April 09, 2025
Thom Carroll/for PhillyVoice
A man bought nearly 400 chips that were used by the Playboy Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City before it shuttered in 1984.
A man who hoped to redeem $59,500 in chips from the former Playboy Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City — which shuttered in 1984 — will not be able to cash in on the haul he purchased in an online auction three years ago, a New Jersey appellate court ruled this month.
Keith Hawkins bought nearly 400 chips that were once used by the boardwalk casino, one of four Playboy-branded casinos Hugh Hefner once operated to build off his media empire. The location in Atlantic City lasted just three years before it was sold, and the casino transferred the value of its chips to New Jersey's Unclaimed Property Administration to allow people to redeem their remaining chips in cash.
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When Hawkins tried to cash in his chips in 2023, UPA rejected his claim because the gaming chips had not been issued to him by the casino. Hawkins' purchase of the chips triggered an investigation by New Jersey State Police, who learned that the casino's owners had hired a company to destroy the unissued chips after the venue and its successors closed, NJ.com reported.
State police determined that several boxes of the chips — which feature the Playboy bunny and various models on different denominations — were stolen by a former casino employee around 1990. The employee put the chips in a safe deposit box, where they remained until the bank drilled them out in 2010. Since the former employee had declared bankruptcy, the chips were later confiscated and eventually sent to an auction house in 2022.
Hawkins told UPA and state police that he did not know the origin of the chips he purchased. When UPA initially denied his effort to cash them, the agency cited a 1991 court ruling that found cash could only be given for unredeemed chips that were issued during normal casino operations.
In his appeal, Hawkins argued UPA's decision was arbitrary and lacked supporting evidence to reject the validity of his chips. The two-judge panel handling his appeal found that UPA correctly followed the law, noting in the ruling that the chips were meant to have been destroyed.
The chips Hawkins bought are not the only chips that survived the closing of the Playboy Hotel & Casino. Thousands were found buried under a concrete slab in Mississippi in 2008, when construction crews were preparing a site to build a community center. The land was formerly owned by Green Duck Corp., a company that once manufactured slot machine tokens and provided the service of destroying gaming chips. The discovery led to a flood of Playboy chips hitting online auction sites like eBay, where the value of the collectibles plummeted.
At the time of the find in Mississippi, Green Duck Corp. had already gone out of business and its former owner denied any involvement in stashing the gaming chips.
One month after Hawkins tried to redeem his collection of chips in 2023, the New Jersey Casino Control Commission closed an $875,000 account that had been set up for gamblers and former employees to redeem their chips from the Playboy casino and its renamed successors, the Atlantis Casino Hotel and Elsinore's Atlantic.
Chris Rebuck, the former director of the New Jersey Division of Gaming, said the account was closed to prevent fraudulent claims — especially after the Mississippi trove was discovered. The state confirmed that the former casino owners had contracted a company to destroy the chips, and the owners had been required to deposit $875,000 with the state treasury for redemption of eligible chips.
"At this time, any such chips are most likely to have been obtained by gift, inheritance, or sale from the secondary market," Rebuck said when the account was closed.
The three casino brands all folded by 1989, and the property was purchased by Donald Trump and turned into the Trump Regency Hotel. It later became the Trump's World Fair, part of the Trump Plaza, before shuttering in 1999. The building was demolished the following year. Trump sold his last remaining Atlantic City casino, the Trump Taj Mahal, shortly after beginning his first presidential term in 2017. That property is now the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Atlantic City.
Playboy once had casinos in Atlantic City, Las Vegas, London and the Bahamas that have all since closed. Some of the rarer, collectible Playboy casino chip are listed on eBay for hundreds of dollars.
