NO DICE

By MARGOT HORNBLOWER/BALTIMORE

THE COFFEE IS BREWED, AND parishioners gather in the meeting hall of the Epworth United Methodist Church in Baltimore, Maryland. On the wall a hand-scrawled poster exhorts: CASINO LOBBYISTS TAKE A HIKE! The tables are strewn with literature on gambling addiction. The T shirts on sale sport the logo NO CASINO and a fiercely clawed Maryland blue crab. As for the evening's featured speaker, "We call him Riverboat Rambo," says Barbara Knickelbein, a grandmotherly church activist, with a mixture of affection and reverence.

To his fan, the Rev. Thomas Grey, 55, an Illinois pastor, is the merry messiah who has built a once lonely battle against a Mississippi riverboat casino into a nationwide crusade against gambling. A Dartmouth graduate and an infantry captain who served in Vietnam, Grey spent 250 nights on the road last year, "networking the fighters--Gideon's army," as he calls it. Whether rattling around the Midwest in his battered Toyota, the Mamas and the Papas playing on his tape deck, or flying on frenetic forays through Maryland, Mississippi, Kansas and Louisiana, he carries everywhere a camouflage-covered Bible. Also in his pocket: a worn copy of the Combat Leader's Field Guide with chapters such as "Ambushes" and "Prisoners of War." Inside the flaps are phone numbers of anticasino agitators in Waterloo, Iowa; Merrillville, Indiana; Pomona, California; Delavan, Wisconsin and beyond. "We're fighting a battle for the soul of America," he says. "Aren't we having fun?"

Only last fall, the Maryland activists quashed casino-company efforts to turn Baltimore into a new Atlantic City, despite $1.3 million in industry campaign contributions to state legislators. But the gambling interests returned, with bills to allow slot machines at racetracks. "We're tightening the perimeter," says Grey, pacing the meeting hall. "If they penetrate the racetracks, the next step is slots in restaurants! Just today I got a call from New Hampshire: the legislature killed two bills to allow slots at dog tracks. Say 'A-men!'"

"A-men!" the audience intones. Since 1988, when Congress opened the way for Indian reservations to set up full-scale gambling, casinos have moved from being the private preserve of two states--Nevada and New Jersey--into the American mainstream. With 126 Native American tribes reaping profits from gaming, commercial companies argued for equal rights. So far, 24 states have legalized casinos, while 37 have embraced lotteries, lured by the prospect of easy money in hard fiscal times. And the games have begun to crossbreed: lottery agencies have added instant-cash video poker and keno games, racetracks have expanded into off-track betting, and grocery shops have installed slot machines. Overall, Americans gambled away more than $40 billion last year--up from $10.4 billion in 1982. On casinos alone, more was spent than on movie tickets, theater, opera and concerts combined.

Now boom is giving way to backlash. In a state-by-state slugfest, grass-roots groups are battling the gambling industry in ballot referendums, court suits and local legislatures. In Louisiana the public outcry over a bribery scandal involving video poker and the bankruptcy of a planned $800 million casino in New Orleans prompted the Governor to convene the legislature in special session this week to consider an outright ban on both types of games. Last week Kansas and Maryland legislators defeated measures to allow slots at racetracks and off-track betting parlors. In the past three months nine states have turned aside efforts to introduce casinos, slots and instant-payout lottery games (which are considered particularly addictive).

Fighting back, casino companies have showered politicians with campaign contributions, hired former Governors and former U.S. attorneys as lobbyists, and poured money into television advertising. Yet "we're winning the hearts and minds of the countryside," claims Grey, whose favorite prop is a map with red, white and blue pushpins stuck into the 23 states where his National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling (NCALG) has won victories during the past two years. Only two states--Missouri and South Dakota--are marked with green pushpins to indicate a gambling win.

Meanwhile, the issue is forcing its way onto the national agenda. On March 5 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill establishing a two-year commission to study the economic impact of gambling, the influence of gaming's political contributions, state-lottery advertising, gambling-related crime and Internet betting. "The moral, social, economic and political ramifications of gambling are far too great to go unaddressed," says Republican Representative Marge Roukema from New Jersey, a state that has the second biggest gaming industry after Nevada. "We must carefully evaluate what has become an uncontrollable epidemic that has destroyed peoples' lives and families."

Nevada Republican Representative John Ensign calls the proposed panel "a thinly veiled disguise for future regulation of the gaming industry." That has been the casinos' worst fear ever since the Clinton Administration last year floated a 4% federal gaming tax--only to drop it after 31 Governors protested. In the past three years gambling has become one of the top five industries donating to political campaigns. That money no doubt ensures some entree now that the casinos' furious lobbying campaign against the federal panel--led by former G.O.P. chairman Frank Fahrenkopf--is turned on the U.S. Senate.

Meanwhile, the religious right tried, with only limited success, to make gambling a moral issue in the presidential race. On the stump, Pat Buchanan routinely declares that "gambling should return to the swamp whence it came." Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition, showed up at a recent press conference to launch Tom Grey's Washington office. "Gambling is a cancer on the body politic, destroying families, stealing food from the mouths of children, turning wives into widows," he said, noting that in 1994 the Republican Party accepted more than $1 million in gaming-industry funds. Without specifically mentioning Senator Bob Dole, who reaped $477,000 at a single Las Vegas fund raiser last June, Reed warned that any G.O.P. candidate dependent on gambling contributions is "going to have serious problems with the pro-family community."

All this attention has caught even Grey by surprise. His national coalition has barely any funds beyond small scattered donations from its 2,500 members, a $10,000 contribution from the Mormon Church to set up an 800 phone number, and Grey's own $3,000-a-month stipend from the Methodist Church. NCALG's new Washington office, in a back room of the National Council of Churches, is staffed by volunteers. "We're up against a multibillion-dollar industry," says Grey. "And we're beating them with housewives and dentists." The movement's strength lies in such groups as Virginians Deserve Better, Bucks County People Serving a Larger Mission, and Stand Up for Kansas, all of which Grey is welding together. "If it weren't for Tom Grey, the people fighting this in South Dakota and Pennsylvania wouldn't know each other," says Republican Representative Frank Wolf of Virginia, chief sponsor of the study commission bill. Topeka lawyer David Schneider was breathless after Grey's tornado-like tour through Kansas last month. "Tom is an arsonist," he says. "He lights fires, and they spread."

The flame that first lit Grey's fuse was a riverboat casino in Galena, Illinois, the quaint Mississippi River town where he lived quietly with his wife and served as the local Methodist pastor. In 1991, 81% of the townspeople voted against playing host to the boat, but the referendum was nonbinding, and local officials, thirsting for revenue, invited it to dock anyway. "I got mad," recalls Grey. Now, with this nationwide campaign, he adds, "I'm getting even." This hometown fight led to invitations to speak in Iowa, Indiana, Missouri and other states grappling with a riverboat onslaught. Grey's message: Despite the $1.4 billion in annual tax revenues it pays states and localities nationwide, casino gambling is bad economics, draining dollars from restaurants and shops, spurring crimes such as burglary and embezzlement, preying on the poor who wager a bigger proportion of their income and tempting addicts who are expensive to treat. Too cowardly to raise taxes or cut spending, politicians, he charges, are "fleecing their flock by escorting gambling into their states."

But Fahrenkopf, speaking for the industry, is quick to point out that gaming (he never uses the word gambling) is creating jobs and "rejuvenating dying cities.'' And he adds, "We don't agree that Tom Grey and his supporters have the right to force their morality on others." Pulling a cue card from his pinstripe suit, Fahrenkopf reads H.L. Mencken's definition of a puritan: "'Someone who is afraid that, somewhere, someone else is having a good time.' The next time I see Tom, I'll say, 'Tom, you're a puritan!'"

It is to Fahrenkopf's advantage to lump all gambling opponents in with the religious right--and to Grey's to deny it. "If we based our opposition on personal morality, we would lose," says Grey. "After all, a majority of Americans gamble. But we're not for prohibition. People can go to Las Vegas or play poker in their homes. We are just saying, Let's stop the expansion of gambling." At his Washington press conference, Grey acknowledged seeking funds from the Christian Coalition, but, with a mischievous glance toward Ralph Reed, pointedly introduced ncalg's new political director, Bernard Horn, as "a Jewish lawyer who was a gun-control lobbyist."

In fact, in several states, Common Cause and N.A.A.C.P. chapters are fighting gambling alongside restaurant associations, bowling alleys, video arcades, theme parks and racetracks that fear losing business to casinos. Nonetheless, NCALG's main foot soldiers are so-called traditional-values and pro-family activists. In Louisiana this week Southern Baptists are escorting Grey to rallies around the state. In Michigan Christian Coalition members helped collect 100,000 signatures on petitions to block casinos in Detroit. So far, Roman Catholic churches, with their bingo and Las Vegas nights, have been little help, while main-line Protestant churches just "like to pass resolutions," Grey scoffs. "I don't have time to organize the goddam rear. This is a citizens' movement. We're the 82d Airborne. We've got to land people now."

On a recent landing in Mississippi, however, the road-warrior reverend found his path strewn with obstacles. Few states have embraced gambling so wholeheartedly. Since 1992, when the first riverboat casino floated down the Mississippi River to Tunica, the desperately poor county that Jesse Jackson once called "America's Ethiopia," 28 casinos have sprung up from the Tennessee border to the Gulf Coast. These garish palaces employ 27,300 people and last year put $189 million into state and local coffers. "Hey, look, Tom Grey, gaming is working here in Mississippi!" declares host Rip Daniels, welcoming Grey to his talk show on WJZD, Gulfport's Afro-American radio station. Grey cites failed restaurants and increased crime in Gulfport since casinos arrived. "The more gambling, the more the rich get richer," he charges. "Casinos are in the business of separating you from your paycheck."

Daniels is unimpressed. "That's capitalism, isn't it?" he says. "If people lose more than they expected, it's because they were greedy." Grey homes in on gambling addiction and related suicides. "Casinos welcome 'em in, milk 'em dry and throw 'em onto the street," he says. But few of the talk show's callers are converted. "A lot of people have casino jobs and are better off," says Candy. Denise agrees: "It's safe, clean entertainment, and tourists love it. "

In Biloxi, a once sleepy, now casino-bedecked resort, Grey preaches at the imposing, white-columned First Presbyterian Church. "I'm here to recruit fighters! He's your enlistment sergeant!" Grey announces, pointing to the Rev. James Richter. Richter has seen two recent suicides and several bankruptcies due to gambling. "A lot of roads have gotten paved," he says. "Personally, I'd rather have a few more potholes and a few more lives intact."

At day's end Grey gets new energy from the messages on his voice mail back in Illinois. There are interview requests and legislative updates from all over the country. An Omaha, Nebraska, doctor wonders where to send a $100 contribution. A Honolulu minister requests information to distribute. A New Yorker wants Grey to fight off-track betting in Chinatown. "Sometimes I feel like I'm riding a wave," he says, "and all I have to do is stand up on the board."

Perhaps so, but there's rough water ahead. Moves are afoot in nine states, from Arkansas to Oregon, to place pro-gambling initiatives on the November ballot. The domino effect puts pressure on elected officials: Pennsylvania and Maryland racetracks watch their dollars drain into Delaware, which installed slot machines last September at two tracks; Tennessee envies the tax revenue reaped by Mississippi's Tunica County, thanks to Memphis gamblers; and New York is readying a constitutional amendment that will allow its slot hogs--who are now flocking to the Pequot Indians' Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut--to spend their money at home. Meanwhile, Fahrenkopf has begun to rally not just casino companies but also suppliers, "down to the guys who make the swizzle sticks," he says. And, he notes, "people are voting with their feet--125 million casino visits last year."

But Grey is undaunted as he pulls out a worn leather datebook. Pasted inside: a typewritten list of General Patton's recommended qualities of a good general. "Steadiness of purpose, strength of character, tactically aggressive, loves a fight." He pauses. "'Loves a fight'--that's the part I like."