A man who tried to cash in hundreds of gaming chips from the long-gone Playboy Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City isn’t hitting the jackpot after all.
Keith Hawkins was seeking $59,500, the face value of the 389 chips that he bought online, according to a nine-page ruling issued by the New Jersey Appellate Division.
The Playboy Hotel and Casino had a brief but prominent tenure in Atlantic City. It opened on April 14, 1981 and closed just three years later. It went through another round of ownership before President Donald Trump bought it and turned it into Trump’s World Fair.
When the Playboy Hotel and Casino closed in 1984, it transferred funds to the state treasury department’s Unclaimed Property Administration to cover the redemption value of any outstanding chips issued to customers, the judges wrote.
Hawkins bought the chips at an online auction in 2022 and he tried to cash them in a year later with the state.
That’s when the New Jersey State Police began investigating. They found that a company was hired by the casino to destroy unissued chips.
A representative of the company told New Jersey State Police that a former employee — whose name was redacted from the police report — “had pilfered several boxes of unused chips ‘sometime around 1990′ and put them in a bank deposit box," according to the ruling.
In 2010, the bank where the chips were stored drilled open the box and confiscated the chips. In 2022, the bank sent the chips to the auction house, the judges wrote.
Hawkins told authorities that he did not know the source of the chips or the owner’s identity. The New Jersey State Police confirmed with the auction house, not named in the ruling, that Hawkins had purchased the chips, the judges wrote.
However, that did not change the outcome.
A two-judge panel ruled that the Unclaimed Property Administration correctly relied on a 1991 court finding that it is authorized to redeem only those gaming chips that were issued, but unredeemed, at the time of a New Jersey casino’s closing.
“We are satisfied that the evidence in the record supports UPA’s conclusion that the chips presented by claimant were ‘unissued Playboy gaming chips that were to be destroyed’ and, therefore, ‘ineligible for redemption,‘” the judges wrote in citing the prior decision.
Tens of thousands of chips from the same Atlantic City casino were unearthed in Mississippi in 2008, at the site of the same company that was hired to destroy all the unissued chips.
Workers made the discovery as they were building a community center 17 years ago at the former headquarters of the company. Many of the chips ended up on eBay as souvenir items, the Star-Ledger reported at the time.
The judges did not mention the 2008 discovery in their ruling.
The Unclaimed Property Administration denied Hawkins’ claim on June 29, 2023, “based on the illicit origin of the chips,” the judges wrote.
Hawkins represented himself in the case. The ruling did not disclose his location or whether he resides in New Jersey.
After the Playboy casino closed in 1984, Elsinore Corp., a Las Vegas-based gambling company, bought the location and renamed it Elsinore’s Atlantic. Elsinore’s closed in 1989.
Next, Trump — then strictly a developer and media personality — bought the property in 1989 for $64 million and operated it as Trump Regency, a non-casino hotel.
It became Trump’s World’s Fair, an extension of Trump Plaza, in 1996, and closed in 1999.
Demolition began in 2000.
Stories by Rob Jennings
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Rob Jennings may be reached at rjennings@njadvancemedia.com.