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The first is on the north side of the city of ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½. There, in a back room, according to federal bribery indictments, its owner handed small amounts of cash out to various aldermen. A thousand here, two thousand there. Former aldermen Jeffrey Boyd and John Collins-Muhammad and former Board of Aldermen President Lewis Reed have been charged with bribery for promising development favors for the gas station owner, in exchange for the cash. They have pleaded not guilty and resigned from their elected offices.

The other gas station is in rural Missouri. Actually, it’s dozens of gas stations, convenience stores and bars in cities and counties across the state. Inside they offer video gaming terminals. Several prosecuting attorneys in Missouri have echoed the words of Greene County Prosecutor Dan Patterson, who, after the Missouri State Highway Patrol seized some of the machines in a gas station, said in court documents that, “there is substantially more than a reasonable possibility that (the) machines are illegal gambling machines.�

Some prosecutors and various state lawmakers don’t believe state statute allows the machines. But they continue to operate. More companies are flooding the state with them.

One of the biggest operators of the machines, the ones Patterson is concerned with, is a company called Torch Electronics. Its owner, Steve Miltenberger, lives in Wildwood. Torch puts many of its machines in convenience stores owned by Warrenton Oil Co. The two companies both hired Steve Tilley, a former Missouri Speaker of the House, as their lobbyist.

On the same day that Reed, Boyd and Collins-Muhammad pleaded not guilty to bribery, Warrenton Oil gave a total of $90,000 to six different political action committees connected to Tilley. This is completely legal. Missouri has no campaign finance limits for committees that aren’t directly connected to an elected official.

A week earlier, Torch gave $240,000 to those same six committees. Based on historical practice, those six committees will then end up giving that money to various state lawmakers, sometimes passing through another committee or two on the way. Those lawmakers are the reason why the Missouri Legislature this year failed to pass a law making clear what the prosecutors have alleged: that the video machines belonging to Torch and other companies, are not legal.

“Currently, Missouri is the Wild West of illegal gaming devices,� state Sen. Denny Hoskins, R-Warrensburg, said last year. “Nobody knows if taxes are being paid, nobody knows what the payouts are and nobody knows if the consumer is protected.�

Torch and Warrenton Oil have defended their machines as being legal. The companies have filed lawsuits in Greene and Cole counties seeking to block investigations of their machines.

The dichotomy in the two situations, both playing out at gas stations, is stark.

Reed, Boyd and Collins-Muhammad, are all Black. They stand accused of taking a few thousand dollars in cash for government favors that were, mostly, not delivered.

Tilley, the owners of the companies he represents, and the majority of the lawmakers the committees connected to him are donating to, are white. They are playing in an area of campaign finance law that in Missouri has always been squishy. Millions of dollars are at stake. Last year, the two companies — Torch and Warrenton Oil — made about $350,000 in campaign donations to the various committees connected to Tilley.

When Tilley was the House speaker, he famously helped gut an ethics bill that, had it passed in the way its bipartisan committee wrote it, would have made it harder for lobbyists and corporations to obscure the original source of their campaign funds. Tilley left office with a campaign fund that was flush with cash, used it to create new political action committees, and then, as a lobbyist, used those committees to make sure that campaign donations go from his clients to the lawmakers who can help them.

This is the state of politics in Missouri.

If you’re a small-time operator taking cash in a back room at a gas station, you get charged with bribery, as you should.

Meanwhile, the big corporations operating video machines that the state patrol has determined are illegal, carry their bags of cash right out the front door.

The victim in both schemes is the same. Had the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ gas station owner received the tax abatement he wanted, thousands of dollars in taxes would have been drained from the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Public Schools. Last week, the director of the Missouri Lottery resigned, in part, she says, because the unregulated video machines are taking away resources from the Lottery, which is supposed to benefit public education.

Deep-pocketed campaign donors win. Schoolchildren lose. Justice awaits.