TUNICA, Miss., March 5 (UPI) -- I keep trying to tell people about Tunica, but they don't believe me.

I won't say it's the greatest place in America for gambling, but it's damn close. It doesn't have the shopping and entertainment that Vegas has, but then I'm not talking about that. I'm talking craps, slots, blackjack, poker--a place where it's all about the gambling. There's a reason that Tunica is the third most popular gambling destination, after Vegas and Atlantic City. I'm talking about action.

"But it's small, right? It's one of those riverboat things."

It's not small. It's ten huge casinos, some of which are high-rises and others that just sprawl all over the cottonfields. And although they're technically on the Mississippi River, you'll never see the river or know you're on a barge. This is Vegas without the traffic.

"But it's a day-tripper place, right?"

There are 6,300 hotel rooms, and for the average gambler the rooms are better than Vegas, and cheaper.

"But it's, like, in the middle of nowhere, right? I mean, they roll up the sidewalks at 8 o'clock."

No, Vegas is in the middle of nowhere. Tunica is 25 miles south of Memphis and it rocks 24 hours a day. Blues country. In 20 minutes you can be at B.B. King's joint on Beale Street.

"But it's in the South. It's in Mississippi."

That's right, and you haven't lived until you've seen a hot southern-style craps table with a superstitious mob all down together on the pass line. These guys are rowdy. These guys have the spirit of the old downtown Vegas from back in the fifties. They're drinking and they're noisy and they're not afraid to slap greenbacks down on the felt.

Probably the closest comparison to Tunica is Laughlin, Nevada, another "alternate Vegas" with 99 per cent of its clientele arriving in cars. The difference is that Laughlin has such a sleepy atmosphere that you feel like you're wandering around in a retirement village. The only advantage Laughlin has over Tunica is sports betting and horse-racing parlors, but Tunica has newer, more elegant properties and just more pure-dee pizzazz.

I don't know, maybe it's the name that puts people off. "Tunica" (pronounced Toonaka) sounds like a frozen fish-stick from Tuscany. (It's actually a Chickasaw word meaning "the people.")

Or maybe it's the Mississippi Delta itself. It's flat, marshy and mostly treeless. For the first 160 years of Tunica County's existence, it was made up of cottonfields, soybean fields, rice fields and catfish ponds. Today it boasts the tallest building in Mississippi--the 32-story Gold Strike Casino- -but if you book a room on the top floor, all you're gonna see for miles is farms, highways and railroad tracks.

The fact is, Tunica ten years ago was not only the poorest county in the continental United States ("There was one poorer one in Puerto Rico," points out Webster Franklin, Executive Director of the Tunica Convention & Visitors Bureau), but it was virtually unknown to anyone who wasn't born here. Traversed by a single two-lane highway, with no bridges across the Mississippi to connect it to Arkansas, it had a 26 per cent unemployment rate, one stop light, and 20 motel rooms. "And they were not the kind of rooms you'd like to stay in," adds Franklin. The mostly black population of 9,000 was employed primarily in agriculture, but they were being laid off left and right as the farms became increasingly mechanized. "It was a community," says Franklin, "that was dying on the vine."

All that changed in 1992 when three St. Louis night club owners filed a notice of intent to dock a gambling ship at an out-of-the-way fishing outpost called Mhoon Landing. Usually such an application would set in motion a series of legal maneuvers that would result in a voters referendum on gambling.

"But we never did vote on gambling in Tunica," says Franklin, "because nobody cared enough to oppose it. These people wanted jobs."

When Mississippi legalized gambling in 1990, Tunica was about the last place they expected it to flourish. The gambling bill was first proposed by legislators on the Gulf Coast, where "cruise to nowhere" ships would pick up tourists and sail out beyond the three-mile international limit for two or three hours of gambling. "The Gulf Coast legislators decided 'Why not let 'em dock?'" says Franklin. "It was a way for the state to gain tax dollars. But there weren't enough Gulf Coast legislators to pass it on their own, so they had to form a coalition with legislators from the Delta."

After two years of debate, the bill was finally passed during the 1990 session, allowing gambling on either the ocean or "a navigable waterway of the Mississippi River."

"Everybody figured there would be maybe two or three boats on the coast," says Franklin, "and maybe one in Natchez and one in Vicksburg."

There were actually six "riverboat" states that approved gambling in the early nineties--Louisiana, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana are the others--but Mississippi was the only one to make gambling more or less wide open. Anybody was welcome to open a casino; all you had to do was acquire the land in the proper area and apply for a permit.

"What the gaming commission did," says Franklin, "is take the Nevada laws and insert 'Mississippi' wherever you had the word 'Nevada.' And this is largely responsible for the success of Tunica. In the other riverboat states, you can't have a Tunica. The other states have a limit on the number of licenses. But in Mississippi, once a county becomes legal, it's up to the gaming commission to determine the legal sites. They let the free market determine the number of casinos."

What Tunica has that no other riverboat state has is clusters of casinos all in the same place, so that people can hop from one to the other. In states like Indiana and Illinois, the casinos are sometimes so isolated that they're 200 miles from the next casino. This results in a massive influx of Tunica tourists- -there were 12 million visitors last year--from states that have legalized gambling, but frustrating legalized gambling. A lot of Missouri gamblers, for example, despise the law that says you have to stop playing after you lose $500. In Indiana, until last month, the riverboats were required to cruise the river, meaning if you arrived at the wrong time, you might have a two-hour wait until the boat came back. In Illinois the casinos are specifically licensed as urban renewal projects for distressed areas, meaning you have to visit places like Joliet or Peoria to play. This is why the Tunica parking lots are full of license plates from Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Missouri. People learn to gamble in their home state, but they come to Mississippi to cut loose.

Today Tunica, far from being the poorest county in America, is actually one of the most prosperous. And that transformation began at 2:30 p.m. on October 19, 1992, when "Splash," the first gambling ship, opened for business at a place called Mhoon Landing, which is five miles west of the county seat (also called Tunica) down a narrow winding road. The first day Splash was in business, there were cars lined up for miles. By the second day, there was a constant three-hour wait to get in. Overnight, it became the most profitable casino "per gaming position" in the world. Crowds were so eager to get into the tiny single-deck riverboat that the owners started charging an entrance fee--$10 on weekdays, $25 on the weekends--but even that did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm.

In retrospect it's not too hard to see why Tunica gambling was more lucrative than Gulf Coast gambling. The Memphis metropolitan area has 1.2 million people, much larger than any city in Mississippi, and Tennessee is one of only three states in the union that has no legalized gambling at all, not even a lottery. These were people who had either never been inside a casino, or else had been to Vegas once or twice in their lives and wanted more. They were literally starved for action.

Splash Casino was a cramped old-fashioned boat that nevertheless had a steak house and a showroom, and it had a monopoly for 11 months. Then, in September 1993, a second boat opened on Mhoon Landing. The Lady Luck, it was called, owned by the same Andrew Tompkins who owned the Lady Luck in downtown Vegas. Far from cutting into Splash's business, the Lady Luck simply doubled the market. Now there were three-hour waits outside both casinos. And that's when the big Las Vegas gaming corporations decided to get involved in Tunica.

The boom at Mhoon Landing lasted only three years, and today the area is padlocked and all but deserted. At its peak there were four casinos operating there, including the President and Bally's, which opened on the same day in December 1993. But as capital started flowing into Tunica County, the prime building sites were those closest to Memphis--10 to 15 miles north of Mhoon Landing. There were no ready-made river landings to the north, but since everything is farmland, it was not that difficult to dredge channels near the many oxbows of the Mississippi and find prime parcels for construction.

First Harrah's opened ten miles to the north of Mhoon Landing, followed by Sam's Town, then the Southern Belle, which lasted less than a year, and Treasure Bay, which lasted exactly a year. Then, in a two-year period, Tunica saw the building of Fitzgerald's, the Sheraton, the Hollywood, Circus Circus, and the Horseshoe. The biggest of them all, the Grand Casino and Resort, opened in 1996 right at the northern county line, with a capital investment of $450 million, three hotels, a championship golf course, and a world-class skeet-shooting range. Since then there's been one more opening--the Isle of Capri, which took over Harrah's old building in 1999 after Harrah's moved into the abandoned Southern Belle building.

Meanwhile, the budget of Tunica County has grown from $3.5 million in 1992 to $80 million today, but, remarkably, the population hasn't grown at all. About 9,500 people live in the scattered towns, 70 per cent of them black, while 16,000 people-- mostly commuters from the Memphis area--are employed by the casinos. The result has been a revolution in the standard of living. Unemployment went from 26 per cent to 5 per cent. Per capita income went from $11,875 to $20,203. Welfare families were reduced by 90 per cent, food stamp payments by 70 percent.

"What the county decided to do," says Franklin, "was, first, infrastructure. The place was dilapidated. There were no four- lane highways. There was nowhere to get gas between Tunica and Memphis. So we built roads. The second thing we spent money on was education. We have about $10 million in capital improvements and spend more per pupil than any county in Mississippi. The third was health care. We had one doctor in 1992. Today we have two health care facilities. And finally, all our debts were paid off."

They also built a fire station, a new building for the sheriff's department, and started construction on a history museum, but the premier project so far is the $22 million Tunica Arena & Exposition Center, which opened two summers ago and was built specifically to accommodate rodeos, livestock shows and trade shows. It's the largest indoor arena in Mississippi, with a seating capacity of 6,000, including 14 luxury skyboxes (!) for those fanatic tractor-pull fans. The expo center is also used for conventions, the largest of which is the South Central Manufactured Home Show, which draws about 2,000 people.

For the future, Tunica intends to turn its tiny general aviation airport, with a 2400-foot asphalt runway, into a facility that will be able to handle 727s. The county is spending $38 million, with the FAA tossing in 80 per cent of the cost, for a three-gate terminal and a runway that, by 2005, will be 100 feet longer than the one at Reagan National Airport. Junkets and charter planes will be able to bypass Memphis entirely and run tours directly in and out of Tunica.

Oddly enough, you can spend a week in Tunica and never see the Mississippi River. Casino marketers know that gamblers don't like riverboats--they prefer Vegas-style palaces--so most of the casinos sit in "bathtubs" that have been dredged near oxbows of the river. The casino floor itself sits on a barge, but the rest of the facility is firmly on dry land, and you usually can't tell where one ends and the other begins. Actually, one of the most common questions asked at the visitors bureau is, "Uh, where can I go to see the river?"

As a result, the county broke ground last year on a $22 million project called Riverpark, next door to Fitzgerald's Casino, that will house an aquarium, a levee system, an interpretive center, and a 168-acre park full of nature trails. It will also feature a riverboat--for excursions only. It's not exactly the volcano at the Mirage, but it will start Tunica down the road toward satisfying its biggest need--non-gambling tourist attractions.

"When people ask me where they can go when they get tired of gambling," says Franklin, "we don't have that much. There are antique shops in the town of Tunica. We have locally famous eating places like the Hollywood Cafe and the Blue & White Restaurant. We have two golf courses. We've just started to get some retail shopping in the form of a Factory Outlet Mall. But in truth, we have to sell the amenities of Memphis."

Those amenities are mostly music-related: Graceland, of course, as well as Sun Records, where Elvis and other artists first recorded, and a refurbished night club district along Beale Street, the traditional home of the blues. The casinos themselves have gotten into the business of sponsoring concerts, but they've had mixed success. Country acts are the only ones that seem to work, and even big-name country acts are only good for one show a year before they start to lose their heat. The sole exception is a trendy blues club at Jack Binion's Horseshoe Casino that has become Tunica's answer to the Hard Rock in Vegas.

Tunica is actually falling into the trap that Atlantic City succumbed to 20 years ago. As the number of casinos has stabilized at ten, with no new construction since 1996, the competition has grown intense and the market has become a gold mine for gamblers looking to get free stuff. Currently, for example, there's a slots war going on between the Sheraton and Fitzgerald's, with each casino claiming to have the loosest slots in the state. (One of the flaws in the Mississippi gaming statute is that there's no way to verify these claims. The casinos aren't required to publicly report their slot-machine "holdback" figures, as they would have to do in Vegas or Atlantic City.) That means free meals, giveaways, drawings, comped rooms and the like are being handed out all over the place, especially when you consider the traditional "loose slots" advertiser, the Hollywood, as part of the battle.

"The rooms and food are mostly given away in Tunica," says Franklin. "We're paying a lot for the customer marketing-wise. The tour operators who run buses to Tunica also give you freebies."

The result is that the cost of attracting customers gets higher and higher--good for the gambler, but a big red flag on Wall Street, which watches these things with an eagle eye. Tunica is essentially a low-roller's market, so even giving away $20 in merchandise or coins could end up meaning the difference between a profit and a loss. But once the customers become accustomed to the freebies, it's all but impossible to cut back--and Tunica already has a sophisticated repeat customer who knows he can ask for things and get them.

The only other thing that could affect Tunica's future is if Desoto County, the Mississippi county between Tunica and Memphis, were to legalize gambling. Fortunately, there have been three attempts so far and all have failed, by about 60 to 40 per cent each time. Ironically, most of the casino workers live in Desoto County, which has 12 times the population of Tunica and is more a middle-class suburb of Memphis than a true Delta community.

In the more distant future, Tunica would like to have more housing, perhaps some subdivisions or apartment complexes. The problem is, says Franklin, "Tunica is an old Delta community." Translation: none of the big landowners want to sell their family land, and there simply aren't enough amenities to attract young couples. "We lack essential services," says Franklin. "It's a chicken-and-egg thing. We have one grocery store. We have zero shopping. There's no drug store--well, there are two small ones in downtown Tunica. All the houses are taken. In the town of Tunica you can't buy a house. For residential growth we need a grocery store."

Or maybe not. Part of the charm of Tunica is that it is so undeveloped. About the only tourist-related business prior to the gambling boom was the Fishing Adventures Guide Service, "specializing in crappie and bluegill," which is basically one guy: Ed "Dawg" Weldon. "Dawg" is still around, taking visitors fishing for large-mouth bass and catfish on Tunica Cut-Off Lake and the various oxbows of the river, and it would be a great loss if Tunica went the way of Atlantic City and got rid of its heritage.

It doesn't seem likely, though. "Do you see those cotton patches out there?" asked Franklin. "Did you see the cotton when you came in? We don't have much cotton here by the highway anymore, but people kept saying they wanted to see cotton. So we called up Walter Wills, who owns the land, and asked him to put some cotton out there. So there you are: cotton patches."

© Copyright 2002 United Press International and Joe Bob Briggs

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