The machines were rigged from the beginning, garnering the name “drop-card machines”� because cards were strategically removed from the deck, usually a ten of spades and jack of hearts, to reduce the probability of getting a royal flush.
The first slot machine was invented in Brooklyn in 1891 by Sittman & Pitt as an added novelty to the typical bar amusements. However, the rise of electronic slot machines in the 1990s, with links again to organized crime, and the 2004 opening of the Resorts World Casino in Queens, New York, featuring the controversial “VLT’s”� or Video Lottery Terminals, reintroduced gambling into the urban fabric of New York City, making this historical inquiry timely.
The eventual regulation of slot machines focused on a containment strategy thereby removing slots from the collective memory of everyday urban life. With slot machines–more than 25,000 of them in New York City alone in the early 1930’s–placed in prosaic locations, the general populace was both knowingly and unknowingly touched by the mafia.
