Hot Seats, an illegal Leesburg casino with apparent ties to the racketeering case against former Osceola County Sheriff Marcos Lopez, was raided Thursday night along with two other Lake County gambling operations.
The operation – dubbed “Calvin Coolidge” after the former US president for reasons that remain unclear – targeted the Hot Seats; The Hub, which is also in Leesburg; and the Umatilla Treasure House. Agents seized a total of 231 machines and more than $158,000 in cash, the Florida Gaming Control Commission and the Lake County Sheriff’s Office announced in separate news releases Friday.
“Getting 231 illegal slots off the streets in one night is impressive,” Alana Zimmer, the commission’s executive director, said in a statement. “We are on notice to those who wish to operate illegal gambling establishments that we will shut you down.”
The Gambling Commission, which has stepped up efforts to shut down illegal casinos since its creation in 2021, led raids on Hot Seats and The Hub and worked with the sheriff’s office to shut down House of Treasures. As the Orlando Sentinel previously reported, Lake County has been a center for illegal gambling in Central Florida, in part because of its former–complicated approach to regulation and enforcement.
Several people were also issued notices to appear in court on charges of operating an illegal gambling house, a second-degree misdemeanor, and illegal possession of a slot machine, which carries a fine of $10,000 per machine under Florida law.
Hot Seats was mentioned last summer in a court document filed in Lopez’s case. Lopez, arrested in June along with several co-conspirators, is accused of helping set up illegal casinos in several Central Florida counties, including Lake and Osceola, in exchange for campaign donations and thousands of dollars in personal payoffs. Investigators said that once he was elected sheriff, he worked to protect an illegal casino in Kissimmee from scrutiny.
Lopez, who has pleaded not guilty, is awaiting trial, while the other defendants in the operation have all taken plea deals.
In late July, after Hot Seats was mentioned in the Lopez case, a Sentinel reporter visited the facility, located in a tidy shopping plaza. There was a large “Hot Seats” sign on the building, although the windows of the facility were blacked out. Inside, patrons were playing the rows of slot machines.
At the time, sheriff’s officials declined to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation into Hot Seats.
A spokesman for the gaming commission on Friday did not respond to questions about how long Hot Seats had been under investigation before Thursday’s raid. The agency also answered questions about why the operation was named after Coolidge, even though the former president stayed at Mount Dora during a winter vacation in the 1930s.
Gambling houses have proliferated in Lake in recent years, in part because of a 2021 ordinance that allowed up to 25 such businesses to receive permits and operate if they disclosed the number of machines they owned and underwent annual inspections. In effect, it allowed those businesses to run afoul of Florida law, which generally only allows gambling houses on Native American lands and in two South Florida counties.
Sheriff’s officials said the ordinance confused the deputies tasked with enforcing it, and it wasn’t until 2024, following concerns raised by state officials, that the Lake County Commission repealed the ordinance.
Hot Seats and House of Treasures were among those allowed to operate under the permit regime only to continue operating once the permits were no longer issued, according to records reviewed by the Sentinel. Many, like Hot Seats in 2017, had been raided in the past, only to reopen, sometimes under the same names and locations.
But now law enforcement is eager to shut them down.
“We will continue these operations to root out this illegal activity and arrest those responsible,” Sheriff Peyton Grinnell said in a statement.
A sheriff’s office spokesman released the names of four people cited in the House of Treasures raid, but none of their cases were available in court records as of Friday afternoon, so the Orlando Sentinel is not releasing the names yet. A spokesman for the commission did not immediately respond to a message seeking the same information about who was subpoenaed in its raids.
Jacksonville attorney Kelly Mathis is listed as the registered agent for The Hub in state business filings. Mathis, whose 2013 conviction for participating in a massive illegal gambling scheme was overturned in 2016, was also mentioned in a court filing as a possible defense witness in Lopez’s case.
He did not respond Friday to a message seeking comment about the raid from The Hub.