How the Sun rose and set as the watchdog newspaper for Atlantic City’s gambling scene

In November 1976, Geoffrey Douglas was a 20-something reporter for the Bristol Press, a Connecticut daily, and a freelance writer for magazines, when he stumbled across the story of a lifetime.

The people of New Jersey, who had soundly rejected casinos just a few years earlier with a resounding “No Dice,” had now changed their minds and voted in favor of them.

Douglas would go on to bet his career on documenting Atlantic City, the first East Coast town to permit gambling — and lose, in some ways at least.

In a 1977 New Jersey Magazine article, “The Selling of Casino Gambling,” he prophesied: “the casinos were coming, and the long empty winters were over, and the lights would flash again on the boardwalk after dark, and the hookers would once more be clean and classy, and the dollars would flood the city like rain after drought.”

Yet plenty remained uncertain.

“[The people of Atlantic City] cannot know for instance who will be there to stop the cheaters from cheating or to keep the mob at a distance,” he wrote.

Entranced by this mix of glitz and danger, just like Harry Hopper, the protagonist of his new novel Love in A Dark Place, Douglas moved to Atlantic City, perhaps to answer his own question. It was he who would try to stop the cheaters and keep the mob at a distance, as the publisher of the Sun, a watchdog newspaper he launched.

On Sept. 6, 1978, five months after the first casino, Resorts International, opened, the Sun’s first weekly issue debuted. Like Hopper, an Atlantic City beat reporter, Douglas was an idealist with good intentions, but “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said.

He knew nothing about advertising or circulation; a veteran circulation and advertising person warned him not to publish some of his exposés.

Douglas didn’t listen.

“I was operating against myself,” he said. Consequently, the casinos wouldn’t buy advertisements. “It was a tough road,” he added, referring to what seemed to him like an unholy nexus between the casinos, the mob, and politicians.

But the Sun’s stories went on to win a slew of Headliner awards, and “got a casino construction project shut down,” said Douglas.

But, he said, “we made a lot of enemies.”

One night in 1983, for instance, something hit the window while he was working late in the office.

“It was thrown from a car; [it] made a big noise.” Douglas hit the floor under his desk. “I was scared s— less,” he said.

Seven years and 350+ issues into his career as publisher, he received an even more definite threat.

At 11 p.m. on June 1, 1985, the paper’s ad director called him and said, “The Sun’s on fire.” It was a Saturday night and no one was in the office. Douglas was in Connecticut visiting his 5-year-old son.

The newspaper office was still burning when he got to Atlantic City at 3 a.m. The fire inspector ruled it arson, but there were no arrests.

The next day, the staff set up a makeshift newsroom on the pool tables of a nearby American Legion hall. A lot of advertisers pitched in. The casinos abstained. Four days later, the Sun put out a slim issue.

“We had insurance so we came back,” Douglas recalled.

But by the late 1980s, he had had enough — a combination of being weighed down covering the city’s dark activities and being exhausted by the uphill fight of running the paper, he said.

In 1987, he sold the paper for a fraction of what it was worth and walked away.

He calls it a sad ending: “Eight years of fighting, pervasive ugliness, my own foolhardiness. I was drinking too much.”

The way he sees it today, “Everybody lost.”

In 1990, Douglas moved in with his girlfriend in Vermont. Sitting in a room above her garage, he wrote a novel about a reporter irresistibly drawn to a “dying backwater city nobody cared about, between Philly and New York City,” where casinos went up, “and mob families from New York and Philly fought over it.” Amid this, a reporter falls deeply in love with a sex worker.

Douglas called the novel Features by Harry. When it didn’t sell, his agent convinced him to write a memoir instead.

The result was Class: The Wreckage of an American Family (1992), telling the ill-fated story of his socialite mother and stockbroker father who self-destructed after his birth. His mother died by suicide and his father, from complications related to alcoholism, leaving Douglas orphaned by the age of 18.

Five nonfiction books later — including 2008’s The Classmates: Privilege, Chaos, and the End of an Era, a forensic examination of some of his prep school classmates, which included the former presidential candidate John Kerry — Douglas opened a drawer and pulled out his abandoned novel. He had been laid off from his part-time teaching position at the University of Massachusetts Lowell because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the manuscript, he rediscovered the tale of a 30-year-old newspaperman contaminated by his own anger in Atlantic City. He hired an editor and together they overhauled the “lousy tale,” building in more dimensions and plot twists.

That book, Love in A Dark Place, is a protracted love story between Harry (a beat reporter) and Anne (a local high-end sex worker). The narrative toggles between scenes set in 2017 in a rural Massachusetts town, and the Atlantic City of the early 1980s.

Douglas renders the latter’s newspaper offices, freshly built condos, smoky bars, green-felted blackjack tables, dance halls, and boxing gyms so vividly that the city becomes the third partner in this star-crossed throuple.

Donald Trump makes several cameo appearances in the book that has none of the makings of a typical beach read: no cozy communities, the lovers are in desperate need of therapy, there is nothing lighthearted or whimsical.

But 35+ years after he drove away from New Jersey, Douglas has capitalized on his losses. As the mob boss of his own literary creation, he finally gets to pull the strings to tell a good story.