This is a tale of two gas stations.
The first is on the north side of the city of St. Louis. There, in a back room, according to federal bribery indictments, its owner handed small amounts of cash out to various aldermen. A thousand here, two thousand there. Former aldermen Jeffrey Boyd and John Collins-Muhammad and former Board of Aldermen President Lewis Reed have been charged with bribery for promising development favors for the gas station owner, in exchange for the cash. They have resigned.
The other gas station is in rural Missouri. Actually, it’s dozens of gas stations, convenience stores and bars in cities and counties across the state. Inside they offer video gaming terminals. Several prosecuting attorneys in Missouri have echoed the words of Greene County Prosecutor Dan Patterson, who, after the Missouri State Highway Patrol seized some of the machines in a gas station, said in court documents that, “there is substantially more than a reasonable possibility that (the) machines are illegal gambling machines.”