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Friday,
November 27, 1998
Stupak
chips edible
They
may not be worth $5,000 but the chocolate wafers are
not shunned by homeless guests.
By
Steve Friess
Review-Journal
Bob Stupak promised
worthless $5,000 chips, and worthless $5,000 chips he
produced.
For dessert.
The Las Vegas gaming
entrepreneur invited the city's poor to his Thunderbird
hotel for Thanksgiving with a dual offer of free turkey
dinners and free $5,000 chips "for their benefit
and enjoyment of."
The invite, actually
a news release issued Tuesday night, seemed to imply
Stupak would hand out the gaming chips he's been trying
to cash in at Binion's Horseshoe. Perhaps, observers
thought, he was setting up the Horseshoe to be besieged
by people demanding their Stupak chips be exchanged
for cash.
So on Thanksgiving afternoon,
there was Stupak leading reporters around the cavernous
dining area of the Thunderbird, greeting his guests
as they chowed down on turkey TV dinners.
"Have you seen any
of them ask?" he challenged smugly an hour into
his free-meal event, his hands shuffling about in the
pockets of his red-and-black sweat jacket. "They're
not here for that, are they? As soon as they ask, I'll
give them one."
It took a while, but
finally 66-year-old Tom Abbott lumbered into the Las
Vegas Boulevard South hotel toting leaflets containing
the gospel and making a beeline for Stupak.
"They're saying
you're giving out chips," Abbott said.
Chips, yeah. Chocolate chips.
"Go ahead, they're
not cashable but they're edible," Stupak beamed,
plunging his hands into his pockets to toss around striped
black ovals decked with "Bob Stupak's $5,000 Horseshoe
Chip" on them. An employee then led reporters through
a narrow hall into the freezer area, where worker Wally
Sloane showed off two large cardboard boxes full of
chilled chips of dark chocolate and a minty tinge.
"We pick these up
in the last 24 hours," Sloane explained, holding
up overflowing handfuls of the chips. "Then we
put the stickers on them ourselves."
Stupak has an estimated
$250,000 in out-of-circulation $5,000 chips from the
Horseshoe that the casino refuses to cash because Horseshoe
executives say they can't verify how Stupak came to
own them. In a high-profile standoff last week, Stupak
invited reporters along as he tried to cash one of the
chips at the casino, only to be rebuffed again. The
Gaming Control Board then ruled the Horseshoe must cash
Stupak's chips, but the casino has not done so while
its attorneys consider an appeal.
On Thursday, despite
the news release promoting the would-be $5,000 chips,
only a few dozen people came to the Thunderbird. In
fact, Stupak sent the delivery man from Albertson's
back to the store with 1,200 of the 1,800 frozen meals
ordered because turnout was so light.
Stupak scolded the media
for hanging around the hotel Thursday waiting for a
greedy scramble that never materialized.
"These people don't
care about the chips, only you people care about that,"
Stupak said. "Look at them, they're good people
who need some help."
For their part, those
who arrived for the meals seemed oblivious to the prospects
of the chips in the first place and shielded themselves
from cameras wishing to gauge their bewildered response
to the after-dinner snack.
"He's a wonderful
man," Abbott said. "He cares about people."
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