Player John Cammarano steps outside for a few minutes as the game goes on at Club Royale, a poker card room that opened last month on the North Side. Tribal casinos say card rooms are illegal and hurt casino business.

Kelly Presnell / Arizona Daily Star

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The Pascua Yaqui Tribe has filed a civil lawsuit against the owners of a poker room that opened last month on the North Side, prompted, the tribe says, by a lack of intervention by the state.

"From our standpoint, we shouldn't have to file this lawsuit," said Kimberly Van Amburg, the tribe's assistant attorney general for gaming. "The people who are responsible for this is the Office of the Attorney General, not the Pascua Yaqui Tribe."

The suit, filed late Monday in Pima County Superior Court, is asking for the closure of Club Royale, 2655 N. Campbell Ave., which opened July 25.

Club owners Donna and Johnny Ray Rogers are named in the suit, along with Tombstone resident Harold Lee and the International Card and Game Players Association, a private organization Lee founded last May that has granted licenses to Club Royale and similar card rooms in Phoenix and Surprise.

Donna Rogers declined to comment on the lawsuit, saying she had not seen the complaint. Lee said he hadn't been served as of late Tuesday, though he said he wondered how it was possible for the tribe to file a lawsuit because he thought Indian reservations were considered sovereign nations.

"I'm surprised that they're allowed to go into the courthouse," said Lee, a former Maricopa County justice of the peace who has been operating card rooms in the state since 2005. "That would be like Costa Rica suing me."

The complaint states that the poker being played at Club Royale violates state gambling laws and also interferes with business at the Pascua Yaqui Tribe's two casinos, Casino del Sol and Casino of the Sun. Both casinos are on the Southwest Side.

Van Amburg said attendance at the poker room at Casino del Sol, 5655 W. Valencia Road, has declined in the past few weeks, though she couldn't say by exactly how much.

"Speaking with our director of poker and the poker supervisors, a lot of the regular poker players disappeared at around the time this card room opened," Van Amburg said, adding that one poker-room employee recently stopped by Club Royale and "counted several of our regular poker players in there."

Van Amburg said the tribe sent a letter to Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard on Aug. 8 stating its intention to sue but received no response. She said the tribe's interim attorney general, Robert Gillon, has since called twice to get a "status report" on whether Goddard intends to intervene but was not called back.

"Part of the thing that's been kind of perplexing about all of this is that the Attorney General's Office has allowed this to go on for so long without doing anything," Van Amburg said, referring to investigations conducted by the Arizona Department of Gaming in 2006 and 2007 against Lee-run card rooms in Cochise County.

Those investigations determined illegal activity was occurring, a January 2008 report showed, but Goddard's office didn't file charges.

Goddard, who sat down with the Star's editorial board on Monday to discuss a variety of topics, said his office didn't feel it was the right time to pursue charges against Lee.

But Goddard said Lee's "move out of Cochise County" has prompted him to take another look at the issue, and he is evaluating the kind of defenses that could be brought forward if he were to prosecute for illegal gambling.

"He's become enough of an issue," Goddard said. "I wouldn't venture into Judge Lee's card rooms."

Business at Club Royale has been booming, said Lee, who said the card room has signed up close to 500 members in less than four weeks.

Players must pay a $20 fee to be members of the International Card and Game Players Association in order to play poker at Club Royale.

That fee, along with the $1 to $3 "button fee" charged to players on a rotating basis before each hand, are at the center of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe's complaint regarding the legality of Club Royale.

State law allows gambling outside of casinos if no one other than the people gambling benefit from the game. The tribe's complaint states that, since Club Royale is operating as a business, it "does not meet the limited statutory definitions of amusement, regulated and social gambling."

Lee, who has said he wanted to get arrested in order to challenge the state's gambling laws in court, contends his clubs are legal because poker should be legalized. He also says casinos steal from players by taking money from the pot each hand.

"We're a 300-year-old profession that people have been making a living off of since the Mississippi riverboat days," Lee said. "I don't see how they're going to get around the fact they're reaching into our prize pool. If they want to go to court and defend stealing, I'm all for it. This one I think we can win outright, because it's clearly wrong to steal from prize pools."

Goddard said Monday that Lee's actions could jeopardize the state's gaming compact with Indian tribes, which was enacted in 1988 and renewed in 2002 by voter approval.

Van Amburg echoed that point, saying the compact provides tribes with a certain level of exclusivity that Club Royale and other card rooms are interfering with.

"If it is determined that gambling is allowed in the state, that should be considered illegal. Then the tribes — not just this tribe — could take the stance that they're not just limited to what's in the gaming compact," Van Amburg said. "It could be like Las Vegas, with slot machines in the Circle K's."

The tribes are required to give a portion of their profits to the state, and Van Amburg said the Pascua Yaqui Tribe has given more than $20 million in revenue during the life of the compact.

"If there is a determination that this is illegal, and it's being allowed, the tribes could suspend making those payments," Van Amburg said. "That's a huge amount of money. It just seems to me that the state would be interested in taking steps to make sure this doesn't happen."