In Florida: Filling the Hours with Bingo !

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Within a year, Steve and his group of investors had turned the Big Cypress bingo parlor into one of the most lucrative bingo halls in the world. He claims he took in $15 million last year, 51% of which went to the Seminoles. He and his investors kept the rest. Steve doesn't like to say precisely how much money he makes because, as he puts it, "there's a lot of poverty on the reservation, and I don't want any hard feelin's. But I made in the six figures, well into the six figures last year." He owns a 1988 Jaguar, a boat and a half-million-dollar house.

He knows his customers pretty well. "I go to their trailer homes," he says. "I eat with them in greasy spoons. There's a basic honesty about these people that's missing from those corporate types. These people have their dreams just like I do. No one should take your dreams from you."

Steve Blad was born in Iowa but raised from childhood in Hollywood, Fla., by "old-fashioned, God-fearin', all-American parents," he says. "I was the first member of my family to get divorced, to drink whiskey and to roll dice." He grins his lopsided grin. "You might say, I like to color outside the lines."

His Oklahoma parlor was only modestly successful at first. The players seemed bored to Steve. He wondered how to inject a little life into them. He spent six months doing market research on bingo players and discovered, among other things, that most don't play just for prizes. "They play because they're lonely," Steve says. "So I invented a little foolishness to make them happy while they're losing."

< One day Steve showed up at his bingo parlor in a lavender tuxedo. He put Aretha Franklin's Freeway of Love on the p.a. system and began to dance down the aisles. Steve led a conga line around the hall, stopping every so often to toss dollar bills into the air. The women shrieked and grabbed for them, and when they did, Steve Blad, 5 ft. 8 in., 250 lbs., began gyrating in a pelvic dance. His fat belly rolled, while the women began gyrating right back at him. He kept up this routine. One day they tore off his clothes. "Thank the good Lord I was wearing boxer shorts," he says. "Now if I had been one a them Eur-o-peen men . . ." On another day, Steve held a negligee contest. Women modeled sexy negligees. Steve Blad put one on and modeled it. The women shrieked with laughter. "My Tupperware ladies," Steve calls them. They began to call him Mr. Bingo.