BROWNSVILLE — By all outward appearances, Suite No. 8 in a strip mall at 3000 Central Boulevard was just another small business.
But on the inside, a non-descript eight-liner operation was underway, according to the Cameron County District Attorney’s Office, which raided the location at 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, citing 16 people and removing the motherboards to the machines, rendering them inoperable.
“We didn’t make any arrests,” Cameron County District Attorney Luis V. Saenz said Thursday afternoon. “We’re trying to find the owners.”
The investigation into the location continues.
“We continue the investigation to determine who owns it, who runs it, who manages it,” Saenz said.
This is the third eight-liner location to be raided by the DA’s office this year, Saenz said.
And there are more raids on the way.
Saenz said his office has identified an eight-liner at Coffee Port and FM 802, and another two or three locations on FM 511.
“We’re going to be paying them a visit,” Saenz said.
Shortly after Saenz was elected in 2012, he announced Operation Bishop, an aggressive campaign to shut down eight-liners.
The first big raid happened in April 2013, when a multi-agency taskforce raided five Cameron County eight-liners, arresting eight people and seizing 456 virtual gaming machines and at least $56,322 in cash.
“We are still aggressively doing it,” Saenz said.
Throughout the past five years, the DA’s office has been able to streamline its eight-liner raids.
“We’ve gotten to be experts at this,” Saenz said. “In the beginning … we would go in there with trailers and pick up the whole device, and that was really cumbersome.”
The raid Wednesday night took one hour. Instead of seizing the eight-liners, authorities just removed the motherboards from the gaming machines.
Saenz said it is possible that the operator could just buy new motherboards, but he said it’s difficult and expensive to do.
The eight-liner operators also have evolved over the years, responding to the Cameron County District Attorney’s Office’s aggressive policing of the establishments.
“There was a progression when we started in 2013. It was open and notorious, then they kind of went to be a little hidden, you know?” Saenz said. “As we progressed and stayed on top of them, they kept getting more and more secretive to finally being in open places to little hideaways in neighborhoods to just really dumpy places in the back of barns.”
That’s what made Wednesday’s night raid different.
“This one right here was just right down the street from Cobbleheads,” Saenz said.
