Hot Seats, an illegal casino in Leesburg with apparent ties to the racketeering case against former Osceola County Sheriff Marcos Lopez, was raided Thursday night along with two other gambling operations in Lake County.
The operation — dubbed “Calvin Coolidge,” after the former U.S. president, for reasons that remain obscure — targeted Hot Seats; The Hub, which is also in Leesburg; and House of Treasures in Umatilla. 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 Friday in separate news releases.
“It is impressive to take 231 illegal slot machines off the streets in one night,” Alana Zimmer, the commission’s executive director, said in a statement. “We are giving notice to those who want to operate illegal gambling facilities that we will close you down.”
The gaming commission, which has escalated efforts to shutter illegal casinos since its creation in 2021, led the raids at Hot Seats and The Hub and worked with the sheriff’s office to shut down House of Treasures. As the Orlando Sentinel has previously reported, Lake County has been a center of illegal gaming in Central Florida, in part because of its once–convoluted approach to regulation and enforcement.
Several people were also issued notices to appear in court on charges of keeping an illicit gambling house, a second-degree misdemeanor, and illegally possessing a slot machine, which carries a $10,000 fine per machine, according to 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 to establish illegal casinos in several Central Florida counties, including Lake and Osceola, in exchange for campaign donations and thousands of dollars in personal payments. 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 others charged in the operation have all accepted plea deals.
In late July, after Hot Seats was mentioned in the Lopez case, a Sentinel reporter visited the establishment, located in a tidy retail shopping plaza. A large “Hot Seats” sign was on the building, though the establishment’s windows were blacked out. Inside, patrons were playing on the rows of slot machines.
At the time, sheriff’s officials declined to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation into Hot Seats.
On Friday, a gaming commission spokesperson did not respond to questions about how long Hot Seats was under investigation before Thursday’s raid. The agency also did answer questions about why the operation was named after Coolidge, though the former president famously stayed in Mount Dora during a 1930s winter vacation.
Gambling houses proliferated in Lake in recent years partly because of a 2021 ordinance that allowed up to 25 such businesses to receive permits and operate if they disclosed the number of machines in their possession and underwent annual inspections. In effect, it allowed those businesses to run afoul of Florida law, which generally only permits gambling houses on Native American land and two South Florida counties.
Sheriff’s officials said the ordinance confused deputies tasked with enforcing it, and it wasn’t until 2024, following concerns raised by state authorities, that Lake’s county commission repealed that ordinance.
Hot Seats and House of Treasures were among those allowed to operate under the permitting regime only to continue business 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 at the same locations.
But now law enforcement is eager to shut them down.
“We will continue these operations to eradicate this illegal activity and arrest those that are responsible,” Sheriff Peyton Grinnell said in a statement.
A Sheriff’s Office spokesperson released the names of four people cited following the raid at House of Treasures, but none of their cases were available in court records as of Friday afternoon, so the Orlando Sentinel is not yet publishing the names. A commission spokesperson did not immediately respond to a message seeking the same information about who was cited in its raids.
Jacksonville-based attorney Kelly Mathis is listed as a registered agent for The Hub in state business filings. Mathis, whose 2013 conviction for taking part in a massive illegal gambling scheme was overturned in 2016, was also listed in a court filing as a possible defense witnesses in Lopez’s case.
He did not reply to a message seeking comment Friday about on the raid at The Hub.
