It poured more than a million dollars into lobbying and campaign donations. The end goal was a full-scale casino, complete with table games, human dealers, the works.įor a while it seemed like Genting would get what it wanted. In 2010, Genting paid $380 million to run 4,500 electronic slot machines called “video lottery terminals” at Aqueduct, the struggling horseracing track in Queens. Genting was hoping to satisfy additional demand at its Queens location. In a saturated Northeast gambling market in which interstate cannibalization is an explicit rationale for New York legalization, the key to success for Genting and Lim is to “redistribute the demand to themselves,” said Gerald Benjamin, a political science professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
