Keeping Games on Midway Honest : Step Right Up, Folks! There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute

Dan Papp knows the physics of a rip-off.

And that’s why, when he walks among the carnival games at the Del Mar Fair, it’s not for fun, not to win prizes for his kids or show off for his lady.

He knows that it’s all but impossible to toss a small plastic doughnut over the top of a Coke bottle, because of the dynamic action between hard plastic and glass.

He knows that, if the bottles arranged in pyramid fashion aren’t exactly square to the player, a rolling ball won’t knock them over.

And he knows that a softball, no matter how well aimed, won’t topple a milk bottle weighted with lead. It just won’t.

Now, when he walks around the carny games that once thrilled and teased him as a kid, he has a different agenda. He belongs to the Sheriff Department’s Night Team, a four-man vice detail that usually investigates prostitute rings and drug trafficking, pornography and bookmaking.

For three weeks at the height of summer, though, Papp investigates crimes that hit whole families below the belt--in their pocketbooks. These days, Papp and the others slip undercover into the Del Mar Fair to check the integrity of the 80 carnival games to make sure no one is getting ripped off.

Oh, plenty of people are, Papp sighs. But mostly out of their own ignorance or stupidity, their own ego-driven arrogance that they’ve got the skill to win that huge white teddy bear, despite the logic that might prevail in a quieter, more sane venue than a fair.

What can be so hard about throwing a dart, tossing a ball, pitching a dime, hoisting a bottle?

Papp knows how hard it is, and he just shakes his head as he watches wide-eyed kids and foolish teen-agers and proud adults dip into their pocket for another buck--or look to a girlfriend or wife to borrow just five more dollars.

“You can’t regulate stupidity,” he says, shaking his head as players succumb to the baiting dares of joint game attendants. It’s something he mutters over and over again.

Papp had his annual coming out, his summer debut, the other night, at the Del Mar Fair, finally going public, climbing into one booth after another to look, to touch, to weigh, to test.

And the carnies were waiting for him. As he made his way down the Midway’s carnival games, he was shadowed by men whispering into their walkie-talkies, telegraphing his advance from one booth to the next. One man brazenly followed on his heels; others held back a safe distance and radioed ahead to others.

Around here, Papp is a marked man. And they were wondering, these carnival game operators, when he’d finally show up.

Tonight’s the night.

Papp and his three partners stop in front of a basketball booth that commands a prime corner spot at the entry to the Midway. It’s a hot joint, with attractive female attendants in referee-type black-and-white shirts and with “plush”--stuffed animal prizes--dangling from the side fences.

Maybe 30 towering teen-age boys--probably each of them a proficient basketball player on his home courts, and most with girls in tow--are in a knot, queued up to pay a buck each to make a basket. The four workers hold fists of currency.

One after another, these wanna-be Michael Jordans make fools of themselves. Miss. Miss. Miss. Money. Money. Money. Miss. Miss. . . . Even those who manage to hit the rim curse as the ball bounces off target. The rare swish just eggs on the others, like some double-dog dare. If HE can do it . . . .

“They should be able to tell, for starters, that the rim is higher than (regulation) 10 feet, and that they’re standing back farther than the normal free-throw line,” says Papp. “And they should be able to tell that the rim is smaller than regulation. But come, look.”

He goes to the side of the booth and, through the dangling stuffed animals that all but block the view, points through a small hole to the side profile of the rims. “They’re not even round. They’re ellipses. They’re wider than they are deep. From the front, where these guys are shooting, the hoops look round, as deep as they are wide. See, it’s even harder to make than it looks.”

One of the teens, a girlfriend on his arm, walks off in angry defeat, having dropped maybe 10 bucks on the game for nothing. Papp can’t help himself.

“The hoop’s not round,” he whispers to the kid, offering balm to the wounded ego. The kid curses when it strikes him the game’s even more customized to his disadvantage than he would have thought.

“Maybe he won’t be so hard on himself,” Papp says afterward.

“But the thing is, the game is legal. It operates on illusion, of not looking as hard as it really is. These kids could probably sink 10 free-throws in a row at home. They figure they can do it here. But they’re dealing with an illusion, and they don’t know it.

“Like I say. You can’t regulate stupidity.”

This is the third trip that the Night Team has made to the Del Mar Fairgrounds since it opened June 18--and the first night they’ll check the games to make sure they’re legal. So far, they haven’t made a single arrest--a fact that amazes them.

They haven’t seen any drunks. Or drug dealing. Or pick-pocketting. Or prostitution. It’s helped a lot that beer sales and consumption are restricted to gated beer gardens, they say. And the new floodlights in the parking lots have done wonders.

And so far, the Night Team hasn’t detected any obviously illegal games.

“The game operators figure on seeing us out here, checking on them, during the first three or four nights,” said Sgt. Steve Blackwood, who heads this foursome. One could almost pass as a college kid during Easter week. One could be a stevedore. One looks like . . . well, they don’t look like cops.

“So, we wanted to wait this year until they let their guard down, and then we’ll see if we can catch them. The one thing we can’t do is get people to just keep their money in their pockets in the first place. As long as people have egos and want to show off to their friends or prove to themselves they have a skill, there will be carnies making money.”

On this night, Blackwood, Papp, Tuffy Tuatagaloa and Larry Wheeler decided it was time to check the games.

They hoped for a large Midway crowd, where there would be so many people playing that they could just hang back, faceless in the throng, watch the action and try to spot a game that just wouldn’t pay off, no matter what, or that just looked squirrelly.

To make a misdemeanor arrest for an altered game--”theft by trick or device” or “theft by hidden device”--they’d first have to pick a suspect game, watch to see if a player seemed to have been victimized, and then decide that the game was somehow fixed. They would arrest the operator, seize the game, take it to court, call in expert witnesses--including FBI agents who have made carnival games a specialty--and prove it to a jury.

They’ve done it in the past at Del Mar. Some were convicted. Others copped pleas and replaced the offensive games.

There was the one where the ball was rolled into various chutes to make points--and the two most critical chutes were undersized. There was the lead-bottom milk carton that couldn’t be toppled. The kiddie’s magnetic fishing game where some fish were made of wood, not metal. And the bottles that couldn’t be knocked over by a rolling ball because they weren’t exactly square to the player and as soon as the first bottle was hit, the deflection sapped the ball of just enough energy that it didn’t have enough steam to knock over the second bottle.

“The FBI studied that one a lot,” Papp said. Others aren’t as sophisticated. There are the darts with points too dull to pop a balloon, or ones missing feathers that send them on skewed flights.

Blackwood--who spent 40 hours at a school sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice on carnival games--talks of how the business of enforcement is experiencing hard times.

Focus of his frustration is a so-called Rainbow game, in which quarters are tossed onto a wooden game board; depending on what color it lands on, a prize is awarded. “The blue spot--the choice prize--is barely larger than a quarter,” he said.

Indeed, at Blackwood’s urging, the district attorney’s office several weeks ago tried to prosecute the owner of one such game at another carnival on the grounds that it was a game of chance, versus skill where the player’s chance of winning is increased after practice.

But El Cajon Municipal Judge Larrie Brainard, following other rulings in California in recent months, ruled that the state’s law governing games of chance didn’t pertain to one-player games. The applicable statute involving carnival games of chance fall under a broader law governing lotteries, and the judge ruled that lotteries, by definition, involve multiple players and pooled money. This particular game involved one player at a time, trying to win just one prize.

“That ruling has narrowed our window of who we can go after,” Blackwood said. “We need a new law written, just for carnival games. And for now, we have to look just for games that are gaffed--fixed--or involve trickery or deceit or sleight-of-hand.”

This night at Del Mar, though, there weren’t enough players milling about any one game to allow the Night Team to stand back and watch for suspicious activity. So, with some resignation, Papp gave up his cover--as his partners stayed mostly inconspicuous in the background--and, walking from booth to booth, simply announced himself, pulled his sheriff’s deputy badge from his pants pocket, and invited himself into the booth.

As at Kiddieland, in the track infield, where there’s a booth of floating fish, their mouths opening and closing so youngsters can dangle a hooked line, snag their target and pull it out, for the color-coded tag inside that would give them a small, medium, large or “choice” prize.

“Show me a fish with a blue tag,” Papp said matter-of-factly. The two attendants started looking and Papp, without invitation, joined in, groping into each fish mouth.

Out of 84 fish, he found one blue tag. Just one. “But that one blue tag made it a legal game,” he said.

In the main Midway, he approached the booth where players are supposed to raise upright a prone beer bottle with a hoop at the end of a pole.

“Some bottles are weighted off-balance, either deliberately or because of the seam when they’re manufactured,” Papp said. “If the weighted side is facing up, when you pull the bottle up, it will immediately swing one way or the other.”

To the consternation of the female joint operator, Papp is going from one bottle to the next. He keeps one bottle, and another, and finally he’s pulled six bottles aside, out of maybe 40. He inspects the bottle openings. He puts them back down on their wooden platforms. They roll slightly. He inspects them again. He points to what he said is a shaving of the glass, marking which side is heavy. “They’re marked,” he announces.

“Nobody’s marked those bottles,” the operator’s sidekick protests. “That’s just not true. I got those from the cases behind that booth over there. I just grabbed a couple of cases. They’re not marked. We’re not cheating anyone!” The guy is seething.

“Come with me,” the woman offers Papp. “We’ll get more bottles right now.” Papp waves her off. “I don’t have time to do that. You get them. But we’ll be back.”

He walks off. I’m sure, he says, the bottles are marked. But he’ll give them a chance to take care of it before he checks again and, next time, he won’t be so easygoing.

A few booths away, someone is on a walkie-talkie. The word’s out. Papp’s here. “In the old days, they would whistle and shout from one booth to another,” he laughed. “Now they use radios. Times have changed.”

He checks out a booth where people toss balls into bushel baskets. No springs on the back side, he confirms. But the way they’re bolted to the floor puts tension--and some spring--to the basket bottoms. Still, it’s a winnable game. He gives the operator a thumbs-up and the guy smiles like he escaped some executioner.

He checks the pool table cues. They’re not warped.

Booth operators talk back and forth on their walkie-talkies.

He lifts the milk bottles that are the targets of large--but lightweight--softballs. None seem heavier than the 3 1/2 pounds the sign advertises. “But those balls are so light, you’ve really gotta throw ‘em,” he mutters.

“By now,” Papp says, “everyone knows I’m here, and if there are any bad games, they’ve been straightened out.” Still, he goes through the motions.

He has a booth attendant show how to run the enclosed wand down the rotating corkscrew. The guy does it successfully--and Papp is impressed. “Basically, if they can demonstrate the game successfully, it’s a game of skill, and then it’s legal,” Papp says.

He inspects the pistols that shoot light balls at plastic glasses stacked pyramid fashion, and he makes sure the two bottom glasses are square to the counter. “Billie, come here. Quick!” shouts the attendant the moment Papp shows his badge. The operator comes from a nearby booth. “Any problem?” “No,” says Papp.

“Good,” the guy says. “Because some other guy--a real big one--came by a little while ago. He had a problem with us. He said the screw (that connects the ball to the pistol barrel) wasn’t straight.”

“Looks OK to me,” Papp says. “I’ll talk to him.”

Papp finds his partner and they discuss the screw. “It was really bent,” the other cop says, showing the screw, which he confiscated. It was so bent, Papp figures, that the player should have complained. He assumes it was a manufacturer’s defect because it was too obvious to be trickery. “We’ll check that booth again later this week.”

Not all the cheating and conniving is by the game operators, Papp said, laughing. “I watched a kid once trying to pitch a dime onto a glass dish. Now, that’s almost impossible.

“The kid was down to his last dime. I saw him lick it before he tossed it. It stayed on the dish. The operator was really mad. He said, ‘That’s impossible. You can’t do that. You cheated.’ I told him to give the kid the prize.

“I figured, those guys have been cheating kids for so long, the kid deserved to get even.”