Saturday, Oct. 19, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
Twenty years ago this fall, they preached the gospel of gambling to leery New Jersey voters.
With nickel-and-dime fund-raising, creative promotional schemes, desperate pleas to civic groups and an effective, not-in-your-backyard slogan - "Casinos Yes, Atlantic City Only" - they sold the promise of jobs, urban revitalization and help for senior citizens.
On Nov. 2, 1976, New Jersey voters bought it. In a referendum that changed the city and the state forever, residents voted 1,535,249 to 1,180,799 to let the former "queen of resorts" try her luck at gambling.
Twenty years later, the principals in that pro-casino campaign remain proud of their accomplishment but puzzled by the failure of casino gambling to fulfill its principal promise - revitalization of the shabby seaside resort with the famous Boardwalk.
"I'm not telling you I'm proud of the pace. The pace has been an embarrassment," said Perskie, who pushed the proposal as an assemblyman, wrote the state's casino law and later served as the state's top regulator.
The stage for the 1976 casino campaign was set two years earlier, when voters overwhelmingly rejected a similar initiative. That ballot question would have allowed New Jersey communities to adopt casino gambling individually. It was defeated, 1,202,638 to 790,777.
In a last-ditch effort to reverse the paint-peeling fortunes of Atlantic City and its hospitality industry, the principals decided to try once more. This time would be different.
The ballot question was framed differently - only Atlantic City would have casinos. And in a stroke of genius, supporters promised that tax revenue from the gambling halls would be used to finance senior citizen programs.
"Help Yourself, Help Atlantic City," was one slogan that implored voters to say yes.
Voters were told the casinos wouldn't end up in their back yards in Hackensack or Jersey City. The senior citizen provision, meanwhile, made them feel it was their patriotic duty to vote yes.
"You don't have to be in favor of gambling to vote for it," Assemblyman Howard Kupperman told the Pleasantville Republican Club a month before the vote. "You have to be in favor of seeing Atlantic City reborn again."
The anti-gambling forces, organized under the slogan "Casinos: No Dice," predicted casinos would turn the city into a cesspool of con men, Mafia dons and loan sharks while bankrupting the hapless patrons.
"It's not gambling I'm against," said Alan Kligerman, a businessman credited with coining the "No Dice" slogan. "It's the element that would be drawn here by it. They say they can keep out organized crime. Bull. Lie down with dogs and you're going to catch fleas."
THE MONEY MAN
Frank J. Siracusa, a successful insurance broker in Atlantic City, was enlisted as the fund raiser. Every Tuesday at 8 a.m., he would meet with the other principals of the Committee to Rebuild Atlantic City (CRAC) in the offices of Mayor Joseph Lazarow, plotting strategy and figuring out where the money would be raised and spent.
He anticipated needing $500,000. As it turned out, the campaign spent $1.2 million, about $750,000 for television and radio advertising.
By October, Siracusa was pointing the finger at doctors, lawyers and businessmen who he said had not given their fair share. In stories published in The Press of Atlantic City, Siracusa named names.
To Siracusa, it was not a campaign issue. It was an issue of the city's survival.
"...If they weren't pressured we wouldn't get contributions and if we didn't get the contributions we'd never win," recalls Siracusa, 65. "I've always felt bad I had to humiliate some people to win, but that's the way it was. It was either this or, 'Last one out, turn out the lights out on the way out of town."'
The biggest contributor didn't have to be asked: Resorts International had purchased the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall hotel on the Boardwalk with plans to make it over into the city's first casino. The company gave $200,000 to CRAC and spent thousands more on its own.
It also made the best of family ties in its hiring decisions, enlisting McGahn, the brother of state Sen. Joseph McGahn, and Marvin Perskie, the assemblyman's uncle.
The second-biggest contributor: The Press of Atlantic City, which gave $45,000, endorsed the pro-casino effort on its editorial pages and provided lots of free publicity in its news columns.
"As a newspaper editor, I felt uneasy about the fact that we didn't give much space to the opposition," remembers Charles Reynolds, 72, who was then the editor and publisher. "But there wasn't any organized opposition, at least not around here."
THE HIRED GUN
By August, CRAC officials realized they needed a campaign expert.
"Attitudes had to be altered, appearances had to be manipulated, the bitter pill sugarcoated," author Ovid DeMaris wrote in his book, "The Boardwalk Jungle."
"It was time to summon a professional persuader, a packager of candidates and causes, a seducer of the electorate," DeMaris wrote.
The man was Sanford Weiner, 47, a political consultant from California with an impressive record of winning campaigns on candidates and issues. He was hired for $35,000 plus expenses to do four months of work.
"He turned what might otherwise have been another poorly managed and disorganized campaign into a scientifically managed battle to target and win over specific voting blocs," wrote author Michael Pollock in "Hostage to Fortune: Atlantic City and Casino Gambling."
He set up satellite offices in Jersey City, Camden and Newark and staffed them with volunteers.
Weiner also established a speakers bureau that trained people for speeches to civic groups and community organizations all over the state. Sometimes there was opposition, sometimes not.
He arranged for more than 1,200 airings of television commercials and 4,300 radio spots in the last two weeks of the campaign. In one of them, a rabbi and a Roman Catholic priest said it was "morally wrong" for people to be jobless and hungry, as some in Atlantic City were, and that casino gambling would save them.
"Many religious leaders believe this is the real moral issue," they said.
That wasn't the only move to neutralize the New Jersey Council of Churches and the "No Dice" crowd. CRAC also mobilized what its members referred to as the "God squad" or "the flying nuns."
The Rev. Martin Wisznat, a Margate minister, together with nuns from an Atlantic City parish wearing their habits, made about two dozen appearances at shopping centers and elsewhere to hand out pamphlets supporting casino gambling.
Did it work? "I never measured it, but we won the election," Siracusa said.
MORE
archive
