Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.

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Dan Casey

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In case you missed my colleague Jeff Sturgeon's story, a sharp operator from North Carolina was in the paper Sunday.

His name is Ronnie Bennett, and he made a novel argument. Boiled down, it goes like this:

Something may look like a duck, sound like a duck and walk like a duck. But using legal loopholes, Bennett can prove it is an opossum.

He wasn't talking about wild animals, of course.

It was about the entirely legal, all-checked out, "sweepstakes" he runs in a foodless, shabby, never-closed Internet cafe called Bennett's Internet in an old drugstore on Brambleton Avenue in Southwest Roanoke County.

Don't you dare call what happens there gambling, though.

It is a exactly like the promotional Monopoly game McDonald's runs once a year to boost burger sales, Bennett told me with a straight face Monday.

I will let you be the judge of that, based on what I have observed in three visits to Bennett's dirty, dingy, smoke-filled business:

Customers sit at rows of computer terminals continuously playing video slots, poker and keno games.

Their sad faces look like the kind you see at any horse-racing track at the beginning of any month, after the mailman has delivered the welfare and Social Security checks.

Bells ring for jackpots, and customers occasionally cheer when someone hits a big one.

After playing slot machine computer games, a smattering of customers cash out their winnings at the counter near the front exit.

As Bennett says, it is exactly like McDonald's.

He is not selling food, of course, he is "renting Internet time." And he is open 24 hours, and he runs his sweepstakes year round.

Just like McDonald's Monopoly game.

Those sweepstakes numbers? They are merely something he magnanimously gives away with the Internet time he sells.

And he has thoughtfully provided casino games on his computers for his customers to play to find if they have won any money in the "sweepstakes."

The customers don't even have to play those games to find out if they have won a sweepstakes. The croupier -- I mean the counterman -- will tell them instantly if they won.

An hour of time, which costs $6, comes with 600 electronic tickets in the sweepstakes.

And Bennett will give away for free a few sweepstakes numbers per day to any adult who walks in off the street, and they can play slot machine games with them. If they want a bunch more, they have to buy Internet time.

Just like they do at McDonald's. Right?

When we spoke Monday, Bennett wouldn't tell me how much he's taking in at his enterprise. It is not $10,000 a day, he told me, which is one of the rumors on the street. His revenue is none of my business, he added.

But, he claimed, he is paying out 95 percent of his "Internet time" revenue as "sweepstakes" winnings to customers.

Which, golly, is not at all like McDonald's.

But is just about what a Las Vegas slot machine pays.

He said he has no idea how many of his customers actually access the Internet, rather than play the casino games.

Bennett is not the only one in this business. A couple of other parlors operate in a similar fashion in North Roanoke County.

Bennett, of course, is the not the first sharp operator to hit this town with a talent for spotting legal loopholes and establishing eyebrow-raising "legitimate" businesses that cause others to wonder if something extralegal is going on.

Remember the seedy massage parlors (don't you dare call them fronts for prostitution) that came to Roanoke back in the 1970s?

They pioneered that game.

Eventually, public outrage and the authorities and the law caught up with those "businesses." They were run out of town in 1983.

Given all of the above, it is no wonder that the city of Roanoke already has run Bennett out of its jurisdiction.

Or that Salem officials warned him to stay out of their city.

The only question is, why is Roanoke County the only government in the valley that will put up with this hustle?