Clients profiled in the Plain Dealer

Plain Dealer reporter Robert Smith interviewed Jill Rizika and two Towards Employment workshops participants, Jasmyne Arnold and Daniel Marshall, for his article about prospective hiring at the Horseshoe Casino Cleveland:


Jasmyne Arnold was an honors student and a cheerleader at John F. Kennedy High School and, at age 23, she has lost none of her can-do spirit. But a winning smile does not impress employers without jobs to offer. After fruitless searches for work, she's eyeing a new game. A Public Square casino has struck her fancy.

"It sounds like a great opportunity," said Arnold, who ran a concession stand in the raucous din of Thistledown Race Track before being laid off. "I think I would be good at it because I like interacting with people. I thought Thistledown was fun."

"There's a lot of excitement and hope," said Jill Rizika, executive director of Towards Employment, a nonprofit job-training agency that specializes in hard-to-place workers. "People come in all the time and ask, 'What do I have to do?' " Rizika said.

Daniel Marshall reported last week to job training at Towards Employment wearing dress slacks, a crisp white shirt and a red striped tie. The trim and polite 35-year-old has experience working for restaurants, telemarketing and selling pots and pans door to door. "I'm not sure I'm a card dealer, but I've always considered myself a friendly, outgoing person," he said.

But his sunny disposition fights a blemish: felony convictions for drug possession and assault. Ohio's casino legislation expressly forbids anyone with a felony conviction from working as "casino gaming employees." Lacking a hotel, Horseshoe Casino Cleveland will be largely a gambling operation, Glover says.

Rizika of Towards Employment has drafted a letter to members of the fledgling Ohio Casino Control Commission, which will write more specific hiring rules, imploring them not to further limit the jobs allowed to ex-offenders. While they may not spin roulette wheels or count money, she said, ex-offenders could prepare food, serve drinks and park cars.

Marshall, who attends job-training classes daily, is keeping his hopes up. "They say success is when preparation meets opportunity," he said. "I'm going to be ready. Us ex-felons, we do have to prove ourselves. But all the preparation means nothing if no one gives us a chance."

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