Colliton Had Pull-Tab License Suspended Former Tavern Owner Admits ‘Technical Violation’ Of Gaming Rules

A few years ago, Spokane City Council candidate Jeff Colliton was a bar owner facing revocation of his gambling license for “willfully violating” state regulations.

He wound up briefly surrendering the valuable license - after investigators accused him of circumventing anticorruption safeguards for Washington’s $500 million pull-tab industry.

Today, the 54-year-old retired U.S. Army colonel is challenging City Council incumbent Bev Numbers in the November election.

Colliton dismisses his past trouble with the Gambling Commission as a simple misunderstanding.

“It’s insignificant,” he says. “It’s a technical violation of a rule that was designed to prevent mobsters from coming in.”

At the time, he and his wife owned the Park Inn tavern across Ninth Avenue from Sacred Heart Medical Center.

The business grossed about $500,000 a year with nearly half of those revenues coming from pull-tab sales, according to Colliton’s own estimates.

In early 1990, Colliton says he was offered a job as a pull-tab and bingo supplies distributor, serving bars and bingo halls in Eastern Washington.

To become a salesman, he needed another gambling license - but such multilevel marketing is against state law.

Knowing that, Colliton and his attorney, Patrick Shine of Spokane, appeared before the Gambling Commission seeking an exemption.

The request was denied March 9, 1990, and a written order was issued, records show.

But Colliton went ahead and doubled as a pull-tab distributor.

He did so, he says, because he believed the commission was sympathetic to his request. He claims one member went so far as to suggest he get around the rule by giving the bar to a family member.

With the help of Shine’s law firm, Lukins & Annis, Colliton did just that.

In late April 1990, he transferred ownership of the Park Inn to his 21-year-old daughter, then a senior at Virginia Tech.

“We reacted to what we thought was a suggestion from the Gambling Commission,” Colliton said.

He and Shine, however, cannot remember the name of the commissioner who made the comment and have no record of what was said.

Both men concede they left the hearing knowing the proposed exemption had been denied.

Shine refused to comment when asked why his firm later assisted Colliton in making the barownership change - a move calculated to get around the state law.

It nearly cost Colliton tens of thousands of dollars in gambling income.

Acting on a tip, state agents audited the Park Inn in the summer of 1991. They discovered that Carrie Colliton, the daughter, was owner in name only and that her father was still running the business and profiting from it.

Jeff Colliton signed all but four of approximately 220 checks issued from Jan. 1 to June 2, 1991, and the other four had Carrie Colliton’s signature stamped on them, according to investigative reports obtained by The Spokesman-Review.

Colliton says he wasn’t hiding anything.

“I was there every day. It was no secret,” he says.

To avoid a conflict of interest, Colliton says he arranged to have another company sell pull-tabs to the Park Inn.

But investigator Julie Lies recommended revocation of Colliton’s bar license. “The licensee willfully disregarded commission rules, even after receiving a declaratory order on this matter,” she wrote.

The commission stopped short of taking that action because Colliton agreed to a voluntary 45-day suspension of his Park Inn gambling license and stopped being a pull-tab distributor.

“He did ultimately cooperate and I have to give him credit for that,” says Carrie Tellefson, commission special assistant.

As for the violation itself, Tellefson calls it “not that big of a deal.”

Shine couldn’t agree more.

“There probably isn’t a business owner or operator who hasn’t had a code violation of some kind,” he says.

Colliton sold his bar in February 1993, but he’s still in the pull-tab business.

This spring, he received a new state license as one of five distributors for Spokane Pull-tab and Bingo Supply Co., where he is also marketing director.

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