Montana route operator Fred Collins passes
Pub Date: 2/1/2006
When the South Carolina video gambling market was shut down by court decision in 2000, Fred Collins Jr., whose Collins Entertainment Corp. at the time owned one in three of the state's machines, looked north to Montana, came in with a substantial bank account and acquired a half-dozen small to medium sized gaming machine vendor routes.
He died Jan. 22 in Greenville, S.C., after a year-long battle with liver cancer. He had three daughters and a son. One daughter, Felicia Collins Roberts, will reportedly continue to run the company.
At the time of his death, Collins Games of Montana was operating 694 machines and was the seventh largest route vendor, though it is believed that at one time, he may have been the third largest with near 1,000 machines.
Collins did attend a Gaming Industry Association of Montana Convention shortly after making his acquisitions, but was not seen in industry association circles since.
He gained some notoriety in his home state when he spent lavishly to successfully unseat then-Gov. David Beasly in the mid-1990s who had campaigned for outlawing video gaming.
In the month before his death, reported the Greenville News, he gave a $1.1 million gift to the Salvation Army's Kroc Center. He was raised in a Salvation Army orphanage after his parents divorced and his mother died.
He went on to build his own national company, starting out with a jukebox vending route.
Services and burial took place Jan. 26.