Key Points:

• FBI agents seized illegal gambling machines from Native American casinos in Arizona in 1992
• The Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation blocked the agents, leading to a three-week standoff
• Arizona’s legalized sports betting has seen a rise in gambling addiction cases

As dawn broke on May 12, 1992, teams of FBI agents and U.S. marshals in fleets of trucks rolled out into the desert toward Native American reservations across the state, under orders from U.S. Attorney Linda Akers to confiscate illegal electronic gambling machines from five tribal casinos.

Although the casinos were within the bounds of the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, they implemented slot machines without proper authorization. One by one, the federal agents seized hundreds of video gambling machines from the casinos with little resistance.

Until they reached the casino on Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation.

Federal agents, with 349 confiscated slot machines in tow, were ready to file out through the casino parking lot when they found themselves barricaded. Members of the reservation’s Yavapai tribe assembled a wall of cars, trucks, heavy machinery and their bodies to block the sole access road. The confrontation began a three-week standoff.

Only when former Gov. Fife Symington arrived five hours later to negotiate a truce with Yavapai Nation President Clinton Pattea were the federal agents permitted to leave – without the confiscated machines.

The Fort McDowell standoff led to Arizona’s first set of agreements permitting tribes’ use of electronic gambling machines.

‘Reminiscent of a Hollywood movie’

The Fort McDowell stand-off is just one incident in Arizona’s long and complicated history with gambling. That history has been thrown into sharp relief as news broke Thursday of a sweeping federal investigation, dubbed Operation Royal Flush, into illegal sports gambling by the Department of Justice.

On Thursday, federal prosecutors from the Eastern District of New York unsealed a sweeping indictment charging 31 suspects across 11 states that spanned years, including current and former NBA players and coaches, along with members of the New York City La Cosa Nostra crime families. Officials say it netted $7 million in illegal profits. They are charged with using wireless technology to cheat in high-stakes card games. In a press conference Thursday, FBI Director Kash Patel said the card games led to tens of millions of dollars in fraud.

Former NBA players, including Hall of Fame point guard Chauncey Billups, who won the NBA Sportsmanship Award in 2009, are among the people charged, along with New York City’s four major mafia crime families: the Bonannos, Genoveses, Luccheses and Gambinos, officials said.

“The investigative work that culminated with this morning’s operation are reminiscent of a Hollywood movie,” said Ricky Patel, the special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations, who has led the ongoing probe.

The mafia family members have been charged with violent crimes, according to officials. According to the indictment, Zhen Hu – also known as “Jonathan Chan,” “Jonathan Hu,” “Scruli” and “Stanley” – and Thomas Gerlado, known as “Juice,” punched a man in the face to get him to pay back his debt.

According to the indictment, Ammar Awawdeh, also known as “Flapper Poker;” Osman Hoti, who went by the nickname “Albanian Bruce;” John Mazzola, also known as “John South;” and Nicholaa Minucci arranged and committed gunpoint robbery on a co-conspirator to steal a machine.

Charlotte Hornets guard Terry Rozier, also known as “Scary Terry,” is accused of “wagering in connection with NBA games or providing non-public information relating to NBA games to others,” according to the indictment.

On March 23, 2023, 30 bets totaling $13,759 were placed on Rozier in just 46 minutes ahead of an NBA regular-season game between the Hornets and New Orleans Pelicans, prosecutors said. All the bets were put on Rozier’s unders, assuming he wouldn’t equal or surpass the betting lines set on him, according to the indictment.

All 30 bets won after Rozier left the game just 10 minutes in due to a foot issue. The event was under federal investigation in July, according to prosecutors.

Thursday’s indictment is not the first time in 2025 a former NBA star has been under fire from federal investigators. The FBI arrested former Arizona superstar and 11-year NBA veteran Gilbert Arenas on July 30  in connection with illegal high-stakes poker games.

Since being released on a $50,000 bond, Arenas has posted multiple comments about the case, suggesting that he “snitched” to avoid legal penalties, including a video posted to TikTok on Friday with the song “Snitching” by Pop Smoke featuring Quavo and Future.

A long and complicated history

Arizona has had an intricate relationship with gambling throughout its history – even preceding its membership into the U.S.

In 1907, before Arizona became “State 48,” Territorial Gov. Joseph Henry Kibbey demanded that the 24th Territorial Legislature outlaw any form of gambling throughout the territory, saying it was a public evil and “an impediment to statehood for Arizona.”

Eugene Brady O’Neill and George W.P. Hunt, two members of the Territorial Council, followed suit and introduced two anti-gambling bills outlining punishment for conducting or permitting gambling.

In true Wild West nature, many gambling establishments and practices continued after Arizona gained statehood in 1912, despite the anti-gambling provision in its constitution.

Decades later, as the federal government targeted organized crime and cracked down on gambling, many of the last bastions of gambling in Arizona closed their doors.

On Nov. 7, 1950, Arizona voters overwhelmingly voted against  a statute to create an Arizona department to “regulate, license, and authorize gambling operations.”

Arizonans rejoined the gambling scene when the Arizona State Lottery, established in 1980 as the first state lottery west of the Mississippi River, sold its first tickets on July 1, 1981, for a scratch-off game called Scratch it Rich.

Arizonans purchased all 21.4 million Scratch it Rich tickets in just 10 days.

As the Arizona Lottery expanded over the next decade, including its first draw-based game, The Pick, in 1984, so did the federal government’s willingness to permit gambling on reservations.

Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulation Act in 1988 to “recognize gaming as a way to promote tribal economic development, self-sufficiency and strong tribal government,” according to the Arizona Department of Gaming website.

The act outlined that a state must allow tribes to run gaming on reservations if it is permitted off-reservation, and that a tribe that wants to “engage in Class III casino-style gaming must first sign a Tribal-State Gaming Compact” with the state. Class III includes slot machines, blackjack and other casino games.

In the early 1990s, many existing Native American bingo halls installed slot machines without the required signed compacts.

While the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation website says “tribes were waiting to sign gaming compacts with the state government,” Symington called upon the U.S. Attorney’s Office and incited the raids, believing reservations in Arizona should not have casinos because the state disallowed such activity elsewhere.

Arizona permitted the lottery, dog and horse races and charity bingo games off-reservation at that time, according to the Department of Gaming.

Following the raid of Fort McDowell Casino, now known as We-Ko-Pa Casino Resort, and the three-week standoff, Symington met with Pattea and representatives of 15 other Arizona tribes to sign Arizona’s first gaming compacts on Nov. 25, 1992.

While the raid and ensuing standoff resulted in the destruction of the original 349 confiscated gambling machines, the new agreements allowed casinos to reopen with 250 new machines anywhere on the reservations.

From those agreements, gambling expanded in Arizona through a voter-approved state initiative in 2002 and again under former Gov. Doug Ducey, who signed HB 2772 into law in 2021.

Although legal sports gambling has become ubiquitous in much of the country, it did not stop the suspects in the latest indictment from resorting to illegal practices, prosecutors said.

“Despite the recent widespread legalization of sports betting, unlicensed bookmakers or ‘bookies’ also offered sports betting services to bettors,” according to the indictment. “Bookies frequently accepted bets on bespoke betting websites that allowed users to place various types of wagers on sporting contests based on publicly available betting lines. Unlike legal sportsbooks, bookies typically ‘settled up’ the bettors’ wagers offline, generally through cash, peer-to-peer payments or cryptocurrency transactions.”

‘These casinos and these apps aren’t charities’ 

In its long and contentious history, whenever opposition to gambling arose, it often did so out of a fear of its corrupting influence.

A counselor at the National Council on Problem Gambling helpline said she has witnessed that corrupting influence firsthand. Most of the people who call her are men who got in over their heads betting tens of thousands of dollars with money they didn’t have. They often jeopardize their jobs or houses through gambling.

“What are they doing to try and keep you coming back?” said Sarah, the counselor, who declined to use her last name because she wasn’t given permission to speak to the press. “Do they give you free play or some sort of credit when you join the app? That’s not an accident. They’re not being generous, these casinos and these apps aren’t charities.”

Since sports betting became legal in Arizona, the state Department of Gaming has safeguarded for patrons and taken enforcement actions against unlawful operations, according to Director Jackie Johnson in the department’s fiscal 2025 report. According to the report, there were 124 serious incidents in the fiscal year.

Of the 22 federally recognized Indigenous tribes in Arizona, 16 of them have operating casinos. According to the report, 88% of winnings from casinos in Indigenous communities contribute to the Arizona Benefits Fund.

Since 2003, the fund has contributed over $2.3 billion to education, emergency preparedness and wildlife conservation in the state.

Despite its deleterious effects, sports gambling continues to captivate bettors here in Arizona and across the country.

The rise of sports gambling on mobile devices has led to an increase in gambling addiction, according to a February study from UC San Diego Today. Total sports wagers skyrocketed from $4.9 billion in 2017 to $121.1 billion in 2023, with 94% of wagers during 2023 placed online.

This article first appeared on Cronkite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.