REVERE — The only thing shiny and new about Suffolk Downs these days is the padlock hanging from a rusty chain on the faded red stable gate.
The horses and riders left weeks ago. Puddles and dead weeds blight the lot where their trailers sat through the racetrack’s final season. The grandstand, where punters can still bet on simulcast races a little longer, grows more tumbledown and less grand each day.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. If the Massachusetts Gaming Commission had awarded a casino license to these guys instead of to flashy Steve Wynn in Everett, a gleaming palace of chance might already be rising from the forlorn parking lot, and with it, the hopes of horsemen, workers, and gaming bigs.
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Instead, everything about this place screams “over.”
Unless you talk to Dan Rizzo. The Revere mayor put all his eggs in Suffolk Downs’ basket, and he is incensed at how things have turned out.
He insists the dream is not dead, and he has gone to Suffolk Superior Court to attempt one last desperate defibrillation. Funded by Suffolk Downs partner Mohegan Sun, Rizzo and a union representing track workers sued the Massachusetts Gaming Commission in October, charging that it acted with bias and caprice in awarding the Greater Boston casino license to Wynn in September.
Just two weeks after Wynn won, three men connected to his Everett site were indicted for trying to hide the fact that a felon stood to gain from the land deal. Wynn was never implicated in the sleaziness (in fact, the investigation called him one if its victims), but Rizzo reckons it still stinks.
Then, just before Thanksgiving, came a report that federal authorities are looking into whether Wynn Resorts violated money laundering laws. How shocking, that a casino could be associated with such untoward practices!
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That’s just the kind of thing that might give a gaming commission pause. In an e-mail last night, Wynn spokesman Michael Weaver said “the fact that information is requested from us by a government or law enforcement agency in no way implies the accusation of wrongdoing by the company or that our company is being investigated.”
Rizzo doesn’t buy it. He fired off a letter to the commission, arguing that either Wynn knew about the investigation in August and hid it, or that the commission knew about it and failed in its duty to find Wynn unsuitable.
Spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll said the commission learned of the money laundering inquiries from the Wall Street Journal article, and that its investigators immediately began looking into it. They’ll brief the commission on what they have so far at Thursday’s public meeting. If Wynn has done something wrong here, they have options ranging from fines to license revocation.
Rizzo isn’t holding his breath. And he insists he isn’t acting out of bitterness.
“This is not my nature,” he says. “I am not a sore loser.” If he thought the gaming commission’s decision were fair, he says, he’d abide by it, as painful as it would be, and lead Revere into a future without blackjack tables and slots, not to mention the old track.
But it’s hard to let go. His father owned horses at Suffolk Downs when he was a kid. Many of the workers who have been laid off are his constituents.
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“Having to see 1,000 people put out of work in exchange for the possibility — and I consider it more and more a remote possibility — of a resort casino, built in the middle of Sullivan Square, on a toxic waste site, makes no sense to us,” Rizzo said of the Everett proposal.
If I had to bet, I’d wager that whatever is going on with Wynn and the feds is not enough to scuttle their Everett project. The chances of the court siding with Rizzo and pulling Wynn’s license would appear to be slim, too. But aren’t long odds what casinos are all about? Maybe Rizzo is the gambler who goes all-in one last time and wins big. Or maybe he’s the compulsive guy with empty pockets who just can’t walk away from the table.
Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @GlobeAbraham.