Raleigh: 280+ Police Calls in a Year Led to a Gambling Parlor Raid; 5 Charged

Police in Raleigh, North Carolina, have charged five people and seized $180,970 in cash after investigating a sweepstakes parlor that officers kept getting called to. Raleigh police and the state’s Alcohol Law Enforcement Division shared the results on Thursday, October 1, according to The News & Observer.

The business, Golden 5 Sweepstakes Parlor in northeast Raleigh, is no longer open. Investigators say illegal video gambling was going on there, WRAL reported.

The raid itself happened weeks before the announcement. On August 28, investigators used three search warrants to search the parlor on Calvary Drive and two other places tied to it, the newspaper reported.

It started with hundreds of police calls

In the year before the investigation began in June, police were called to the business more than 280 times, The News & Observer reported. WRAL said the calls go back to June 2025.

The reasons varied: disturbances, assaults, drug violations, stabbings, robberies, weapons violations and assaults involving law enforcement officers, police said.

Still, a call is not proof. A high number of calls does not mean every reported incident turned out to be a crime.

Cash, guns and gambling machine parts

Across all three searches, investigators seized the following, according to The News & Observer:

• $180,970 in cash
• three firearms that police described as illegally possessed
• 29 motherboards from what police called illegal video gambling machines

Those numbers cover the three searches combined, not the parlor alone. WRAL reported the same gun and motherboard counts and more than $180,000 in cash. A motherboard is the main circuit board inside a machine.

What police say was going on

According to police, undercover operations recorded the parlor paying out on video poker machines, The News & Observer reported.

Five people were arrested. Between them, they face six felonies and 20 misdemeanors, police said. The reports do not break those charges down by person, and neither WRAL nor The News & Observer named the five.

The charges are allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless proven guilty.

There was more. A broader drug investigation involving the business led to 17 arrests on 47 felony and eight misdemeanor charges, and six illegally possessed firearms were recovered, the newspaper reported. The reports do not say whether any of those people are among the five charged in the gambling case.

Raleigh is not the only place dealing with gambling machines. In an unrelated case in Texas, three people were charged over an alleged gambling operation at an arcade in Texarkana.

The doors are shut

Golden 5 is no longer operating. WRAL reported that it has been evicted from the property, while The News & Observer, citing police, reported that the eviction is still underway.

Raleigh Police Chief Rico Boyce credited his officers and Alcohol Law Enforcement agents, saying their work “has helped make this area of Raleigh safer for the community,” WRAL reported.

Featured image: Video poker machines at a casino in New Orleans, used here as an illustrative image. The photo is not from the Golden 5 Sweepstakes Parlor. Photo: Peter Mai / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)