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Week of October 15, 2002 |
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SUNCRUZ CASINO
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The cruise ship
port near Cape Canaveral is not exactly the most beautiful
seaside destination in the world. It's full of unsightly
warehouses, marine-gear joints and giant hulking terminals that
look like Siberian airport hangars.
But if you happen to find a diner called the Portside
Galley, tucked away on a feeder road near the Canaveral Port
Authority, you'll eventually meet everybody in town, including
Cape Canaveral Mayor Rocky Randels, who comes in every day to
glad-hand his way through the various officials who get their
eggs and pancakes there.
And one of those booths at the Portside Galley will
frequently be occupied by Cheryl Lindsey and Diane Morey, the two
gals who pretty much run the SunCruz casino ship and may
represent the only female-operated gambling operation in the
country. I haven't been to all the casinos in America, but I've
been to more than any one person would likely see in a lifetime,
and it's extremely rare to find two women in the top two
positions at a casino. Cheryl runs the ship, as General Manager,
and Diane is Director of Sales, the key executive position for a
ship that relies heavily on group sales to tourists and retirees.
At any rate, SunCruz VIII is a 208-foot four-deck yacht that
can conceivably hold 1,000 passengers, and she's part of the
seven-ship SunCruz chain that sails out of ports all over Florida
and South Carolina. As gambling experiences go, it's pretty
basic--437 slot machines, 32 table games--and since she berths at
the same port as the largest gaming ship in the world, Sterling
Casino, it pretty much has to be sold as the "cozier, friendlier"
alternative.
"The whole basis of our business is customer service," says
Cheryl Lindsey, the General Manager. "'Always be friendlier' is
what we tell our employees. All the dealers greet people and know
everybody by name. We have a Players Club that rewards the status
of the player and awards comps. You can get match play, buy-in
advantages, buffets. But we don't try to compete with Sterling.
It's a whole different experience."
SunCruz has one other advantage. The SunCruz name itself is
the most famous gambling brand in Florida, thanks to a Greek
immigrant named Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis who founded the
business in 1994 and at one time had as many as 12 "cruise to
nowhere" ships. Boulis was a flamboyant self-made millionaire who
built the Miami Subs sandwich-store chain and the Marriott Key
Largo Bay Beach Resort as well as several Greek restaurants in
Hollywood, Florida, but his success in the gambling ship business
was opposed at every turn by Florida Attorney General Bob
Butterworth, who hated gambling and did everything he could to
run Boulis out of business.
After spending a million dollars investigating Boulis,
Butterworth finally nailed him for a technical violation of the
obscure 1916 U.S. Shipping Act. Boulis wasn't criminally liable,
but in 2000 the state forced him to sell his company--and SunCruz
quickly fell apart.
The new owners had agreed to pay $147.5 million for the
company, but they never made the initial $23 million cash
payment, and within weeks Boulis was embroiled in a bitter feud
with new CEO Adam Kidan, a New York attorney who founded the
Dial-A-Mattress company in Washington, D.C., and had served as
general counsel to the St. Maarten Hotel Beach Club & Casino in
the Caribbean. At one point Boulis and Kidan got into a
fistfight. On another occasion SunCruz employees boarded two of
the ships, held a security guard for four hours, and removed slot
machines and other equipment that Boulis claimed were his.
It all came to a head on February 6, 2001, when Boulis was
shot dead in his car while driving home from his Fort Lauderdale
office. One car stopped in front of him, cutting him off, and
another car pulled alongside as the driver emptied a semi-
automatic into Boulis' body. It looked like a classic mob hit,
and Kidan didn't look too squeaky-clean when it was later
revealed that his "food and beverage consultant" was Anthony
Moscatiello, a Brooklyn friend of John Gotti with ties to the
Gambino family, or that $95,000 had been paid to a mysterious
company called Moon Over Miami Beach "to protect the vessels."
As the family of Boulis started wrangling over the estate,
eight lawsuits were filed against Kidan, and he eventually agreed
to walk away from SunCruz for $200,000. Kidan now runs an
"executive security company" in Washington that builds armored
cars, and since 2001 SunCruz has been run by Boulis' nephew,
Spiros Naos. The murder is unsolved, but Fort Lauderdale police
say the file is still very active, and detectives have made
several trips to New Jersey and Brooklyn in an effort to identify
the shooter.
All of the high drama, though, seems far far away when
you're hanging out in sleepy little Cape Canaveral. Up until 1993
the port was little more than a place for a few charter fishing
vessels and some navy ships attached to the Air Force base that
provides support to the Kennedy Space Center. (On launch days, by
the way, you can get one of the best views of the Shuttle from
the deck of the SunCruz, which cruises just off the coast near
the launching pad.)
Carnival Cruise Lines was the first to notice that Port
Canaveral could be a profitable port when they docked the
Carnival Fantasy here in 1993, running three-day and four-day
cruises to Freeport and Nassau in the Bahamas. Disney World
noticed how much business Carnival was doing, mostly taking
advantage of tourists who wanted to combine Orlando with
cruising, and the result is that Port Canaveral has become a
major cruise departure city, with Carnival running two ships (the
other one is the Carnival Pride, which goes to the Caribbean),
Disney running the Magic to the Eastern Caribbean and the Wonder
to the Bahamas and Disney's private island (Castaway Cay), and
Royal Caribbean running the Sovereign of the Seas to Nassau (and its
private island, Coco Cay). Next month Holland America
inaugurates service from Port Canaveral with the Zandam, and
Norwegian Cruise Lines will start operating from here in 2003
with the ship Norwegian Dawn.
The first gambling ship at Port Canaveral was the 600-
passenger Diamond Royale, owned by a group of Dubuque, Iowa,
businessmen, who started cruising in 1996 but sold out to SunCruz
eight months later after deciding it was too difficult to control
the business from such a distance. That ship lasted until May of
1998, when it was replaced by SunCruz VIII, which is almost twice
as big.
The SunCruz ship is the closet gambling ship to Orlando, so
most of its business comes from tourists and conventioneers who
drive over for one of the twice-daily cruises. It has all the
casino basics--blackjack, craps, roulette, Three Card Poker, Mini
Baccarat, Let It Ride, Caribbean Stud--and mostly caters to low-
rollers, with a $5 minimum bet. (Twenty-five-dollar players are
considered high rollers and get the use of a private lounge on
the top deck.) They also have a pretty elaborate live poker room,
with nine tables, which is a little strange since the ship only
cruises for five hours and most serious players would need to
play for longer than that to make sure the skill levels even out.
It takes 45 minutes to get out to the three-mile limit where
gambling is legal, and during that time SunCruz features live
lounge entertainment and a fairly lavish buffet. On weekends they
extend the cruise time an extra half hour, returning at 1 a.m.
Unlike the rival Sterling Casino, SunCruz allows 18-to-21-year-
olds to board--which makes for a rowdy ship during spring break.
(They can gamble but they can't drink.)
SunCruz's Cape Canaveral ship welcomed its millionth guest
earlier this year--the Florida gambling ship industry as a whole
clocked 4.3 million passengers last year--and most of them were
retirees, who like the 11 a.m. weekday cruises, and capacity
tourist crowds on weekends, most of them from Orlando. You
approach the ship on a palm-lined drive leading to the Clams
Casino restaurant, which is used to feed large groups before and
after cruising, and inside it looks like a thousand other
casinos--lots of brass railings, a puke-proof green, yellow and
purple carpet, and slot machines crammed into every available
nook and cranny, including one called "Jack and the Beanstalk"
which is exclusive to the SunCruz line.
They try to promote other area attractions to attract more
drive-in business. The Kennedy Space Center is a big draw
("Astronaut Appearances Daily!"), as is Melbourne Greyhound Park
and, oddly enough, a place called Ron Jon Surf Shop in nearby
Cocoa Beach that's famous as one of the largest swimwear and
sporting goods shops in the country.
For the most part, though, it's a ship that relies heavily
on bus business. There are regular runs from Orlando hotels and
shopping malls up and down the east coast of Florida, attracting
retirees with promotions like Senior Fun Day (Thursday), Asian
Night (Sunday) and blackjack tournaments.
SunCruz is not as dominant as it once was. There are only
seven ships in its current fleet, and one was put out of
commission in August when it caught fire in Little River, South
Carolina. But the company is returning to normalcy, and the gals
at the Portside Galley are conspiring even as we speak to bring
back the glory days of the mid-nineties.
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© Copyright 2002 United Press International and Joe Bob Briggs
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