The casino industry has lost one of its major innovators with the passing of Bernie Goldstein this weekend. From the Quad City Times:
Bernard “Bernie” Goldstein, 80, who got his start in business as a scrap metal dealer and became a major player in Americas gambling empire, died Sunday in Trinity Pathway Hospice, Bettendorf.
“Im just a scrap dealer who did good,” Goldstein once said.
He was considered to be the father of riverboat gambling who wore a gruff exterior, but was a softie when away from the business table.
His stake in the gambling industry – and other businesses – is said to have created jobs for as many as 100,000 people.
Cancer, which was diagnosed last autumn, slowed Goldstein down, associates said, but only a month ago he was at a Bettendorf City Council meeting to receive a special honor and salute from the city.
He looked pale and wan at the meeting but graciously smiled and shook hands all around as he received the honor.
Goldstein was behind the 1989 legislative drive to get casino gambling approved on riverboats in Iowa, the nation’s first riverboat casinos. He saw riverboat gambling as a way to attracts tourists and revive economically depressed areas of the state, particularly the Quad Cities region. On April 1, 1991, the first dice were tossed on his “Diamond Lady” boat, making it the first legal riverboat casino. In 1992, the company that owned the riverboat was renamed Casino American, and it opened the Isle of Capri in Biloxi, that state’s first riverboat (actually barge) casino. Over the next few years, Goldstein opened a spate of Isle of Capri casinos across the south (Vicksburg, Bossier City, and Lake Charles) and expanded into Colorado. As a result, the company was renamed Isle of Capri Casinos, Inc.
There are few owners who had as much an impact on the proliferation of gaming in the 1990s, and it’s amazing to think that for Goldstein this was a third career. And it’s possible to imagine that without Goldstein’s determination to champion riverboat gambling in the late 1980s, casino history might have turned out very differently.