Gambling Night Investigated

Welcome to the world of big-money casino gambling, Harvard style.

Yesterday, the state of Massachusetts examined the Casino Night held by the Asian American Association (AAA) last month.

The Charitable Gaming Division of the State Lottery discovered a photograph that ran in The Crimson last month of Vivek H. Murthy '98, Vipul R. Patel '98 and Richard S. Chang '98 engaged in a possibly unlicensed game of Carom.

The division uses a press clipping service to discover unregistered gambling activity.

With the photo in hand, Jerry Glassman, the division's program administrator for raffles and bazaars, wanted to discover whether the AAA owed Massachusetts back taxes.

Organizers of a gambling event are required by law to obtain a permit from the town so a 5 percent tax can be levied on all of the proceeds.

"It's got to go through the city, because otherwise it's illegal," Glassman said.

Before Massachusetts could collect from the AAA's coffers, however, Glassman ran into one small problem.

Although they were taking tiles in a game of Mahjongg or betting sticks on a game of Yut, the students weren't gambling away their tuition money.

"We gave people play chips," said Sewell Chan '98, co-president of the AAA. "There was absolutely no exchange of money."

"There were no proceeds," Chan insisted. "There wasn't any gambling."

The event was designed to introduce about 100 students to some traditional Asian games "at a social event during reading period to give our members a break," said Chan, who is a Crimson editor.

"We decided to call it Asian Casino Night because we thought it would be a fun name," Chan said. "We didn't think anybody would take it literally."

Upon hearing of the innocent nature of the evening, Glassman took some advice from Kenny Rogers' immortal song "The Gambler."

As the country singer crooned, "You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em"; Glassman promptly ended the inquiry and the matter was declared "a dead issue."