The Diamond Lady, with Sanders aboard, pushes a ticket barge down the Mississippi towards Biloxi in August 1992. (Image: Anne Zeiger Collection)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u201cCapt. Ken was one of the desired captains on the river,\u201d Sanders said. \u201cOn the way down the river, he received at least 10 other offers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once in Biloxi, the Diamond Lady was tied to her sister boat, the Emerald Lady, then to the ticket barge and to the dock. The conglomeration became the newly branded Isle of Capri dockside casino.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe two boats were nosed into the shore, with the ticket barge in the middle,\u201d Sanders recalled.<\/p>\n
Murphy didn\u2019t have the proper license to stay with the boat in Biloxi. According to Sanders, his license covered the Mississippi and its tributaries, but not the Mississippi Sound, where the Biloxi casino operated. So he decided to take a job opening the Players Riverboat Casino in Metropolis, Ill.<\/p>\n
Sanders didn\u2019t have that license, either, but he didn\u2019t have Capt. Ken\u2019s options. So he went to school for the license in New Orleans while a smelly fish warehouse was prepped to become the Isle of Capri\u2019s offices. Upon his return, Sanders was named a captain of the Emerald Lady. (Each boat had four captains, who took shifts, even when the boats were docked.)<\/p>\n
\u201cBiloxi didn\u2019t pay much,\u201d Sanders said. \u201cI had a young family who was living in Natchez, Miss., and I was commuting every two weeks. The Mississippi was like a strange land to them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last Boat Leaving<\/h2>\n When Goldstein\u2019s company, Casino America, opened the Isle of Capri-Vicksburg on the Mississippi River 200 miles northwest of Biloxi, he asked Sanders to sail the Diamond Lady there. Goldstein had already planned to rehouse his Biloxi operations in an $18 million, a two-story barge that would open in 1994.<\/p>\n
Sanders turned the job down. Instead, he joined his old friend, Capt. Ken, on the Players Riverboat Casino, which was closer to his home in Northern Kentucky.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m lucky I didn\u2019t go to Vicksburg,\u201d Sanders said.<\/p>\n
After the Diamond Lady sailed there in August 1993, she was docked with the same ticket barge, and a moat surrounded both to form the second Isle of Capri gambling operation.<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cI heard that the dike around the boat sprang a leak, and the captain who went there instead of me was fired,\u201d Sanders said.<\/p>\n
In 1994, a larger dockside casino replaced the Diamond Lady at the Isle of Capri-Vicksburg. How she ended up in Memphis 14 years later is still currently a mystery. The Riverside Park Marina, where what’s left of the Diamond Lady rests today, did not return voicemails left by Casino.org.<\/em><\/p>\n“I was long gone by then,” Sanders said.<\/p>\n
Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A week after running our first story on the Diamond Lady, the rough sketch of the historic riverboat casino\u2019s history can now be fleshed out, thanks to Don Sanders. He was the chief mate who helped sail the Diamond Lady from Bettendorf, Iowa down the Mississippi River to Biloxi, Miss. under Capt. Ken Murphy in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":78,"featured_media":241060,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[83481,82746,13363,83480,13628,81932,83570,83569,82122,83479,82516,83571],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
Diamond Lady Riverboat Casino: How It Ended Up in the Rough - Casino.org<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n