In New Jersey, cheating at boardwalk games is considered especially heinous. On the Jersey Shore, the dedicated detectives who investigate this malicious mischief are members of an elite squad known as the Legalized Games of Chance Control Commission.
These are their stories.
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Summer was waning when the investigator stepped out of the September sun along the Jersey Shore boardwalk and into the arcade, his eyes alighting on the glistening glass boxes filled with the possibility of prizes.
One claw machine teased a LeBron James jersey. Another, a new iPhone. A coin stacker game promised an Apple Watch inside.
The investigator knew better. There was no jersey, no phone, no watch stuffed inside the mystery boxes or stashed behind the counter.
This was Atlantic City, after all, and the house always wins.
But not today.
For their funny business, records show, the arcade owner paid a $1,500 fine.
The Jersey Shore has, well, a reputation. Fun in the sun, a little debauchery and some good old-fashioned, family-friendly gambli—excuse us, games of chance. It also has a dedicated force of quasi-law enforcement investigators trying to keep the ring tosses, the frog flippers, the balloon dart games honest.
It takes a particular set of skills to see through the scams — equal parts detective work and high school physics.
And they have their hands full. Not just at the Shore, but across the state at county fairs and church carnivals.
The state’s Legalized Games of Chance Control Commission, known as the “LG-Triple-C” around the office, conducted more than 7,000 inspections last year. LG-Triple-C investigators gauged the pounds per square inch of basketballs, checked the level of bean bag toss platforms and measured the circumference of bushel baskets, according to the commission.
Their methods are a closely guarded secret. State authorities declined to make an investigator available for an interview. Requests for a ride-along were rebuffed. They wouldn’t even say how many investigators they employ. But officials say their work might be the thin cotton candy-colored line between order and chaos.
“What could be more New Jersey than ensuring people have a fair shot at a boardwalk game down the Shore?” Attorney General Matthew Platkin, whose office oversees these high-stakes investigations, told NJ Advance Media in a recent interview.
The most violations for Jersey Shore boardwalk games of chance were issued to claw games.
The LG-Triple-C was thrust into the national spotlight earlier this year when it fined an operator $15,500 and issued a 10-year ban from the boardwalk after an investigation found employees at her game stands overinflated basketballs to make it harder to score baskets, duped customers over prizes and ignored repeated violation notices from the state over two years.
Jersey Shore boardwalk games exposed as a scam? The jokes wrote themselves.
The story went viral.
It also irked the operators of the state’s more legitimate seaside attractions, who say the Shore long ago cleaned up its act, but hasn’t yet cleansed itself of the stench of crooked carnies of yore.
“Our industry has had such a black eye for so many years, that we’ve still got that stigma of being a group of criminals,” said Mark Malland, a general manager at Jenkinson’s in Point Pleasant.
It’s not fair, the boardwalk operators insist. After all, the argument goes, if the games were all rigged, why would people keep coming back year after year?
“Enjoying the game means it has to be winnable,” said Denise Beckson, a vice president at Morey’s Piers in Wildwood who says her chain of amusements hands out more than 350,000 prizes every year. “It’s not fun if no one ever wins.”
So like a kid with a bucket on the beach, we did some digging.
Through the state’s public records laws, NJ Advance Media obtained and examined five years’ worth of violation notices sent by the Legalized Games of Chance Control Commission to Jersey Shore boardwalk operators, building a never-before-seen database of shenanigans on the shore.
Then, a pair of reporters walked the boardwalk beat in Wildwood undercover as easy marks, wearing too much sun screen and a fanny pack, a bucket hat and a 1988 Jimmy Buffet tour T-shirt. We subjected a random sampling of Wildwood games to our highly scientific tests, such as “throwing a ball into a basket” and “trying in vain to win a plush Mario.”
Our findings will shock you.
For starters, there’s not that much cheating on the boardwalk.
Or at least not that many operators get caught, especially compared to the sheer number of game stalls dotting beachside resorts from Cape May to Seaside Heights.
LG-Triple-C investigators found just 63 violations on the boardwalk over five years, according to an NJ Advance Media review of the records. Those accounted for $66,650 in fines, more than half of which came from the operator hit with a 10-year ban, Christine Strothers.
Still, don’t bet on winning big. The odds are never in your favor.
While basketball game scams have gotten a lot of attention, it’s the claw games you really need to look out for, according to our small sampling of data. They were the most frequently cited, followed by various arcade games, bushel basket games, basketball games and dart games.
Where were the sketchiest games concentrated? Seaside Heights had 18 violations, followed by Atlantic City with 12 and Wildwood with 10. (We removed the Strothers case from our analysis because it was so unusual it skewed the overall picture.)
The records offer a kind of caricature sketch of shenanigans on the boardwalk, where stories abound of phantom iPhones, faux-designer bags filled with rocks and poop emoji plushies kept just out of reach. They include schemes and scams as well as mundane mechanical errors and futile protests of government overregulation.
“We are not there doing anything illegal,” one operator wrote, appealing a $750 fine for technical violations. “I run my games by the certification book. Customers always leave happy! They always leave with a prize, and come back for more fun.”
And is there drama buried like pirate’s booty in these dry regulatory records? This is the Jersey Shore, baby. There’s more drama than an evening at D’Jais. They nearly banned basketball games on the boardwalk statewide because a few operators kept getting caught cheating. We’ll get to that soon.
Even better? Everybody who reads to the end gets a prize.*
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*Offer not valid in your area.
A photo lineup captures the suspects in a basketball overinflation inquiry that led to a 10-year ban for a boardwalk operator.
Any good boardwalk story is going to include a few federal crimes, so let’s start there, with Brett and Evan Strothers and $4 million worth of counterfeit sports jerseys.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials arrested the brothers in 2013, alleging a conspiracy ring in which two other men manufactured the National Basketball Association and National Football League knock-offs in China and sold them to eager buyers in the U.S.
The feds said the Strothers brothers purchased them as prizes to dole out at their boardwalk basketball and “quarterback challenge” games, where they “enticed customers to pay for the chance to win a purported authentic NBA or NFL jersey by shooting basketballs into a hoop or tossing footballs through a target at various stands,” according to a criminal complaint.
They pleaded guilty three years later, in 2016, to conspiracy to traffic counterfeit goods, forfeited more than $100,000 as well as 8,526 jerseys they had at the time of their arrest and served five years probation, federal court records show.
That should have been the end for the Strothers brothers on the boardwalk.
Under various state laws and regulations, you can’t run a boardwalk games business if you’ve been convicted of certain crimes. Conspiring to buy knock-off boardwalk prizes happens to be among them.
Evan Strothers held licenses for several years prior to his conviction, the records show. He was even listed as the “manufacturer” of the quarterback challenge game.
But in 2018, Brett’s wife, Christine, applied for and received licenses to operate basketball and quarterback challenge games on the boardwalks of Wildwood and North Wildwood, public records show.
Christine Strothers soon found herself under her own mounting legal pressure.
Starting in 2020, investigators with the LG-Triple-C noticed a subtle sports scandal burbling. Forget juicing in Major League Baseball or Deflategate at the National Football League. The basketballs on the boardwalk were bouncy. A little too bouncy.
There’s a science to this, you see, and the basketball manufacturers have determined that a properly buoyant basketball is between 7 and 9 pounds-per-square-inch, or PSI. But at some basketball game stalls, investigators armed with pressure gauges found staff were over-inflating basketballs to make it harder for players to sink shots.
Things got so bad that in 2021 the commission briefly considered banning basketball games from the boardwalk unless operators took it easy on the overinflation, said Cari Fais, the acting director of the state Division of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the agency.
A basketball game and quarterback challenge game at the Wildwood boardwalk sits vacant after its operator was banned for life by a state watchdog.
“The chair of the commission notified basketball game licensees that, due to the high volume of violations, the commission was considering canceling the basketball game certification, meaning that the basketball game would no longer be an amusement game available for licensure,” she said in an interview.
A group of games operators objected, calling it a “knee-jerk reaction” to a few bad actors, operators told NJ Advance Media. Chastened by the threat of losing a popular attraction and about $500 per overinflated basketball, most operators cleaned up their acts and the commission backed away from the move.
“After the commission put out that notice the majority of operators got into compliance, and so investigators were able to focus on addressing the remaining games with overinflated basketballs,” Fais said.
During their crackdown, a pattern emerged at stalls registered to Christine Strothers, according to a trove of reports tucked into her case file at the LG-Triple-C.
Investigators would show up unannounced, measure the basketballs and find them way overinflated, according to the commission. A manager would tell them aw, shucks, those balls are prizes, not game balls, or blame the kid running the game, saying it’s his first day. Workers would deflate the basketballs to the industry standard and promise to pay closer attention going forward.
When the investigators left, as if through some occult force, the basketballs would become overinflated again.
And again.
The cycle continued all summer. All told, 31 basketballs were found overinflated across four inspections in June, July, August and September 2022. This is after paying $16,000 in fines through 2021.
While a single violation can run hundreds of dollars, industry experts who spoke to NJ Advance Media said that for some operators, the fines associated with getting caught cheating are little more than the cost of doing business.
“The only explanation I can think of is the disregard of New Jersey’s amusement laws, accompanying regulations, and the game certification of permissibility under which licenses to operate those games were issued,” James Greenberg, a deputy attorney general, said at a January 2023 public hearing.
He addressed an empty chair. At a hearing about air pressure, the defendant — Christine Strothers — had never materialized.
Lawyers from the Attorney General’s Office last spoke with Christine and Brett Strothers by phone before the January hearing to lay out the charges and seek a formal response, the transcript shows. No response came.
State and federal authorities have not publicly connected the federal conviction of Brett Strothers and the civil penalties leveled against his wife. Investigators declined to discuss the cases with NJ Advance Media and none of the Strothers responded to messages seeking comment.
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A note about the data: We obtained records of violations in Shore towns from the Attorney General’s Office through New Jersey’s public records laws. After we received the violations, we compiled them into a database. Some records did not have full addresses listed, so they did not appear in the database but were used in our analysis of cities with the most violations, and type of games with the most violations. Violations related to operator Christine Strothers were excluded because the unusual number of violations and penalties skewed the overall picture.
On a recent Friday, stalls on the Wildwood boardwalk once licensed to Strothers sat vacant under a torn banner promising the chance to win sports jerseys or a $50 Visa gift card.
A pair of NJ Advance Media journalists were there, inappropriately dressed in boots and socks and sandals, to beat the boardwalk and do some on the sand shoe-leather reporting. With six crisp $20 bills, we set out to test a random sampling of the other arcades, basketball games and bushel baskets on offer.
We spent the most money on basketball and bushel basket games, which at as much as $5 or even $10 a play, already feel like a form of theft. But we spent the most time and careful study on the claw machine games, vexing over their herky-jerky movements and reveling in a few fleeting victories.
The most common games offered prizes that were catnip to kids: stuffed and plush versions of video game characters like Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario, Elmos and Cookie Monsters, aliens, giraffes, owls and Carebears for $1 a play.
We played 20 times. We won twice. A plush Shadow the Hedgehog and a pink Cookie Monster, for $20.
Pay a little more, and your odds improve substantially. For $5 apiece, we played on two “Play Until You Win” machines, scoring an anthropomorphic avocado and a one-eyed alien — each on the first try.
A whole dollar too rich for your blood? We also tested a 50-cent claw game filled with off-brand jawbreakers and smarties, the saddest display the boardwalk had to offer. It had a jammed claw that could move side-to-side, but not backward and forward. A valley had formed in the pile of candy under the only place the claw could descend. The hobbled clasper grabbed two packs of smarties and a “Jaw Buster” and sent them down through the chute.
A week later, the candy sat unopened in a car cupholder, where it will likely remain all summer.
This is what $120 in tokens and game cards will get you if you lack skill on the boardwalk.
Claw machines were the single biggest source of citations by the LG-Triple-C, according to NJ Advance Media’s analysis. A malfunctioning claw can catch a boardwalk operator a $500 fine, whether it’s because it needs maintenance or the owner is trying to pull a fast one.
The line between challenge and cheating is also blurry, said Anthony Cabot, a gaming law fellow at the University of Nevada’s William S. Boyd School of Law.
“My feeling is that the person has to have a reasonable opportunity to display their skill and if they have a skill, they have to have a reasonable opportunity to win the prize, right?” Cabot said. “If you take away either of those, it’s cheating.”
Cabot studies casinos and compared the games on the boardwalk to the slot machines in Atlantic City. Most slots have controls in place to pay out a specific percentage of what they take in, he said. Arcade and carnival games, like claw games, should have similar controls in place to strike a balance between fairness and profit.
“A game that virtually everyone loses is a cheating game,” Cabot said. “This could be because the game is changed from its normal play — like basketball hoops that are smaller than regulation or have mechanisms like changing the degree of difficulty in claw games.”
Not only are there changes from machine to machine, but modern amusements are also powered by software, adding a new layer of complexity, Cabot said.
“So now what do you do if you’re an inspector?” he asked. “Do you seize the chip that contains the program that operates the game and then send it to a lab? I don’t even know how you would do that.”
If it’s that difficult for the inspectors, what are regular rubes like us supposed to do?
There are things to look out for, said Beckson, the Morey’s Piers VP, to make sure things are on the up and up, whether it’s a claw machine or a ring toss.
“Observe the game before you play,” Beckson advises. “Just watch. If other people are winning, that’s a good sign.”
Some other tips: Keep an eye out for written rules. It’s not required, but most reputable operators spell out the game rules and prize categories in bold block letters. And be nosy! Ask questions. What’s the PSI on these basketballs? When was the last time that frog flipper got a tune up?
Because overall, the men and women manning the games are a charismatic bunch, heckling and sweet-talking over crackly PA systems. We barely sunk a shot during our basketball and bushel basket experiments, but the operators egged us on, offering bonus shots and cheap consolation prizes to keep the Lincolns and Hamiltons coming.
That’s part of the appeal, said Malland, the Jenkinson’s manager.
“I tell my team members, they’re not games operators, they’re in the entertainment business,” he said. “That’s what we do. I want them to always remember when they were a little kid, the first time their family took them to the boardwalk and they won a prize.
“That’s how I want our guests to leave our games.”
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