Casinos Pay Dividends as South Sees New Reality : Bible Belt: Cities and states on the Mississippi River and along Gulf Coast are looking for ways to bring in tourists and their dollars.

BILOXI, Miss. —  This balmy Gulf Coast town was Jefferson Davis’ last home. Today, it’s where the Old South meets a new reality, where Bible Belt meets money belt, where hanging moss meets pulsing neon.

It’s the new Nevada, in--of all places--Mississippi.

“It’s just like Las Vegas, but without the hustle,” said Evelyn Hebert, who made the 2 1/2-hour trip from Lafayette, La., to Biloxi’s President Casino.

On a recent Sunday morning, the President’s parking lot was packed. Inside, a few blackjack tables had vacant stools, but most slot machines were busy. Cascades of quarter or silver-dollar tokens made a rich racket--four or eight or 20 at a time clinking into the machines’ metal payout trays.

This is Sunday morning in the Bible Belt?

Since August, no fewer than five full-scale, 24-hour gambling casinos have opened in Mississippi, which needs silver dollars and any other form of cash as much as anyplace. So far, the state has taken in nearly $10 million in taxes.

Four of the gambling halls are along what some now call the Casino Coast, in Biloxi and Bay St. Louis. Another one, about 400 miles north in Tunica, the Delta town better known for its poverty, draws players from Memphis.

Cities on the Mississippi River, including Natchez and Vicksburg, also are looking to casinos to bring in tourists. Even Memphis itself and coastal Alabama are talking about taking the gamble, as they watch tour buses and revenues roll in next door. And a New Orleans casino complex is in the works.

More than 25 applications to open casinos are on file with the Mississippi Gaming Commission.

“There’s no limit, really,” said Sean McGuinness, the commission’s compliance director. “Obviously, there’s going to be a market saturation level, but we haven’t reached it yet. It just keeps growing.”

Officials estimate first year casino revenues at $285 million, with the state’s take at around $25 million, which McGuiness called “fairly conservative.”

There was opposition by some religious groups before the Mississippi Legislature approved casino gambling in 1990, and some grumbling continues.

But attitudes largely have changed, it seems.

A survey in January by the University of South Alabama Polling Group in Mobile found that more than 64% of the respondents approved of casinos, up 5% since August, when gambling halls opened just down the coast road in Mississippi.

Even among Baptists, Pentecostalists and members of traditionally fundamentalist sects, casinos won 59.8% approval.

Sam Fisher, director of the polling group, was not surprised, noting the area’s proximity to Mississippi’s new slot machines and Florida’s lottery.

“We’re surrounded,” he said. “So people have sort of gotten a taste of it, and that may have changed some attitudes.”

In Alabama, legislators will introduce a bill authorizing a casino referendum in Mobile County. At the same time, an Indian tribe with a huge bingo operation in Atmore wants to expand to casino-style gambling and has sued in federal court over the state’s refusal to permit it.

In Memphis, Mayor W. W. Herenton has proposed casino gambling on Mud Island in the Mississippi River. First, the state constitution’s gambling ban would have to be lifted, and the mayor said he would lobby for that. “Tennessee should feel compelled to match other states in providing new revenue for public services,” he said.

In Louisiana, state officials who received 15 applications for riverboat gambling permits--the maximum allowable--could grant the first next month. Meanwhile, planning goes ahead for a land-based casino operation in New Orleans. The financially strapped state hopes to expedite construction and start earning tax revenues.

Although Nevada has “a huge head start,” it takes the Southern upstart casinos seriously, said Anthony Curtis, a Las Vegas authority on casinos.

He said the Nevada gambling industry hopes the newcomers, which also can be found farther up the Mississippi River, in Colorado and elsewhere, will help persuade folks to consider going to the “big leagues” in Las Vegas.

“You look at that Southern group and say, ‘This is the Bible Belt,’ but they’ve come out of the closet,” Curtis said. “The stigma that’s attached to gambling, it’s really changed a lot over the last few years.”

Some of the Mississippi casinos, set up on permanently moored ships, promote themselves as picking up where the riverboat casinos of lore left off.

The town of Midnight, Miss., they say, got its name--and start--from the hour when the owner of a plantation on which it was built lost all in a card game. Other locales, including Hot Springs, Ark., where President Clinton grew up, went through cycles of gaming permissiveness and reform.

A mob stormed a gambling den in Vicksburg in 1835 and summarily hanged five denizens. “What they said they were trying to do was purify Vicksburg,” said Gretchen Schoel, a doctoral candidate at William & Mary who researched the incident.

The gamblers fatally wounded one local, and a monument erected to the martyr became an anti-casino rallying point in recent years, she said. Eventually, however, Vicksburg voters approved casinos in a referendum.

“One of the things the churches try to do is to curb these instincts that are basically part of a frontier culture,” said Bill Ferris, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.

“You have everything from cockfights to bets on car races and football games,” he said. “Southerners have always been gamblers at heart.”

An Atlanta couple spending a weekend of high-stakes play in Biloxi were a case in point. They’d received free room and meals. Their only cost was chips.

“I was down about $4,000 there,” acknowledged the husband, who favors blackjack and would give only his first name, Joe. He managed to recoup and headed home down only $400, less than on previous trips to Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

“And I enjoy the atmosphere here. Southern hospitality I think it is,” he said, looking toward the placid Gulf and breeze-rustled palms.

Still, he reflected, “If I’d left there five minutes earlier. . . . ‘

“Like I asked you to,” interjected his wife, Artie, a slots player.

” . . . I’d be ahead $1,000,” he said.