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For almost 20 years, the Lake Elsinore Casino has hosted poker games without holding a permanent gaming license.

During that time, the gaming club also has become one of the most important businesses in Lake Elsinore.

The city’s mayor, Steve Manos, describes the casino as “a great partner for the city,” noting it sponsors scholarships and hosts chamber of commerce events. And with about 275 employees, the casino is Lake Elsinore’s fourth-largest employer.

But the casino, owned by Ted and Joseph Kingston, have been linked to a group that has drawn public condemnation and, later this year, a criminal trial for tax fraud.

The Kingstons – public records don’t indicate how they are related –  are reportedly part of the Kingston Group, a Utah-based polygamous sect also known as the Davis County Cooperative Society. The sect’s alleged teachings on race relations have prompted some to call it a hate group, and in 2011 its business operations prompted Utah’s then-attorney general to describe it as an “organized crime family.”

The sect also has been accused by former members and others of pressuring girls as young as 15 to marry adult men.

State gaming regulators want to deny the Kingstons’ latest application for a permanent gaming license, citing, among other infractions, the group’s failure to provide information.

Neither casino management nor a Davis Society spokesman responded to requests for comment.

It’s not clear what might happen in Lake Elsinore if the Kingstons don’t get a permanent license. Manos says he isn’t worried about the casino closing.

20 years of temporary

With a remodeled digital sign visible from Interstate 15 – which shares space with the words “Welcome to Lake Elsinore … Action Sports Capital of the World” – the casino once known as Sahara Dunes is modest by the sometimes garish standards of California gaming operations. It features 22 gambling tables, an off-track betting service that started in 2016, and a neighboring hotel.

Ted and Joseph Kingston’s interest in the casino goes back to 1991 when they took on a company that at that time was at least 13 years old, according to a filing with the state Bureau of Gaming Control. Today, state records show that Ted and Joseph Kingston each own 47.5 percent of the casino and they co-own a management company that controls the other 5 percent.

State records also show that the operation, while owned by the Kingstons, has had a consistently rocky relationship with state gaming officials.

In 1999, after Ted and Joseph Kingston and the now-deceased Clyde Kingston applied to the state to run the casino, they were granted a temporary operating license. And in the years since then, they’ve encountered consistent pushback, even as they’ve received new provisional permits.

In 2008, for example, regulators recommended the California Gaming Control Commission not grant the Kingstons a permanent license. They cited an alleged “failure to disclose required information, the failure to maintain adequate records, the use of inappropriate accounting methods, the failure to notify the Commission of transfers of interest, and the continued employment of a key employee with a felony conviction,” according to the gambling control bureau’s filing with the state Gambling Control Commission.

Eight years later, the bureau again asked the commission to deny a license to the Kingstons, citing the applicants’ failure to submit complete paperwork and comply in a timely fashion with requests for information. The Kingstons also “committed numerous violations of (the state Gambling Control Act) … in the operation and management of the Casino,” bureau officials wrote.

Hate group?

This month, The Salt Lake Tribune reported the casino is one of many businesses controlled by the Kingston Group. Other holdings include a grocery store, pawn shops, and a high-end firearms maker, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which in 2017 labeled the Kingstons a hate group.

A 2017 article in the center’s “Intelligence Report” magazine quoted Jessica Kingston, who left the group and is now a cast member on the reality TV show “Escaping Polygamy.” She described frequent use of the N-word by sect members and a Sunday school lesson in which a teacher added a drop of black food coloring to a bucket of water as a way to illustrate the sect’s views on race relations.

“The teacher was like, ‘You can never get that out, that is always there now,’” Jessica Kingston told the Utah paper.  “She talked about how you can’t associate with black people or anybody of a different race.”

Kent Johnson, a Davis society spokesman, denied that the group teaches discrimination. “The organization I represent believes in freedoms and not discriminating against” minorities, he told The Salt Lake Tribune in 2017.

Also known as the Order, the group started in the early 20th century as a polygamy-practicing offshoot of the mainstream Mormon church, which disavowed plural marriage as early as 1890. Published reports put its present-day membership in the low thousands.

The group’s incorporated church is known as the Latter-day Church of Christ. It is not connected to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose leader, Warren Jeffs, is serving a life prison sentence for child sexual assault.

The Salt Lake Tribune in 2017 described the Davis society, a registered nonprofit with the state of Utah, as an organization “through which members consecrate their businesses, homes and personal possessions – down to the shirt on their back – to God. All those assets may legally belong to individual members, but they are managed through the cooperative.”

“Great partner”

A 2011 Rolling Stone article, “Inside ‘The Order,’ One Mormon Cult’s Secret Empire,” described the Kingstons as “the most powerful polygamous cult in America – and one of the most dangerous.”

The Lake Elsinore Casino sign is visible from Interstate 15 (File photo).

The article, which put the Kingstons’ wealth at $300 million, also quoted then-Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff as saying: “I strongly believe they are an organized-crime family.”

“When people hear ‘organized crime,’ they think of mobsters,” he told the magazine. “I don’t think they’re organized crime in that regard, but the racketeering statute defines it as any conspiracy or pattern of illegal activity done in concert with others. If they are money-laundering or making money in support of polygamy and incest, then they probably meet the statute.”

This summer, Kingston family members are scheduled to go on trial in Utah, facing allegations stemming from what federal prosecutors describe as a half-billion-dollar fraud scheme. Jacob Kingston and his brother Isaiah have pleaded not guilty to charges of using their renewable energy company to scam the Internal Revenue Service out of biofuel tax credits.

It’s not clear if the Kingstons who own the Lake Elsinore Casino are connected in any way to the Kingstons facing trial.

The group also has faced criticism on another front — setting up marriages involving adult men and teenage girls. Last year, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that since 1997 at least 65 marriages in the group included brides were were 15, 16 or 17 years old. The newspaper’s investigation quoted former members who are women who said they were pressured to marry as teens.

It’s unclear if any of those allegations, or the group’s legal issues, will affect the license for the Lake Elsinore Casino.

The question recently has been taken up in court. An administrative law judge who heard evidence in the casino case in March said via email that a new round of briefs in the case is due May 10, and that a decision could be made soon after.

“The… judge will issue a proposed decision to the California Gambling Control Commission, which may adopt, reject, or modify the proposed decision as provided by law.”