City laundermats are cleaning up with illegal gambling.
In the last two weeks, at least two Brooklyn laundermats have installed “coin pusher” machines that come chock-full of dangling dough and prizes.
Players plunk a quarter into the low-stakes game in hopes their coin pushes a cache of quarters into a winning slot when a metal bed sweeps against them.
Nobody seems to beat the house – which generally rakes in $200 per week off the machines, store employees say.
Most players are teenagers, who leave without hitting the jackpot.
Julian Rodriguez, 15, said he and his friend won 75 cents a few times playing at Lin’s Landromat in Bushwick, Brooklyn, but together they’ve blown about $19.
“You’re supposed to win money whenever the quarter falls, but that doesn’t always happen,” Julian said yesterday.
The games are standard attractions at arcades and fairs, but generally, payouts come in tokens redeemable for prizes.
The NYPD said a coin pusher with cash prizes is illegal.
A Lin’s employee said she did not know the machine is illegal. Later in the afternoon, the store unplugged the coin pusher and draped a towel over it.
At Jing Fang Inc., a family-run East New York laundermat, store manager Alex Jing, 27, said a vendor came in two weeks ago offering to set up one and split the profits.
Reached by The News, vendor Steven Sztab said he leased the coin pusher to Jing’s family, but didn’t know it is illegal.
“There is no law against it, and if there is, I’ll remove them,” Sztab said.
He would not say where else he had installed the machines.
Customers said the laundermats need to clean up their acts.
“That’s gambling. What if I brought some dice in here and started shooting dice?” asked Vincent Davis, 59.
Davis added that the machines – which light up and make noise – prey on children.
“It’s tempting for kids,” he said. “Whenever they get a quarter, they want to win more quarters. It’s not an appropriate place for it to be here.”
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