Louisiana gaming receipts ($227 million) were flat last month, although there were a number of little dramas being played out behind that bland façade. Lake Charles was up 7% and Baton Rouge casinos plunged 17%. L’Auberge du Lac was flat, grossing $31 
million, just staving off a 19% surge by Golden Nugget ($29.4 million). Delta Downs was up 6% to $16 million while hard-to-sell (strangely enough) Isle Grand Palais was up 2.5% to $10.5 million. There was little joy in Baton Rouge, where even market leader L’Auberge Baton Rouge ($14 million) was down 12%. The bottom fell out of Casino Rouge ($5 million) and Belle of Baton Rouge ($4 million), down 21% and 25% respectively.
Losers outnumbered gainers in the New Orleans market, with Harrah’s New Orleans ($25.5 million) up 4.5% and Amelia Belle ($3 million) up 6.5%. Boomtown New Orleans ($9.5 million) was off 6%, Treasure Chest ($8 million) slid 8% and Fair Grounds ($3.5 million) slipped 4.5%. Outstate, Boyd Gaming‘s Evangeline Downs ($7 million) was off 5.5%. Up in Shreveport/Bossier City, everybody profited at the expense of Eldorado Shreveport ($10 million), falling 18%, and Boomtown Bossier ($5 million), sliding 15%. Sam’s Town was flat at $6.5 million, while the market leaders were Horseshoe Bossier ($18 million), up 12%, and Margaritaville ($14 million), 12% higher.
* If a bill passed by the House of Representatives makes it through the Senate and past the president’s desk, tribes will have staved off an important challenge to their sovereignty. 
The bill exempts tribes from the National Labor Relations Board‘s remit. Rep. Todd Rokita (R) passed his Tribal Labor Sovereignty Act of 2017 almost strictly along party lines. “Interestingly,” I. Nelson Rose notes, Rokita was the largest recipient of Indian gambling campaign contributions in the House in 2017, even though there are no tribal casinos in his Indiana district. He has announced he is running for US Senate.”
In his online column, Rose points to San Manuel Indian Bingo and Casino v. N.L.R.B. as being the at the nub of the issue. The court held that “a tribal casino is not a part of a government, but merely just another privately owned business … At the maximum, the case could result in the virtual end of tribal sovereignty.” The background is that San Manuel’s Indian Bingo & Casino was not allowing HERE to organize workers at the casino but was permitting the rival Communications Workers of America to do so. The NLRB ruled that the tribe was discriminating and that both unions should have access.
“The decision itself is a significant crack in the wall of sovereign immunity protecting tribes from federal and state laws. But perhaps more importantly, the Court then declared a fundamental change in the way courts will decide in the future if any law applies to a tribe … All federal and state laws, including all statutes and regulations, apply to tribal casinos unless there is an explicit statement in the law itself that tribes are exempt,” Rose writes. If the Rokita bill becomes law, tribes will be spared a lot of paperwork — and perhaps the obligation to ever dicker with a labor union again.
* Investigating Mandalay Bay gunman Stephen Paddock is like probing a riddle inside an enigma. The more we know the less we understand either the man or his motives. The latest revelation is that he was a consumer of child pornography. Authorities are investigating an undisclosed ‘person of interest’ in the case. That’s no surprise: It almost a 
given from Oct. 1 onwards that Paddock has assistance in setting up his MBay sniper’s nest. One of the questions raised by the preliminary report is that if “From September 25, 2017, through October 1, 2017, Paddock transported multiple suitcases to his room on several occasions. Paddock also left the Mandalay Bay on multiple occasions for long periods of time, often returning to Mesquite,” no one thought anything suspicious was afoot, let alone saw fit to bring the matter to the appropriate authorities. Even only a video poker “whale,” it seems, you are entitled to a wide amount of latitude. I’ve only had time to skim portions of the report but Paddock’s movements have been reconstructed in exacting detail, so he was making no effort to be inconspicuous. (Sample: “At approximately 2300 hours, Paddock arrived at the Walmart in Mesquite, Nevada. He purchased luggage, razor blades, fake flowers, a vase, and a styrofoam ball.”)
Paddock girlfriend Marilou Danley is cooperating with the investigation, as well she might, describing her former squeeze as “germaphobic” and distant. She said he had scoped out the Las Vegas Village festival venue from various angles during a previous venue. Considering that Paddock purchased 55 guns in the year leading up to the attack, the penny should have dropped somewhere along the line that he should be on a domestic-terrorist watch list — but we wait in vain for law enforcement to explain its complaisant attitude. Being a WASP seems to have enabled Paddock to hide in plain sight.
