Here we go again with a boat for Kimmswick, Jefferson County’s designated historic town and past graveyard of potential floating entertainment.
The sleepy little Mississippi River town has had two flirtations with big-time boats in the last two decades and both ended before they really got started, one to cheers and the other to jeers.
With the announcement Sept. 10 that the historic riverboat Delta Queen will be making Kimmswick its home port, a third attempt is being mounted.
The earlier ventures made for delicious theater. The first was a 1990s effort by Lady Luck to win a gaming license from the state of Missouri and install a floating casino in the tiny village.
This notion was being pushed by the riverfront landowners who had a lease with Lady Luck (later Isle of Capri) and by county politicians, but opposed mightily by locals, most significantly the late Lucianna Gladney Ross, the most intimidating 5-foot-tall, white hair-bunned grandmother I’ve ever met.
Ross, an heiress to the 7Up fortune, restored countless buildings in Kimmswick in the 1970s and 1980s, leasing them to shopkeepers and restaurateurs. She created a quaint shopping and dining district that kept modest daytime hours. She didn’t cotton to the idea of a blaring, 24-hour, neon-lighted den of iniquity.
Neither did her buddies, whom I dubbed the Hatpin Ladies. Their hatpins proved mightier than the poker chips. After several years of public relations and legal maneuvering, the gamblers threw in their hand in 2001 and left town.
The Hatpin Ladies and the majority of Kimmswick’s hundred-plus residents cheered.
There was a great postscript in which the gaming company lost again – twice. The landowners who held the lease successfully sued the gamblers for several million dollars for breach of contract. The county, which had been promised a cut of the take, used the same lawyers, sued them again and got enough millions to build a new administration building in Hillsboro. Cha-ching!
Round Two of Kimmswick Boat Bingo was even more entertaining, an outcome that didn’t seem possible after Round One. That was because the lead role was played by Capt. Dan Francis, a modern day pirate if ever there were one.
To great fanfare, Capt. Dan bought the Robert E. Lee, a floating barge restaurant that used to be in downtown St. Louis. In 2004 he brought it to Kimmswick and began a series of business misadventures that made the gamblers look like the Vienna Boys Choir.
Francis began his business by defying a cease-and-desist order from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which had not yet issued a mooring permit.
The next three years or so were a comedy of opening the boat, closing the boat, re-opening the boat, not paying taxes and many suppliers. Along the way he “bought” numerous local businesses and lost a million-dollar judgment to a local businessman who lent him money. Francis eventually pleaded guilty to two counts of failure to pay sales and employee withholding taxes.
As he dealt with the criminal charges, the civil lawsuits piled up. At one point, Francis amassed a three-page, single-spaced list of lawsuits against him.
Eventually the Robert E. Lee, which Capt. Dan said was worth $7 million, was sold at auction for $200,000. Francis left town to a chorus of hisses, like a melodrama villain.
After a failed business effort at the Lake of the Ozarks, which increased the number of lawsuits filed against him, Capt. Dan resurfaced earlier this year in Colorado Springs, Colo., where he was charged in federal court with theft of government property.
An FBI investigator alleged Francis conspired with two soldiers at Fort Carson to steal $374,000 worth of equipment, including range finders, electric headsets, axes, body armor and two robots, then attempted to sell them on eBay. Some of the loot was bought by FBI agents. Oops.
No matter what issues the Delta Queen encounters, barring a Titanic-sized disaster, it will have a hard time topping the capers of the colorful Capt. Dan.
The Queen, it was merrily reported in this newspaper and elsewhere, is planning to make Kimmswick its home starting in 2016. Currently undergoing repairs in Louisiana, the 1927 steamboat just needs one teensy, eensy thing to become a cruising riverboat again – Congressional approval.
For 40 years, the vintage boat cruised because it had an exemption from the federal Safety at Sea Act. It lost that exemption in 2006, reportedly over a labor dispute with the Seafarers Union, which had clout with a late Minnesota congressman who chaired the Transportation Committee that denied an extension of the exemption.
The new owners say they will get the exemption from Congress. If not, they say there are non-cruising uses for the vessel.
WHICH DO NOT INCLUDE GAMBLING, they emphasized.
That brings up an interesting, theoretical question: If the Kimmswickians had to choose between the Delta Queen becoming a gaming boat, or having a non-gambling operation run by the rascally Capt. Dan, which would they choose?
Too close to call.
