STUART, FL -- Kathy Githens is on a mission.
"To hit the jackpot!" she says with a laugh.
She sits in a dark arcade in Stuart, staring intently at the video screen in front of her, her fingers relentlessly tapping at the buttons on the machine.
She's playing one of the dozens of video slot machines in the Venetian, a popular arcade that offers free food and even $5 in free "match play" money to play its games.
And it's built a loyal clientèle. Mostly senior citizens who return to play their favorite games and to socialize with friends.
"It gives them a place they can go where they know people, they see a lot of the same faces every day," says Mary Anne James, the Venetian's owner.
But make no mistake about it, these arcades aren't just about providing a social outlet for seniors. They're about money -players looking to parlay their $5 or $10 into a much larger jackpot, and owners looking to keep their customers feeding money into the machines.
At many of the arcades, players don't actually insert cash into the game. They insert a card with credits - usually one credit equaling one penny - which can go up or down as they play. If they win, players can exchange the credits for gift cards.
The Venetian offers Visa gift cards, as well as Hess gas station and Walmart cards.
James recently opened her second Venetian arcade in Port St. Lucie, and even in the middle of the day, the place is packed - a player at most every machine. She averages 350-400 customers a day, players who stay an average 3 or 4 hours at a time.
"Nobody makes anybody spend anything they don't have the ability to control, I don't care if you go to a real casino, you go to an arcade, yo ugo out to dinner, go to the movies, whatever, you know what's in your budget," she says.
But Pat Fowler, executive director of the Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling, disagrees.
"We have seen an increase in the number of calls that we're receiving from folks who are having problems in the adult arcades," she says.
Fowler recounts the story of one caller, a 68-year old woman, who said she was spending over $100 on each trip to a local arcade, and she was visiting several times a week.
"She was concerned because this was the first month she had been unable to pay her bills as a result of the money she was losing there," said Fowler.
Another caller, a senior citizen, reported losing $2000 out of her annual $9000 income at an adult arcade.
"Yeah, it's addicting," said Loretta Chasar, a customer at the Port St. Lucie Venetian, "You have to know when to stop just like any other addiction, you know just like a real casino. You have to know when to walk away."
Ryan Butler, an assistant state attorney for the 19th judicial district, doesn't mince words when it comes to adult arcades.
"We think these places exploit the most vulnerable among us, people who are on fixed incomes and really can't afford to be losing their money on gambling," he says.
And he doesn't just see a moral issue, he sees a legal one. The arcades exist in Florida under what's known as the "Chuck E. Cheese Law." It allows people to play games with an "application of skill" to get credits redeemable for non-cash prizes.
"You have to be able to use skill to beat the machine and if you can't use skill to beat the machine, then they're illegal," says Butler. "Most of these machines are designed to be pre-set to pay out a certain percentage of the time. What that means is they're in a sense rigged."
And yet Butler's office hasn't prosecuted a case against an adult arcade in 3-4 years.
And arcade owners know it. Their business is booming. Newschannel 5 obtained public records that show St. Lucie County went from 1 adult arcade in 2003, to 26 in 2008.
Butler explains the cases are not popular, there's no "public outcry" against the arcades. And, he says, the cases are expensive to prosecute. State attorneys have to hire experts to pick apart the machines, and pay to store the machines for months.
"Spending upwards of $20,000 to investigate an amusement center may not be the best use of their funds right now," says Butler.
In 2006, a Ft. Lauderdale-based state attorney was unsuccessful in an attempt to prosecute Gale Fontaine, an arcade owner and president of the industry's trade association. He is now pursuing a civil suit against her.
"How does any state attorney determine that these machines are illegal when they’ve been to court repeatedly?" she asked rhetorically in an interview with Newschannel 5.
As for Kathy Githens, her few hours entertainment at the Venetian turned into a day-long obsession.
"From 9 in the morning until midnight or 1 in the morning," she says.
And the next day. And the next.
"I had to work a couple of days so I had a friend come and sit in," she says.
When we left her, Kathy had been gambling at the same machine for 4 1/2 days, still hunting for her jackpot.
We reached her by phone weeks later to check in. She said she eventually won her $700 jackpot after 5 1/2 days. She wouldn't say how much money she had to put in that machine to win it, but she did say she wouldn't chase a jackpot for that long again.
