, included a broad definition of the term "slot machines" that was first presented by former Justice Sue Bell Cobb in 1997. That definition essentially states that when a constitutional amendment fails to define the term "bingo," then it means the "ordinary game of bingo."

Many believe it was a bit of a stretch, since the ruling in that 1997 case also made it clear that an amendment and its intentions could alter the definition of bingo. But Taylor said the basis of the argument was formed: "The court was saying that it was less about form and more about substance. If it looks like a slot machine and acts like a slot machine, it's a slot machine."

With the two rulings and the state Supreme Court seemingly behind the idea that the bingo machines were illegal slots, Riley said he became convinced that the games were illegal.

To make sure, he asked attorneys from one of the state's most powerful law firms, the Bradley Arant Boult Cummings firm in Birmingham, to review Taylor's opinions. They concurred with Taylor, according to Riley. (An interesting note: in a 2005 opinion provided to a financial institution seeking guidance on whether to lend money to McGregor for renovations at VictoryLand, Bradley Arant attorneys deemed the casino to be in compliance with the law. In fact, their attorneys stated that the only way VictoryLand would not be in compliance was if a new constitutional amendment were written.)

With the legal opinions squared away, Riley said he had no doubt that something had to be done about the illegal gambling operations.

On the other side of the fight, however, there was a strong belief that something else was driving the sudden interest Riley had for shutting down Alabama's gaming operations — money.

The way they see it, King was already going after the small-time shops that weren't complying with state laws, and VictoryLand and Greenetrack had been operating for years, dumping millions into state coffers. So, they contend, something else had to be driving the desire to shut down these businesses.

McGregor and many others came to believe that Riley had accepted money from the Choctaw Indians, which were operating a number of casinos in Mississippi. The Choctaws made it clear they wanted to shut down the Alabama gaming operations, and they were willing to pay to do so. They hired the best known money-spreading lobbyist in the business, Jack Abramoff, to do their bidding. And, seemingly, no move was off limits.

Riley has consistently denied receiving money directly from the Choctaws. However, he has admitted taking money from the Republican Governors Association and from a lobbyist who represented the Choctaws. That's where things get a bit convoluted.

Abramoff and his partner, Michael Scanlon, and the Choctaws dumped buckets of money into the RGA to support Republican candidates in meaningful races. Scanlon's company alone donated $500,000 to the RGA in 2002.

The RGA gave Riley $600,000 during his 2002 race with Don Siegelman for governor, and Scanlon personally donated $100,000 more to Riley. Scanlon had previously worked with Riley when he was in Congress.

"I've never spoken to a Choctaw, I've never asked a Choctaw for money, I've never received a dime of money from a Choctaw," Riley said during a recent interview at his lobbying office in Homewood. "I told the (RGA) that we will not take any gambling money. They came back later and did an audit and said not one dime of Choctaw money came into the governor's race in 2002. That has not changed. It's beyond dispute."

Case closed? Not by a long shot.

In June 2006, the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, chaired by Arizona Sen. John McCain, released its final report on an investigation of a scheme called "Gimme Five" that was concocted by Abramoff and Scanlon. The goal of the scheme was to separate six Indian tribes from millions of dollars with as little work — but with lots of lies and scheming — as possible. It was a wild success, scoring Abramoff and Scanlon more than $66 million in pure profit over the course of just four years.

The scam worked like this: Abramoff, who was working with a reputable lobbying firm and representing several tribes, would recommend to the tribes that they hire a "grassroots" consultant to help work up opposition to potential threats to their gaming operations, such as potential electronic bingo casinos in Alabama.

Abramoff would then casually recommend Scanlon. Once the tribe hired Scanlon, he and Abramoff would secretly work together to come up with a mixture of real and imagined tactics to achieve the tribes' goals, and then grossly overcharge them. Both Abramoff and Scanlon were convicted for their roles in the scam.

Abramoff got the idea while working in the late '90s for the tribes, particularly the Choctaws. He realized that the gaming operations the tribes were operating were bringing in large amounts of money and that the tribes were just gullible and naïve enough to fork over large amounts of money for political activities they didn't really understand.

For example, during that failed 1999 attempt to get a video poker bill pushed through the Alabama Legislature, lobbying hard against that bill was former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed. Reed had enlisted the help of several pastors in the state, who had in turn convinced their congregations to make calls against the bill. There were even church bulletin inserts urging good Christians to call their lawmakers about the sinful gambling bill.

For that work, Reed earned more than $1.3 million from the Choctaws, according to the McCain report, in just three months.. And there was even more paid out, the report concluded, with a variety of entities skimming cash from the transactions. Included in that was famed anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist, whose Americans for Tax Reform group was paid $25,000 for serving as a pass-through for money between the Choctaws and Reed.

With Scanlon on board, he and Abramoff began to work over all of the tribes, marking up invoices and falsifying services. Scanlon was particularly valuable to the Choctaws because of his connections to Riley. Prior to his work as a con artist, Scanlon worked for one year on Riley's congressional staff, serving as a press secretary, before moving on to work for congressman Tom DeLay.

Riley said it was their previous relationship, and hearing that Scanlon was a successful and well-funded lobbyist, that led him to call Scanlon and ask for a donation during the 2002 campaign. He stressed that Scanlon never requested action against the Poarch Creeks or any other gambling operation in Alabama.

The McCain investigation, however, uncovered emails between Scanlon and Abramoff that seem to indicate there was more behind the Riley donation than simply helping out a former boss.

In a December 2002 email, Abramoff wrote to Scanlon about a conversation he had with Nell Rogers, a planner working for the Choctaws who was the primary contact for Abramoff and Scanlon in their dealings with the tribe. In the email, Abramoff said he told Rogers that the Choctaws needed to hire Scanlon again to fight off a potential casino in Louisiana, and then says "I reminded her that if you had not done what you did in Alabama, she would have to spend millions over the next four years (damn!)…."

Abramoff then writes: "She definitely wants Riley to shut down the Poarch Creek operation, including his announcing that anyone caught gambling there can't qualify for a state contract or something like that."

In addition to the Abramoff email, the McCain report also included a quote from a Louisiana tribe chairman stating that Abramoff told him that the Choctaws paid over $13 million to get Riley elected in 2002. It's a claim that Riley has consistently and adamantly denied, pointing out that his campaign raised less than $13 million total from all donors.

Riley also said that no one from the Mississippi gaming interests, the Choctaws or Scanlon has "ever asked me to do anything on their behalf. Not once."

In an email response to questions posed by the Montgomery Advertiser, Abramoff said he recalled Scanlon donating "a significant amount of money to the (RGA)" and that the money was to be "directed to Alabama."

"We were doing everything we could to stop the competition to the Choctaws, which included the Poarch Creeks at that point," Abramoff wrote. "We developed a number of measures to impede that facility, including the one mentioned (in the 2002 email). The email suggests that we were going to lobby Riley to support that particular approach. I believe there were likely several approaches that we were lobbying him to support, but (I) can't recall them all."

Abramoff said he can't recall what, if anything, Riley did for the Choctaws because he and Scanlon were working numerous deals at the time. He noted that he and Scanlon weren't pressuring Riley because "that's not an effective way to lobby an ally, and we considered him an ally."

Whether intentional or not, Riley became a Choctaw hero.

Once he determined that electronic bingo machines were illegal, Riley said he was left with two options: Either turn a blind eye or enforce what he believed to be the law. To that end, Riley called together several law enforcement officials and attorneys and asked for opinions.

Eventually, they settled in December 2008 on a gambling task force headed up by former Jefferson County District Attorney David Barber. The task force's main objective was to locate and gather information on illegal gambling operations in the state in order to aid local sheriffs and prosecutors in their fight against gambling.

The choice of Barber to lead the task force was notable for one reason: He wasn't Troy King, who was still the AG and top law enforcement official in the state. In fact, within the previous three years, King said he and his office had helped shut down 30 illegal gambling operations.

The fundamental difference between Riley's views on electronic bingo machines and King's views on the same machines also happen to be the crux of the fight that's still ongoing. And as odd as it might seem, it's likely that both men — and McGregor and Nat Winn and all of the bingo supporters and detractors — are right, depending on whose interpretation of the law you're relying on.

Basically, it boils down to this: Can a six-second game that requires no skill, no call of "bingo" and no daubing of a game card still qualify under the law as bingo?

According to the federal government and several federal and state courts, probably so.

According to the Alabama Supreme Court, probably not.

Let's deal with the federal courts first. As mentioned earlier, IGRA divides games into three categories, and courts have consistently held that electronic bingo games fall within the parameters of Class II games, which also contains the traditional bingo game. In fact, IGRA was altered slightly to include electronic bingo games within the list of Class II games that could be put in Indian casinos without first receiving state permission.

Most states have generally accepted this ruling. Recognizing that it would provide Indian casinos with an advantage and result in millions of tax dollars being missed — since Indian casinos pay no state or local taxes — states have generally allowed the machines where voters approve. This isn't the case for every state, but a majority have followed this path.

Alabama, however, has not. And it presents one of the trickiest legal conundrums in the country, thanks to its archaic constitution.

Bingo is considered a form of a lottery, and lotteries are illegal in Alabama unless a constitutional amendment is passed to specifically allow it in a certain area — much the same way alcohol sales are legalized in some counties but not others. In order to for a county to play any form of bingo, a constitutional amendment is required.

In order for a county to legalize bingo — even the charity and church games — the Legislature must approve the amendment. Once that happens, the amendment goes on the ballot during the next election cycle.

That has happened 18 times in Alabama counties, making bingo in some form legal. But that doesn't mean electronic bingo is legal in all 18, or in any of them.

Because also important in this process is the wording of the amendments and what the intent of the amendments were when they were passed by the Legislature and by the voters. For example, if the amendment simply makes "bingo" legal, and there was no discussion that the games in question might be played on electronic machines, state courts have ruled that the game made legal is only the traditional game of bingo.

But in Macon and Greene counties, the circumstances were different. In those counties, which passed amendments in 2003, local legislators drew up bills specifically to make electronic bingo legal — and give the struggling dog tracks that contributed so heavily to local tax coffers a boost. Greene's amendment specifically cites electronic machines, while the Macon amendment leaves it simply as bingo.

DEEPER DIVE: See all Alabama counties' gambling amendments

When both bills were brought up in the Legislature there was lengthy discussion about them making electronic bingo legal. Later, when the amendments were placed on local ballots, there was extensive debate and campaigning that included ads, fliers and newspaper columns stating the votes were to legalize electronic bingo.

"It was pretty clear to everyone at that time what we were voting on," former state Sen. Myron Penn said recently. Penn was responsible for pushing the amendment in the Senate, while Ford picked up the duty in the House.

"I really can't believe that this is even in question now," Penn said. "It was just a fact back then."

Does that make electronic bingo in Macon and Greene counties legal? There is no clear answer.

Even as the Republican-dominated Alabama Supreme Court has mostly backed the Riley side in this fight, it has stopped short of ruling against the machines in Macon and Greene counties. In its most quoted decision on the matter of electronic bingo — the Cornerstone vs. Barber decision that laid out a definition of what traditional bingo is — the court opinion mentioned numerous bingo amendments in the state.

It didn't mention the amendment in Macon.

There is currently a case pending before Judge William Shashy in Montgomery Circuit Court that might be the first step in finally addressing the Macon issue. That case stems from a raid at VictoryLand and the state's request now to destroy machines it seized from the casino. Lawyers for VictoryLand are arguing that the machines are legal bingo machines that voters in that county approved. A ruling in the case is expected sometime this month.

In the meantime, with no clear guidance on the law, and with lots of money available for lawyers and investigators and PR people, the fight over bingo has turned downright ugly on both sides.

Riley's insistence that he formed his task force because of the inundation of bingo halls around the state has some validity. In the three years after King's statement that some form of electronic bingo is legal, more than 300 charities in Alabama received licenses to operate bingo games.

To demonstrate the atmosphere at the time, because many of the county amendments that allowed bingo put limitations on the hours in the day the charity could operate bingo games, several charities combined licenses in order to operate 24-hours per day. There were also fights between charities over locations and intimidation tactics used to coerce charities to give up their licenses.

Even McGregor says he supported the task force's work in cleaning up the illegal operations.

"They should've been closed down — most of them — because they were illegal," McGregor said. "We were legal, but those folks had no business doing it."

But even as the task force was seizing machines in Walker County and Mobile, lawmakers in 2009 were introducing another bill to legalize and tax certain electronic bingo games. That bill would have limited bingo operations to counties with amendments and set up a system for taxing the bingo halls. Lawmakers estimated this would pump $200 million into the economy.

The bill, dubbed the "Sweet Home Alabama" bill, was marketed as a way to let state voters settle the bingo problem. It was accompanied by millions of dollars' worth of TV, radio and newspaper ads — some featuring country music stars — touting the merits of the bill.

And that's when things got crazy. First, a judge ruled the state had no authority to raid the White Hall gaming parlor in Lowndes County, and he ordered the machines and money returned. Riley appealed that decision to the state Supreme Court, and both he and King filed dueling briefs over the legality of Riley's task force.

It was King's first foray into the fight. He argued that the governor had no authority to conduct law enforcement operations without participation from the attorney general. Riley countered that King was failing to perform his sworn duty to stop illegal activity, and by doing so left Riley no choice but to find an alternative option.

In April 2009, the state Supreme Court ruled in Riley's favor. It would start a run of favorable opinions for Riley from the court. There was another favorable decision in November. And then another the following January, which allowed the biggest raid to date, on the Country Crossing casino in Dothan.

With it clear that Riley's task force was not stopping at the fly-by-night bingo parlors, and would be going after the state's largest casinos, the heat was turned up.

At the BCS National Championship Game between Alabama and Texas in Pasadena, Calif., a plane flying a banner reading "Impeach Corrupt Governor Bob Riley" circled the Rose Bowl stadium. King began lobbying local district attorneys to take control of raids in their towns. Local politicians began to speak out and fight back against Riley's raids.

And Milton McGregor's investigators caught task force chief David Barber slipping.

Barber resigned in January 2010 after McGregor revealed his investigators had trailed Barber to a Mississippi casino, where they recording him winning $2,300. It was McGregor's first public foray into the gambling debate since King's 2005 announcement that certain machines were legal. But McGregor had been working behind the scenes for some time, funding ads and helping organize attorneys and the legal strategy against Riley.

McGregor said he started moving shortly after that September 2008 lunch meeting he held with Riley — the one at which McGregor claims Riley lobbied him to hire Rob Riley. "I knew something was coming, that he wasn't going to let it go," McGregor said.

In a way, McGregor says he was already doing business with Rob Riley. One afternoon in 2004, Rob Riley and his University of Alabama college roommate had shown up at McGregor's office unannounced to meet with the casino boss about possible investment opportunities.

Rob Riley's roommate, a former Wall Street worker named Robert Sigler, was the founder of a number of investment and finance companies, most notably Crimsonica and Global Trust Partners. McGregor said Sigler and Rob Riley pitched a number of investment opportunities. Rob Riley acknowledged going to McGregor's office, but said he went only because Sigler asked for an introduction and he was helping a friend.

Rob Riley was listed as the attorney and a board member for Crimsonica.

The most potentially lucrative business deal entered into by the group was a plan to set up a nationwide lottery in Russia — a plan that would ultimately go awry for many reasons, including the fact the Russian mafia didn't care for the idea.

Rob Riley said he had no interest in that deal and warned Sigler that it wouldn't work. Ultimately, when the deal did fall apart, the investors — including McGregor, Sigler and Montgomery doctor David Thrasher — lost a substantial sum of money. There has been speculation through the years that Rob Riley also lost money, but he insists he had no involvement in the lottery deal, although he admits to losing money on some of Sigler's other ventures.

Asked if the failed dealings with Sigler and Rob Riley played a role in his fallout with Bob Riley, McGregor declined to answer. He also declined to provide details of the deals or say what resulted in their failures, saying it would be unfair to the other investors.

However, Bob Riley is emphatic that the failed deals had nothing to do with his decision to take on McGregor personally. But he did take him on.

In pre-dawn raids in late January 2010, Riley's task force, now being led by Mobile DA John Tyson, attempted to confiscate machines at both VictoryLand and Country Crossing. They left empty-handed from both, as tips prepared the casinos for the action.

In neither instance did the task force possess a search warrant — a tactic Tyson thought up, relying on the law enforcement principle that a search warrant is not needed when the illegal act is performed in plain sight. But it quickly became clear the tactic wouldn't work, leaving Tyson to take on the arduous task of convincing a local judge to sign a search warrant for an establishment pumping millions of dollars into the local economy and benefitting thousands of local voters.

In Dothan, the task force was able to find a judge. But in Macon, Riley again had to turn to the state Supreme Court, which continued its helpful ways. In February, the justices lifted an injunction put in place by a Macon County judge and gave Tyson the green light to raid VictoryLand.

But McGregor kept his casino closed to avoid the raid, and the public debate swirled. As casino owners and pro-gambling politicians urged Troy King to take over the task force, and as cooler heads urged Riley and Tyson to take their cases to court instead of relying on raids, the whole thing nearly spiraled out of control in late-February 2010.

At an anti-gambling rally on the Statehouse steps, which was inexplicably held just moments after a pro-gambling rally was held in the same location, the two sides exchanged heated words. Unemployed casino workers numbering into the hundreds shouted down Riley and his wife, Patsy, who were attempting to speak at the event. Before long, the workers and gambling opponents were screaming at each other. The event ended without violence, but it was an indicator of how heated the issue had become.

A few days later, the 2010 incarnation of the "Sweet Home Alabama" bill failed in the House.

As Riley's task force slowly made its way across the state shutting down electronic bingo operations and forcing smalltime operators out of business, it quickly became obvious that the biggest fights would be in Greene and Macon Counties, where Greenetrack and VictoryLand are located.

Country Crossing and its developer, Ronnie Gilley, certainly would have been players as well, but a federal indictment and subsequent guilty plea by Gilley ended his days as a major player in the state. Also indicted in that case were McGregor and nine others, including state lawmakers and lobbyists.

That federal case, which centered on claims that McGregor and other gambling supporters had offered bribes to legislators to get the "Sweet Home Alabama" bill passed, had a number of issues. Most notably: Some witnesses, who wore mics and secretly recorded conversations, were tainted, with some, such as state Sen. Scott Beason, recording themselves making racist comments. There was also the larger issue of the government lacking tangible evidence against the defendants who didn't accept or seek plea bargains.

Then there were the questionable tactics — of the prosecutors. To begin with, it was revealed that FBI agents held a summit with Alabama lawmakers in April, as the House was on the verge of passing the "Sweet Home Alabama" bill, to inform them that the bill was at the center of a corruption probe. That move, which longtime FBI and federal law enforcement officials called unprecedented, effectively killed a bill that seemed destined to pass.

To announce the indictments in the case six months later, U.S. assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer held a Washington D.C. press conference before sending the accused their charges. Then, instead of allowing McGregor and the other defendants to turn themselves in, which attorneys for the defendants said would happen within an hour of notification, FBI agents went to the homes of each and brought them out in handcuffs. At McGregor's home, his attorney Joe Espy said, a TV news crew was waiting outside — at 7 a.m. — filming McGregor being escorted to a car in handcuffs.

It took two trials, two years, millions of tax dollars and millions of personal dollars, but eventually McGregor and his co-defendants were found not guilty by a jury.

"They examined me closer than any person in this country has been examined, and they found nothing — because I'm clean," McGregor said during a recent interview. "Make sure you put that in there, because by God, they put me and my family through hell. They listened to my wife reading my grandbabies Bible stories.

"And (the verdict) wasn't because I had good lawyers — I did have good ones, but that wasn't the reason. You don't beat that kind of a case unless you're innocent."

The odd thing for McGregor, as he stepped away clean from that trial, would be that he would spend the next four years trying to get back into a courtroom.

As Riley moved out of the governor's mansion and Robert Bentley moved in, one thing became clear: Bentley did not share Riley's passion for chasing casino owners. But the attorney general does.

A few days after taking over, Bentley dissolved Riley's task force. The task force and its war on gambling had cost taxpayers nearly $4 million, and while it had been successful in shuttering a number of casino operations, it had not been responsible for a single arrest.

The new responsibility for chasing illegal gambling fell to Attorney General Luther Strange. Like Riley, Strange saw the decisions by the Alabama Supreme Court as an indication that electronic bingo games are illegal. And as the chief law officer in the state, it was his job to shut them down.

"My goal, and I said this from day one, is to treat everyone fairly, let everyone have their say, have their day in court," Strange during an April interview. "The court tells us what the rules are and then we move forward. I don't have a position on gambling. I am required to enforce the law, and it's really that simple."

Strange said he and his staff reviewed the information available when he took office and formed an opinion of what the bingo law is. He said they withdrew the opinions issued by King, "because those just weren't consistent with what the Supreme Court had said," and informed everyone of their decisions.

Strange's office views the Cornerstone decision handed down by the Alabama Supreme Court in 2009 as the backbone of state law concerning bingo in the state. That decision laid out a six-point test for defining what bingo is, including that it must be played on paper cards, players must daub the cards themselves, numbers must be called by a live person and winners must claim their prizes by shouting "bingo."

The gray area is here: When passed, some of the bingo amendments were specifically intentioned to allow electronic bingo. Greene's amendment has the word "electronic" in the amendment. In Macon and Houston counties, the central debate and vote on the amendments were almost exclusively about electronic bingo.

According to constitutional law professors, the intent of a constitutional amendment and the goal of the voters who passed it have consistently been viewed by courts as key factors when determining the parameters of the amendment. In some cases, those factors have trumped the wording of the amendment.

Strange disagrees with that position, and he believes the Supreme Court has made it quite clear that it believes electronic bingo to be illegal in the state.

However, to demonstrate his goal of fairness, Strange points to his decision to go after the Poarch Creek operations in the state. "If it's illegal in Greene County and at VictoryLand, it should be illegal on their lands, according to the law," he said.

Strange is referring to a lawsuit his office brought in federal court challenging the Poarch Creek's right to operate electronic bingo casinos in the state. A federal judge ruled that Alabama has no standing to challenge the games on Indian lands, noting that the issue has already been determined and settled by IGRA.

Strange's action came on the heels of a lawsuit filed by the Escambia County Commission, which was represented by Bryan Taylor, the former Riley legal advisor and a state senator at the time of the suit. The Commission cited a recent U.S. Supreme Court case, Carcieri v. Salazar, to claim the Poarch Creeks had no right to sovereign land because they weren't a federally recognized tribe in 1934. Strange's suit against the tribe also incorporated that claim.

Congress has made at least two attempts at correcting the bungled language in the Carcieri decision, which appears to limit the federal government's ability to take lands into trust to only those tribes that were federally recognized by 1934 at the time of the Indian Reorganization Act. But the bills to correct that ruling have failed because of a variety of other issues — primarily a deadlocked Congress that has turned even simple matters into partisan fights.

Still, most courts and the Department of the Interior have held that the Carcieri ruling doesn't have the damaging effect that some speculate. The DOI has issued an opinion stating it still has authority to recognize tribes and lawsuits challenging land put into trust prior to the Carcieri decision have mostly failed.

That the Escambia County suit was filed at all is confusing to Robbie McGhee.

"They obviously wanted more tax money, and they said, 'Well, if we win this we can get what we're owed,' " McGhee said. "And I said, 'What you don't seem to understand is that if you win this, all of this goes away. This casino that pumps millions into your county is gone. All of these jobs, gone.' It makes no sense to me, but then, many things don't.

"I really don't get the attitude sometimes. It's as if everyone was happy when we were poor and sharecroppers. I can't tell you how many politicians showed up down here for photo ops and to talk about what they would do for us. But now that we're able to care for ourselves and provide a little back, there's resentment. It's hard to fathom."

The Poarch Creeks weren't the only ones fighting Strange in courtrooms. Attorneys for VictoryLand and Greenetrack — and those two groups sometimes are the same — have spent a significant amount of time over the last three years fighting Strange over search warrants, a liquor license, and finally, an actual case.

Strange ordered a raid of VictoryLand in Feb. 2013 and a raid of Greenetrack in March. Prior to the VictoryLand raid, Strange's office had to get the state Supreme Court to force Macon County Judge Tom Young to issue a search warrant for the raid.

Young was not alone in his beliefs. The Alabama Criminal Court of Appeals also reviewed Young's decision on the search warrant and unanimously backed the judge.

Young had declined to issue the warrant, in part because Macon County's amendment requires that the county sheriff certify the bingo games being played — and Sheriff David Warren had examined and certified VictoryLand's machines. The Supreme Court wasn't swayed by Young's ruling and ordered the warrant granted.

Strange's office also had earlier needed Supreme Court intervention into a Greenetrack raid, in 2011. The court first appointed a judge from Birmingham to oversee the case, and he ultimately issued a warrant to Strange's office. Following the raid, Judge Houston Brown, who issued the warrant, allowed a hearing at the track's request to consider evidence that Strange's office had misrepresented evidence to obtain the warrant.

Following that hearing, Brown agreed with Greenetrack, killed the warrant and ordered the machines and money seized from Greenetrack returned. Brown also found that agents from Alcohol Beverage Control and an expert retained by Strange's office had lied under oath.

Regardless, earlier this year, the Supreme Court overturned Brown's ruling, saying he had "an erroneous understanding of the judge's role in a warrant process." A Greene County grand jury, in the meantime, indicted the ABC agents and the gambling expert for perjury.

Strange is now seeking to intervene in that case with the intent of quashing the charges. A Greene County pastor has filed a complaint with the Alabama Ethics Commission to determine if such a move runs afoul of state ethics laws.

All of this leaves us in roughly the same spot we were in when the whole uproar got started — one side says it's all legal, the other side disagrees. The ball is in Judge Shashy's court on that question, but it will likely be in the laps of the Alabama Supreme Court justices within the year.

As attorneys in nice suits lob accusations back and forth from nice offices, it is sometimes easy to forget that this all affects real, hardworking people. Good people. People who don't care about the legal nuances of "random ball drops" or "source codes" or a "six-point test."

On a recent drive around Tuskegee, the toll of VictoryLand's crippled operation was obvious. There are a number of abandoned homes. The city's streets are a mess in some spots. Planned development has stalled. The recent news that a Hibbett Sports store was opening generated two press releases from Mayor Ford's office.

Look at the numbers and the impact is easy to understand.

Just five years ago, VictoryLand was employing over 2,300 people in the county. Many of those jobs were going to low-skill employees who have few options in the job market, particularly in a county with Macon's lack of industry. Now, the track employs about 50 people, most of them taking bets at the pari-mutuel windows — the only portion of VictoryLand still operating — or serving food and drinks.

The county is shedding people at an astonishing rate. Since 2010, its population is down over 8 percent. That's the largest in the state by a wide margin.

"People are leaving because they have no jobs," said City of Tuskegee spokesperson Dyann Robinson. "And what's really bad is that most of those people are our middle class and up people — people who had options to move and get jobs elsewhere."

The hurt is felt throughout the city — in ways most people overlook. James Samuel runs Tuskegee's electric company, which supplied VictoryLand's power. The track alone was paying over $1 million per year in electric costs, Samuel said. Now, they haul in about $800,000.

Same for water. VictoryLand was forking over between $20,000 and $25,000 per month for water. Now, the 300-room Oasis Hotel sits boarded up. For the first few weeks after the raid in 2013, workers would go through each room once per week and flush the toilets, just to make sure everything stayed operational. Even that would help the Tuskegee water company, but a toilet hasn't been flushed in over a year now.

As adults looking for work have moved out, they've taken their kids with them. Over the past three years, Macon County is down 23 teacher units — each would've earned about $50,000 per year. Booker T. Washington High, which was built primarily from money donated by McGregor, can barely afford to stay open.

"We've had to cut back on athletic funding and several other things to make ends meet," Macon County school board chairman Theodore Samuel said. "We're in here now trying to fix up a budget and there's just no way to fill the hole we got. No way."

And there's no real hope of fixing it anytime soon — not without VictoryLand reopening. Any other fix will require time, recruitment and a lot of help from the state's economic development office. So, Ford says he's doing all he can to attract businesses that will locate to Tuskegee, and he's also fighting harder than anyone to get VictoryLand back open.

"We have been denied our rights here in Macon County," Ford said. "Our people voted for this. It was properly introduced in the Legislature. It was properly passed. It was cleared by the Justice Department. It was placed on our ballots and our people approved it with 76 percent of the vote. This is what we want here. It's no different than a town that wants alcohol sales."

There is a similar plight in Greene County, although the people there haven't experienced quite the same drop-off, because the casino has managed to stay mostly open.

The AG's office made a deal with the electronic bingo game distributors following one of the raids on VictoryLand. It would give some of the machines back to the manufacturers in exchange for an agreement stating the distributors were aware that they would be prosecuted for distributing illegal gambling devices if future machines showed up at VictoryLand. That agreement has prevented McGregor from restocking and reopening, as Greenetrack has been able to do.

Still, Nat Winn, Greenetrack's CEO, has been just as much in the fight. He organized a rally in Tuscaloosa this summer, at which 200 or so supporters rallied in support of electronic bingo. Standing in the blazing sun, Winn echoed many of Ford's comments, saying they've been treated unfairly and questioning the motives behind attacking businesses in predominately black counties.

In Tuskegee, Dyann Robinson echoed Robbie McGhee, saying the black community in Tuskegee, like the Native Americans in Atmore, had finally found a way to survive and thrive with VictoryLand up and running. Maybe it was controversial, maybe some people disagreed with it, but this was their industry.

"We voted for gambling and we knew full well what we were voting for," Robinson said. "And gambling is gambling. What does it matter if you do it in six seconds on a machine or in three minutes on a piece of paper? You're still gambling. But the difference for us is everything. Look at our streets. We can't pave those. Not now. That's just a little thing. Our friends are gone. Our town is dying.

"But I'll tell you this. We've been in this position before as black people in this state. We fought then and we'll fight now. These people might just come to find that they should've picked another fight."

On a sunny Wednesday afternoon in late October, cars are coming and going from the parking lot of the Southern Star casino in White Hall. The clientele shuffling in and out of the giant, box-shaped structure situated a couple hundred yards off Highway 80 are mostly elderly and mostly black.

Inside, there are 100 electronic bingo games operating. But these are not the machines in use at the Poarch Creek facilities, nor are they like the machines confiscated from VictoryLand most recently and from Southern Star itself a few years ago.

These machines look more like a computer terminal, with a monitor and even a mouse for customers to use to get the games set up. Nothing is inserted into the terminal; nothing is returned from the terminal, thus ducking under the state law outlawing and defining slot machines.

The place has a weird feel of an Internet café trapped inside a casino. There's a cashier's cage and a restaurant/bar. There is a VIP room that is empty. There is even the familiar thick casino carpeting with a hideous pattern.

But most importantly, there are live games to play and a steady stream of customers, even at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday, to play them. To do so, the customers visit the cashier's cage and pay for a pin number. The pin number starts the games, which are played on touch-screen monitors. To collect any winnings, players must go back to the cashier's cage at the end of their time playing, say "bingo" to the cashier and collect.

There is a paper sign posted beside the cashier's cage informing customers that no winnings can be returned unless the player says "bingo" first. This is an attempt to address another often-cited argument by the AG's office: Players in traditional bingo games have to yell "bingo" in order to win.

It's all one more step in a seemingly never-ending dance around the law – a dance participated in by both sides of this gambling fight.

"We've felt like these machines are legal, because they're like the ones in Greenetrack," said Ester Jackson, executive director of the charity operation White Hall Enrichment Advancement Team (W.H.E.A.T.) that controls Southern Star. "We've never received anything from (the AG's office) saying the machines are illegal. Hopefully, if they have a problem with what we're doing, they'll send us something to let us know before coming in here and trying to shut us down."

The W.H.E.A.T. board's argument is similar to an argument presented by attorneys for VictoryLand to Montgomery Judge William Shashy a few weeks ago. Essentially, they argue, the AG's office can't pick and choose which facilities to raid if it is contending that all electronic bingo is illegal. Yet, that's what it is doing by allowing casinos such Greenetrack and Country Crossing to continue operating.

During that trial, VictoryLand attorneys showed Shashy a list with the number of days that Greenetrack, Country Crossing and other casinos have operated in the state over the last four years as VictoryLand's casino sat empty. The argument appeared to catch Shashy's attention and he told the attorneys for the state that he "just doesn't get" why the casinos aren't being closed down if they're illegal.

Whether that argument will hold water for long isn't clear. But there is at least some sign that the state is softening its stance on electronic bingo in the short term, as it awaits Shashy's ruling, and a sure-to-come Alabama Supreme Court ruling on the matter. There's also an indication of a possible long-term softening on the state's approach to dealing with the Poarch Creek operations.

Gov. Robert Bentley, who has never seemed to carry the disdain for gambling that Riley did, has said the state might explore a possible compact with the Poarch Creeks at a future time. The compact would allow the Creeks to expand their operation, likely to include full-blown slot machines and/or table games, in exchange for a percentage of tax dollars going to the state.

That extra cash flow to the state, projected to be well into the tens of millions of dollars, depending on the tax rate, would be a godsend for a state facing a nine-figure budget shortfall.

"It will probably be one of the recommendations I will get (on the budget)," Bentley said in a recent interview. "We will look at that. I'm not opposed to people voting on the lottery, as long as it's done right.

"I've never been pro-gambling. I think it's a poor way to fund government, and I think it actually hurts people, but if someone earns their money and wants to play the lottery – it is their money. That's the libertarian streak in me, you know, you can do with your money whatever you want to do. You earned it."

Bentley said he didn't believe entering a compact with the Poarch Creeks would result in a spread of gambling throughout the state. In fact, he said it could limit it, since ensuring the Indians faced little competition would likely be part of any compact.

That's a position that McGregor, Nat Winn and others disagree with – not just in theory but also in implementation. They don't feel it would be fair to have a compact that cuts businesses, such as VictoryLand and Greenetrack, which have paid state taxes for years. Also, they don't think it could ever be passed through the Legislature.

"I just don't think doing that is something the people of this state would ever stand for," McGregor said. "How could you look at that and say that's fair, knowing what's happened all along? Because you need the money now? I can't see how that would pass."

With or without a compact, the Poarch Creeks are charging forward. In October, they announced plans to spend $65 million to expand the facility in Montgomery. Once completed, it will feature a new five-story hotel, several new restaurants and a remodeled interior.

That expansion comes on the heels of the $246 million in upgrades to the Wetumpka location completed earlier this year. Where there were once modulars with cigarette smoke billowing from the open doors, there is now a beautiful, 20-story hotel and casino with nice restaurants and a 16,000-gallon shark tank.

Robbie McGhee, the tribe's treasurer, said the Creeks have always been open to a compact with the state. They're not pressing for one, because business is good and the federal government has all but ensured their continued operation of electronic bingo machines. But McGhee said he's spoken to a number of elected officials over the years about a compact.

"We don't actively seek (a compact) anymore," McGhee said. "We did with Bentley what we've done with every governor – we reached out and said the ball's in your court. We let it go with that. But in reality, a compact gets us Class III gaming and that's not necessarily the money maker people think it is, because with it comes a number of other expenses."

McGhee also acknowledged that a compact would end frivolous lawsuits his tribe has been forced to deal with, but it's still not an issue that's worth chasing. Not with millions of untaxed dollars already flowing into Poarch Creek coffers.

McGhee said he doesn't understand the resistance to the tribe's success, nor the state's refusal to embrace and promote the tribe.

"We're here and we're not going anywhere," he said. "There are so many benefits and so many ways we could help this state. Why not take advantage of all of that and figure out a way to make things better all over for everyone?"

It's virtually the same question many have asked about gambling in general. With the advent of offshore websites on the Internet and various other means, gambling has never been more prevalent inside Alabama. Factor in the casinos in Mississippi and Louisiana and lotteries in Georgia, Florida and Tennessee, and more Alabamians than ever are gambling.

So, with gambling already prevalent in the state, why not let the people of Alabama vote, and if gambling in some areas is approved, establish a system to tax and regulate it?

It's a question Alabama lawmakers have been unable – and at times unwilling – to answer for the better part of the last half-century.

In June 2011, as the start of the high-profile federal corruption trial involving VictoryLand owner Milton McGregor and state lawmakers and lobbyists was dominating the state's media and interest, behind the scenes — in federal Judge Myron Thompson's chambers and in hearings closed to the public and media — the whole spectacular show was teetering on the edge of collapse because of one name on a witness list.

The name belonged to a 27-year-old female court reporter, who had been tasked with transcribing grand jury testimony in the case. It was an odd entry on a witness list filled with prominent names and obvious witnesses, but when FBI agent Keith Baker learned of the entry a few months before the start of the trial, he knew immediately why it was there.

Baker, the federal government's lead investigator on the case, had been involved in an extramarital affair with the court reporter — a breach of ethics for Baker, a possible conflict of interest for both and only the beginning of the sort of odd and unexpected twists that shaped the "Bingo trial."

Details of Baker's affair and an alleged coverup are contained in thousands of pages of previously-sealed motions, orders and transcripts from closed hearings and in-chambers conferences, all of which were recently made public when a federal judge granted the Montgomery Advertiser's motion to unseal those records. The Advertiser filed that motion last September after learning of the sealed records during its reporting on the history of gambling in Alabama.

Those records highlight a three-month-long fight — a sort of secret trial-within-a-trial — between prosecutors and the team of defense attorneys, who were representing the nine defendants in the case, over whether to allow Baker to be questioned in open court about the affair.

Those proceedings also brought to light a number of other issues, which morphed into their own series of closed-door hearings. Included in that was the revelation that more than 8,000 text messages sent and received by Baker during a key period of the investigation had gone mysteriously missing from both his phone and the backup computer servers at FBI headquarters in Virginia.

"Had it been one of my attorneys that did what Baker did, you can bet the government would've gone after them, they'd probably be in jail," McGregor said in a recent interview, his first on the subject. "I understand why Thompson ruled the way he did — he didn't want the trial to be completely overtaken by this. And it would've been."

The Advertiser attempted several times to contact Baker through the Alabama Attorney General's office, where he now works as an investigator. Ultimately, Baker and the AG's office declined an interview.

The trial, with defendants that included two sitting state senators, two former state senators, two powerful lobbyists and two casino owners, was a full-blown legal circus.

With all of the defendants facing serious jail time over allegations they participated in a scheme to push gambling legislation through the Legislature by way of improper donations, no expense was spared on attorneys. At times, there were more than two dozen attorneys milling about the defense tables, including some of the top legal names in the state. It was so bad that in chambers, Thompson implemented a one-attorney-speaks rule to keep order.

"I don't want you all ganging up on me," Thompson told the attorneys, although he rarely seemed to be in danger of losing control.

After learning of Baker's transgressions — and then being told by Assistant U.S. Attorney Louis Franklin that Baker also had an inappropriate relationship with a female courtroom deputy during former Gov. Don Siegelman's trial — Thompson let his displeasure be known.

"It is a very serious matter ... and it does compromise the proceedings, at least in appearance, and can compromise it in substance," Thompson said from the bench during one of the closed hearings. "If a witness was having an affair with my court reporter, I'll tell you right now, that court reporter would not be working for me tomorrow. Now that's how serious it is.

"And that's in a courtroom. A grand jury proceeding is just so serious, because there's no judge presiding. The integrity is just — it's paramount."

Credibility is key

The primary issue that Thompson had to determine, however, was whether Baker's relationship with the court reporter had damaged the credibility of grand jury transcripts or if it had damaged the grand jury process.

After a number of hearings and motions, and after having his own court reporter go through the grand jury recordings and transcripts, Thompson ultimately decided that Baker's actions didn't impact the case enough to bring about a dismissal, and that the introduction of the affair would be so prejudicial that it would inappropriately bias the jury.

However, another motion to dismiss — this one based on cumulative errors and miscues by the prosecution — lingered. Among other issues, the defense noted Baker's missing text messages and a chronic problem receiving evidence in a timely manner from the prosecution.

On the latter, U.S. Magistrate Judge Wallace Capel called the government attorneys' actions ridiculous and threatened sanctions.

On the former, Thompson went to great lengths to get to the bottom of the missing messages, including allowing an FBI information technology expert to be questioned by both sides during one of the closed hearings.

Jason Amos, then an IT specialist for the FBI, testified that FBI-issued cell phones are backed up by a server, which meant that any text message Baker sent or received on his FBI Blackberry should have also been duplicated and stored at FBI headquarters.

Baker testified that when he received the request to provide his text messages for the times related to his investigation, he realized they were gone. A check on the FBI servers revealed the copies were also missing for that period of time.

Baker's more than 8,000 text messages were the only ones Amos said he could say for certain were missing from any FBI agent in the country, although he added he wouldn't necessarily know of missing messages unless asked to pull records for specific agents. While messages did sometimes go missing, Amos said the other agents he checked during that span experienced no issues and that there had been no changes to the system that would have prompted or corrected an issue with the servers.

The FBI was able to retrieve time stamps on the missing messages, and they revealed that some of the missing messages went to and from former Sen. Scott Beason, who was a government witness in the case.

Beason recorded conversations he had with numerous fellow legislators and some of the defendants. While the behind-the-scenes hearings over Baker's issues were ongoing, Beason's problems — referring to Greene County voters as "aborigines" and making other racially insensitive comments —were playing out in full light. Beason also said the messages were missing from his phone.

Despite the missing messages, the defendants were able to get some messages from Baker's phone. Of the 10 messages Thompson allowed into the record, one exchange in particular stood out to the pro-gaming faction.

On Nov. 6, 2010, Baker messaged the court reporter: "Just talked to Gov Riley," he said.

"You love it," she replied. Then, four minutes later: "Hope you are having fun."

"I'm having fun," Baker replied.

McGregor's attorneys, who never got an opportunity to question Baker about the message, believe it could be the smoking gun link tying the former governor to the investigation. But government attorneys denied that, saying the text was an innocent, tongue-in-cheek joke by Baker, who had been on the field at Auburn's homecoming football game and shook hands with Riley at one point.

For his part, Riley has denied any involvement in the case, and during an interview with the Advertiser last year, Riley said the allegations "simply are not true."

AG's office appeals VictoryLand ruling

Attorney General troubles

The release of the previously sealed documents is another problem for an Alabama Attorney General's Office that has seen more than its share over the last year, particularly among the employees assigned to investigate and prosecute illegal gambling in the state.

In December, former Riley legal advisor and the AG's office's top gambling prosecutor, Henry "Sonny" Reagan, was allowed to resign instead of being fired after AG Luther Strange said Reagan was found to have leaked sensitive information regarding the Lee County special grand jury's investigation into House Speaker Mike Hubbard.

Hubbard, a Riley protégé, has been indicted on 23 felony counts, mostly for violations of the ethics laws he helped pass. His legal team has attacked the AG's office's handling of the case, alleging misconduct and heavy-handed prosecution. Baker is currently working as an investigator on that case.

In addition to Reagan, lead investigator Gene Sisson, a 28-year law enforcement veteran, was also fired in May by Strange for helping Reagan undermine the Lee County grand jury.

A few weeks later, Sisson and Baker's boss at the AG's office, former chief investigator Tim Fuhrman, who worked with Baker at the FBI, also retired.

That leaves only attorney John Kachelman from the team that chased illegal gambling operations around the state — an operation that has cost Alabama taxpayers millions, according to figures compiled by VictoryLand attorneys and mostly confirmed by the AG's office and data in the state's open checkbook.

According to those figures, which does include salaries for at least one AG's office prosecutor and investigator each year — the only point of contention between the VictoryLand attorneys and the AG's office — the state has spent more than $9 million since 2009. In addition to the salaries, that number includes legal fees paid to outside attorneys — including more than $1.5 million doled out to the Bradley Arant firm in 2010 — fees paid to experts and moving and storage expenses. Riley's former task force cost the state nearly $4 million in two years between January 2009 and January 2011, according to a cost analysis provided by Gov. Robert Bentley's office.

The storage expenses — which go towards the rental of warehouse space to store electronic bingo machines confiscated during raids of illegal casinos — have exceeded $320,000 over the last 20 months. That includes a rate of $17,875 per month paid since May of last year.

The beat goes on

The gambling chase doesn't seem to be slowing down soon, despite a declaration from Strange last year that his office would no longer be chasing illegal gaming operations. Instead, that task now falls to local sheriffs and district attorneys.

But for existing cases, the AG's office is working from the same playbook. In late June, Montgomery Country Circuit Court Judge William Shashy tossed a request from the AG's office to keep cash and destroy bingo machines seized from VictoryLand during a 2012 raid.

Shashy said in his ruling that because VictoryLand has been shuttered since that raid while other casinos in the state remain open, it had not been afforded equal protections under the law. An appeal of that ruling with the Alabama Supreme Court was almost immediately filed by the AG's office. There is a new hearing in the case set for Aug. 4.

However, the whole thing could be moot. The Legislature is set to take up a bill that, if passed, would create a new constitutional amendment allowing for full casino-style gambling at four locations, including VictoryLand, the Birmingham Race Course, GreeneTrack and the Mobile Greyhound Park.

But behind the scenes, the maneuvering has started all over again, as most legislators position themselves on the most personally beneficial side of the issue and await the inevitable flow of money from both sides.

BY THE NUMBERS

• Total Cost of investigating and prosecuting illegal gambling (since 2009): $9, 031,773.60

• Former Gov. Bob Riley's task force on illegal gambling: $3,948,850.69

• Storage Fees for confiscated e-bingo machines since October 2013 (machines from VictoryLand, GreeneTrack and Country Crossing): $326,875

• Monthly cost of storing machines: $17,875

• Cost under Attorney General Luther Strange since 2011 (doesn't include staff salaries): $1,161,775.01