For Gaming Executive, Betting on Charity Is a Winning Proposition

Once upon a time, gambling-industry executives would give neither a nickel nor the time of day to charity.

These men (they were always men) were servants to their bottom lines. Although their employees and many of their customers lived near the casinos, managers never doubled down in support of a local cause.

If a dollar was flashed in their halls, it went into a drop box near a gaming table or into a slot machine. The business of casinos was business, and little attention was focused on community problems.

In Tunica County, Miss., about 35 miles south of Memphis, that is changing in a big way.

William Wright, who runs the three-casino Tunica operation for Harrah’s, the largest gambling company in the world, has just joined the board of the United Way that serves the region. Soon, he expects to serve as the local United Way president, even though he moved to the town just two and a half years ago.

Mr. Wright is one of only a handful of gaming-industry executives to have taken on such a high-level charitable post. According to some industry observers, he will not be the last.

For Mr. Wright, a wiry, intense 44-year-old, this isn’t the first time he has stepped up for United Way.

During previous career stops in Las Vegas and along the pre-Katrina Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Mr. Wright served on local United Way boards. His motivation is partly personal (“Two family members have been helped by United Way”) and partly practical (“We want our employees to know that we care about the communities where they live”).

But Mr. Wright’s commitment is far deeper than it might otherwise be.

It would be easy just to ask the 6,000 employees of Harrah’s/Tunica to allow the company to deduct a small charitable gift from each paycheck, as many businesses do. But Mr. Wright does more than a typical charity drive: He allows employees to tour local institutions on company time and to decide where their collected dollars will go.

Harrah’s/Tunica workers support 69 projects in the nearby three-state area, including such stalwarts as Ronald McDonald House and the American Heart Association but also including local battered-women’s shelters and job-training programs for recently released convicts. Those smaller charities might drop off the radar without help from Harrah’s.

Harrah’s/Tunica employees active in charitable work come from every division of the operation, Mr. Wright said. Besides making decisions about where their gifts will go, 1,100 Harrah’s employees volunteer at local charities. Last year, these employees donated more than 6,000 hours of their time to charities, Mr. Wright said.

If only the rest of the casino industry were as generous.

It’s not.

The American Gaming Association has no formal grant-making effort, according to its spokeswoman, Holly Thomsen.

The association did begin a relief fund shortly after Hurricane Katrina, for industry employees along the Gulf Coast who had lost everything. Donors were gaming-industry suppliers and executives and trade-show attendees.

But the fund raised only $675,000 in its first four months of existence — a pittance next to the millions that governments spent there and that private charities raised.

The association does donate heavily to research on pathological gambling and treatment. The Institute for Research on Pathological Gambling and Related Disorders, a nonprofit organization that the association founded, has received more than $22-million, Ms. Thomsen said.

But none of that money goes to help poor or destitute people meet expenses or handle family problems. Nor does any of it treat drug or alcohol addictions — long known to go hand in hand with gambling addictions.

Do other gaming operations contribute as substantially to local charities as Harrah’s/Tunica? None would answer in any significant detail.

All the major gaming chains say they give to local causes, in Tunica and elsewhere. But they declined to say which causes, what the dollar amounts have been, or why they wouldn’t disclose specifics.

It’s not as if the need in Tunica County is hard to see. According to the 2000 census, the average household income in the county is $23,270 per year. That’s barely half the U.S. average.

Only 9.1 percent of Tunica County’s residents hold a college or graduate degree. Despite the boom in employment brought about 20 years ago by casino gambling, unemployment in Tunica County was 8.4 percent in 2007, about double the national average.

To drive through the county is to see as many tumbledown shacks as modern houses. Less than a generation ago, a significant portion of the county lacked indoor plumbing. Jesse Jackson once called Tunica County “America’s Ethiopia.”

For Mr. Wright, charitable giving in and around Tunica is part of a larger trend in his business — a move away from “the old reputation of Las Vegas. You know, everyone supposedly wore dark glasses and couldn’t care less about anything but profits.”

Mr. Wright began at the very bottom of the business. By day, he was a hotel student at the University of Nevada’s Las Vegas campus. By night, he worked at the Flamingo hotel as a public-areas housekeeper. He would begin his shift at 11 p.m., get off at 7 a.m., and go directly to class.

As Mr. Wright rose to his present position — regional president and general manager of Harrah’s/Tunica — he hasn’t hesitated to get personally involved. Not only does he write a personal check to United Way every year, but he will engage in stunts to encourage more employees to give.

“One year, I dyed my hair pink to get donations,” he said. It worked. Employee giving that year set a Harrah’s/Gulf Coast record.

Mr. Wright sets aside between two and three weeks each year for a United Way drive for workers. In last year’s campaign, Harrah’s/Tunica employees donated $300,000. That was more than any employee group in the greater Memphis area except for Federal Express — and FedEx has far more workers.

The big frontier in the gaming industry is donations from customers, not just from employees. Asked if he would consider placing a box at the front door of his casinos to induce gifts from arriving or departing gamblers, Mr. Wright said, “It’s something we would consider. Other businesses do it, so we probably should, too. I don’t look at our business any differently.”

He continued: “What you need to remember is that we are all large, publicly traded companies. It’s a very different model from what people think of when they see Las Vegas in the movies. My aim is to touch hearts — the hearts of our employees and the hearts in our communities. I don’t believe we can do less.”

Bob Levey teaches journalism at the University of Memphis. He spent 36 years as a columnist and reporter at The Washington Post. He has also been a senior development executive and a longtime volunteer fund raiser for colleges, arts groups, and health-care institutions.