Adele Belizaire, 54, was arrested early Wednesday morning after allegedly calling in the bomb threat to the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Tampa from her Clearwater Beach motel room hours earlier. Since Belizaire’s phone number was on file as a member of the casino’s player’s club, police were easily able to identify her and track her down. Belizaire said “I left a bomb in your casino” during the call, made about 90 minutes after she left the casino on Tuesday night, according to a police report.
Casino authorities quickly contacted police after the call, who were then able to ping Belizaire’s phone and locate it at the motel. She was confronted by officers at around 4 a.m. and informed them that she “became upset” after losing the money, explaining that she “has anger issues” and only wanted to make the threat to “blow off steam.” The police report notes that Belizaire has two “active non-extraditable warrants for terroristic ‘bomb threats.’”
“When Adele Belizaire lost $380 in the slot machines at Seminole Hard Rock Casino this week, she got mad,” the Clearwater Police Department said Thursday in a statement. “After the Spring Hill woman got back to her hotel room on Clearwater Beach, her self-admitted anger issues got the best of her. At about 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, she placed a call from her cell phone to the casino and said she had left a bomb there.”
“The police department from the casino contacted us, and we worked with them to identify Belizaire and confirm where she was staying,” the statement continued. “She was subsequently arrested early Wednesday and booked in to the Pinellas County Jail on a charge of making a false report about planting a bomb, explosive or weapon of mass destruction. She said she just wanted to ‘blow off steam’ by making the threat and didn’t have the ability to place a bomb there. She remains in jail this morning.”
Newsweek reached out to Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino for comment.
A similar threat to bomb a casino was allegedly made in 2017 by a Ferndale, Washington man who had lost money playing slot machines, according to The Bellingham Herald. Shane Patrick Clark, then 45, reportedly warned casino workers that he could “blow your (expletive) building up” in a voicemail before he was identified and arrested based on his player’s club-linked phone number.
A bomb threat made by a disgruntled gambler to Harvey’s Resort Hotel and Casino in Stateline, Nevada in 1980 turned out to be the real thing. At least 600 pounds of dynamite blew a massive 50 by 30 foot crater through five floors of the resort after a demand for $3 million in cash was not paid to bomber John Birges, who later testified at his trial that he had lost $750,000 gambling.
