NO DICE: THE BACKLASH AGAINST GAMBLING

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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."