Odds stacked against lifetime player in battle with casino over jackpot

This is the story of a player. Not a winner. Not even a gambler in the professional sense of the word. A player.

Joe Pepitone has been a player all his life.

Cards. Ponies. Lotteries. Slots. Anything that moves, he plays it.

And sooner or later, he loses.

That's the way it is with players. They play until they lose.

In Las Vegas, where one man's degenerate is another man's inveterate, that makes him an ideal casino customer.

Joe started as a schoolboy in Brooklyn running bets to Yonkers Raceway for his mother.

His parents taught him card games. Truth is, the whole family gambled, and at New Year's and other holidays the Pepitones played penny poker.

He's been playing catch-up since he was a kid. At 62, he's not a kid anymore.

Joe's name became a sports page conversation piece after his cousin, Joe Pepitone, played for the Yankees. Joe has spent much of his adult life explaining that, no, he isn't that Joe Pepitone.

He's just an average Joe. He's Joe the hard-working butcher. Joe the father of three, grandfather of four.

Joe the player.

Joe and his wife, Lynda, 57, once built a successful meat business in Kew Gardens, Queens. All that time Joe was playing, and so eventually they sold out and moved to the Poconos, where there were no OTB parlors or racetracks for miles.

They started a business and had a house, but in a few years they lost it to Joe's playing.

Pennsylvania had passed a state lottery, and Joe bought tickets by the fistful. Joe played until the family was so far behind on the mortgage the bank vultured their property.

"A gambler will find gambling no matter where they are in this world," Lynda says. "We lived in the backwoods of Pennsylvania with one stoplight. He found it.

"I could move to Alaska and he'd find someone to bet on the salmon going upstream. No matter where I go, he'd find it."

The Pepitones headed west from Pennsylvania in two trucks with not much left to risk.

They moved to Las Vegas to be near Lynda's family and, truth be known, the action.

It was here, on Oct. 23, 1997, at Arizona Charlie's that average Joe Pepitone thought his luck had finally changed. He hit a $463,895 Nevada Nickels progressive slot jackpot.

But there was a catch. Casino officials claimed the machine had malfunctioned. He hadn't really won, they said.

Pepitone fought the casino. Some facts were in his favor. He had an independent eyewitness. The casino reset the machine despite his protests, then destroyed it a short time later.

Joe appealed to the Gaming Control Board and Gaming Commission and lost. He went to District Court and lost, appealed to the state Supreme Court and lost again.

Since then, he's become increasingly obsessed.

"He wants to go further, but we just don't have the money," Lynda says. After 35 years of marriage to a player, she suffers from hypertension and depression. "The case has devastated him. He's like a dog with a bone that don't know enough to give it up.

"He's a good father, a loving grandfather, and a good man. Except for his gambling."

The regulation is clear: In the case of a mechanical malfunction, the play is voided. The rule is invoked often in the 1,000-plus player disputes the Control Board examines each year.

Pepitone's case isn't unique. Although his story encouraged state Sen. Joe Neal to introduce legislation to amend the regulation in the player's favor, the proposal was shot down.

On a cold, clear Friday afternoon outside the Clark County Courthouse, Joe stands in his Yankees cap carrying a large yellow sign that begins, "Robbed!! Of $463,895 ..."

The butcher knows the truth but won't give up. It's the player in him.

"The casinos have everything working for them," he says. "I gambled my whole life. I never cried when I lost. I never complained even when my kids did without. Then on the one day I hit, they took it away from me.

"I feel deep in my heart I won."

With that, Joe returns to his one-man picket line. He stands on the sidewalk at ground zero of America's gambling capital, trying to get back to even against the longest odds of his life.

John L. Smith's column appears Wednesdays in the Nevada Appeal. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call (775) 383-0295.