Inside an Underground Gambling Den Bust in California

EL MONTE, Calif.—On a recent summer night, a caravan of a dozen cruisers crawled through residential streets toward a drab industrial stretch where sheriffs suspected gang members were running a “slap house”—an underground casino named for the tell-tale sounds of players furiously smashing buttons on digital table-top games imported from China.

An alert came out over the radio: “countersurveillance.” A lone lookout on a scooter was patrolling the streets. The slap house operators had also installed security cameras, which fed to a large monitor inside their decrepit lair.

But by the time suspects saw the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) coming, they had nowhere to run, surrounded on three sides by high walls and barbed wire. Deputies found one man calmly waiting by the front door when they came to bust it open.

Sheriffs, assisted by federal agents, detained seven suspects that night—a modest but incremental gain as they chip away at the elusive targets.

Underground casinos, or “casitas,” are peppered throughout Los Angeles County, in nearly every city, according to Capt. Calvin Mah, who runs the LASD’s Major Crimes Bureau.

“Everywhere from North County to East to South, it’s a huge problem,” Mah told The Epoch Times.

Hidden behind storefronts and in residential homes, slap houses are a booming business for the organized criminal networks that operate them or take a cut off the top.

Most go unnoticed until police get a tipoff from another bust, social media posts, or neighbors calling to complain.

“It takes us a while before we’re able to identify them. Once we’re able to, we’re going to systematically try to dismantle them. But it takes quite a while and there’s so many of them,” Mah said.

The captain described casitas as a kind of haven where gang members can conduct a litany of illicit businesses—including gun and drug sales, extortion, and prostitution—in relative peace.

“It allows crooks to be in a comfortable place where they can use drugs,“ he said. ”They can hire prostitutes if they want. They can sell drugs and other illegal things, stolen items. It’s almost like a bartering house for them.”

Fish Tables

Inside the building—a tiny, two-room structure that appears to have once housed an ironwork shop—deputies rifled through couch cushions and tore open walls in search of drugs and guns.

“Don’t get meth on your fingers,” one warned.

The walls were decorated with posters of tattooed pinups, a neon Marilyn Monroe wearing an “I Heart California” tank, and one of horror movie characters in a convertible car with a play on a “Mean Girls” quote: “Get in loser, we’re going killing.”

Deputies quickly unearthed bullets and small stacks of cash, but it was early; their work would continue into the morning hours.

Revelers had left a meth pipe in an ashtray and a still-icy Big Gulp on one of three jerry-rigged gambling tables.

In a DIY-version of these digital table games—which can retail for $10,000 or more and feature bright graphics and retro dynamics reminiscent of 1980s arcades—the “brains” were wired to a TV monitor and encased in cheap wood panels, painted black, and rigged with buttons and joysticks for multiple players.

Players pay cash or load up credits with an app, then compete to point and shoot creatures on the screen. The house, according to sheriff’s deputies, typically takes 20 percent.

Imported primarily from China, some games are sold to legitimate vendors, but most end up on the black market, funneled to gang-run gambling houses, the sheriff’s deputies said.

Distributors will deliver the machines to a vacant residence or business, where operators set up video surveillance and soundproofing, then hire cashiers and security to control the location.

Several detectives and deputies described the casinos as facilitating a kind of unusual cooperation between rival gangs.

“Local gangs will operate them, pay cash for the rentals, and you’ll find gangs that don’t get along in the streets here together for the purposes of conducting business. They’re here to make money,” said one detective involved in the bust, noting that casitas can bring in tens of thousands a week.

“Asian gangs have their own crews and do their own casitas, and you’ll find they have better machines,” she said. “This one here is run by a Hispanic gang.”

The San Gabriel Valley, in the eastern reaches of LA County, is a stronghold for both Asian and Hispanic gangs. In northern cities such as Lancaster, also a hotbed for underground casinos, operators tend to be Armenian, according to a local government official with knowledge of the issue who was not authorized to speak to the media.

“We haven’t seen any Asian ones up here, but organized crime has their cookbook of crimes; all the groups are reading the same crook-book,” the official said.

Head of the Snake

While law enforcement agencies are sometimes reticent to name specific gangs—so as to avoid inflating their power in the streets—it’s no secret that the Mexican Mafia, a California prison gang, controls and extorts slap houses across the state and beyond.

“Illegal underground casinos are known to be a tool for funding money that goes straight up to the members of the Mexican Mafia,” a sheriff’s detective on the El Monte bust said.

“Anything that’s illegal is controlled by the Mexican Mafia, so if they’re doing illegal gambling, they first have to check with the gang members in the area, and they'll get a representative.”

The group, also known as “La Eme,” Spanish for the letter “M,” uses illegal casinos to launder money, fund international trafficking, and violently enforce and expand control over its territory.

“It always varies depending on location and current politics within the organization. ... At these locations it’s not uncommon to meet to discuss their politics and at times during such meetings, assaults take place that have led to homicides,” the department told The Epoch Times.

Non-gang members also open casitas, with permission, paying a monthly tax to the local gang, which in turn pays the Mexican Mafia.

Hector Bravo, a retired lieutenant with the California Department of Corrections who recounts numerous interactions with active Mexican Mafia members on the inside, said the kickback from soldiers and gang members on the street is typically around 30 percent of profits from casitas and other criminal activities.

“Just think of it as the Italian mob. They’re doing the same thing. The Mexicans are stealing the playbook from the Italians,” Bravo said, likening today’s casitas to the Chicago speakeasies of the Al Capone era.

The extortionate taxes, he said, end up going to members in the form of a Green Dot Visa prepaid card that inmates can access in prison.

“They’re kind of laundering money. They clean it, and with these Green Dots, they’re able to put their kids through college, they’re able to purchase properties. ... I would not say they’re millionaires, but they’re definitely generating revenue from behind prison walls,” Bravo said, likening members to company CEOs. “They’re the brains of the operation—at the top of the food chain.”

Established in the 1950s by Hispanic youth inmates in a California correctional facility, La Eme operates in at least 13 states despite having only a few hundred members and being largely run from behind bars.

The mythos of the organization, Bravo said, is such that there is never a shortage of young men willing to do whatever it takes for a shot at joining, including assaulting or murdering the gang’s enemies and rivals.

Most will never be accepted, he said.

“They’re just pawns in the game. The power is concentrated at the top, and they want to keep it that way,” he said.

Whac-a-Mole

In recent years, federal and local law enforcement agencies have collaborated on several major takedowns, including a 2020 raid in Lancaster that resulted in the confiscation of more than 200 illegal gambling machines, and several multicounty busts related to underground casinos, both going after Mexican Mafia members and the affiliate street gangs that fund them.

An operation dubbed “Gangsta’s Paradise” in Orange County earlier this year illustrated the pivotal role slap houses play in the Mexican Mafia’s sprawling criminal network.

In it, the Justice Department nabbed dozens of members in a sweeping anti-racketeering case following a years-long investigation.

The 66-count indictment named more than 40 members and associates in a wide range of felonies, including murder, kidnapping, extortion, and fentanyl and meth trafficking—largely anchored in the operation of illegal casinos from 2024 to 2026.

The indictment offers grim details about the organization’s tactics: torture, prostitution, international drug trafficking, and assault—including attacks with hammers against operators who came up short, “to make an example” of them.

Such investigations require time, resources, due process—and the methodical work of connecting individual casitas under federal conspiracy charges.

In the meantime, detectives play whac-a-mole.

“It’s all day long,” an LASD detective said. “We shut them down and then they open somewhere else.”

The model has gained popularity in recent years, she said, as operators realized criminal charges would often be a “wobbler”—on the fence between a misdemeanor or felony and at the prosecutor’s discretion.

“The reason why [the Mexican Mafia] got into this business more is because it’s not a [large] penalty,” she said. “Here in California, it’s hard to get felony charges.”

Even gun possession can be dropped on misdemeanor, she added.

Cumulative Effect

Sheriffs insist the problem is like a hydra.

Cheap and manifestly imitable, the casita model lends itself to all manner of opportunistic criminal enterprises.

In nearby Orange County in 2022, a multiagency investigation dismantled an illegal gambling network run by Asian gangs.

“These illicit businesses are a breeding ground for drug trafficking, violence, and even police corruption,” said former U.S. Attorney Tracy L. Wilkison at the time, calling casitas a “blight in our communities.”

As he surveyed the filthy gambling den in El Monte, Mah echoed the sentiment.

“The problem, I feel, is for the community,“ he said. ”You have all these criminals in one place. You have gang rivalries, we’ve had shootings. So we’re trying with all our might to stop it.”

Responding to an inquiry about the proliferation of underground casinos in California and other states, and about the organized criminal networks that oversee them, the Department of Justice said it had no comment.

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