Donald Craig Mitchell - Wampum: How Indian Tribes, the Mafia, and an Inattentive Congress Invented Indian Gaming and Created a $28 Billion Gambling Empire

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Copyright 2016 by Donald Craig Mitchell

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ISBN: 978-1-4683-1335-2

DONALD CRAIG MITCHELL is an attorney and nationally recognized expert on Indian law and history. The author of Sold American: The Story of Alaska Natives and Their Land and Take My Land Take My Life: The Story of Congresss Historic Settlement of Alaska Native Land Claims, he lives in Anchorage, Alaska.

Jacket design: Anthony Morais

Cover photograph: antonel tudor / Alamy Stock Photo

Author photo by: Judy Patrick

Printed in the United States Copyright 2016 The Overlook Press

THE OVERLOOK PRESS

NEW YORK, NY

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Sold American:

The Story of Alaska Natives and Their Land, 1867-1959 (1997 and 2003)

Take My Land Take My Life:

The Story of Congresss Historic Settlement of Alaska Native Land Claims, 1960-1971 (2001)

For Myles Anderberg and Osley Saunooke

DONALD CRAIG MITCHELL

WAMPUM

HOW INDIAN TRIBES, THE MAFIA, AND AN INATTENTIVE CONGRESS INVENTED INDIAN GAMING AND CREATED A $28 BILLION GAMBLING EMPIRE

With 9 color and 9 black and white photographs

I n 2015, 239 Indian tribes operated 478 casinos, highstakes bingo halls, and other gambling facilities on Indian reservations in 28 states that collectively earned $28.5 billion in gross gaming revenue. How did Indian gaming become such a lucrative and commonplace fixture of the American landscape? In Wampum, Donald Craig Mitchell tells the never-before-told story.

In 1979, the Mafia opened the nations first high-stakes Indian bingo hall on the Seminole reservation in Florida. Nine years later, Indian tribes were operating bingo halls on reservations in 23 states. Congress enacted the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act to subject gambling on reservations to regulation by the federal government and the states in which the reservations were located. But, while members of Congress who voted for the bill didnt intend for it to do so, the act facilitated the transformation of Indian bingo halls into what they are todayLas Vegas-style casinos whose gaming floors contain more than 352,000 video slot and other gaming machines.

On Capitol Hill, Donald Craig Mitchell is a recognized expert on Indian law and history, and the only researcher who had early access to the records of the committees whose members and staffs wrote the bills that became the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. In Wampum, he offers readers the first comprehensive look at the forces in Congress and inside the Bureau of Indian Affairs that have created the Indian gaming industry.

anybody else. Theyve shown that if they have the opportunity to make a buck, theyll act on it.

D ISTRICT J UDGE L AUGHLIN W ATERS

O N F EBRUARY 8, 2007 THE BUXOM TABLOID CELEBRITY A NNA N ICOLE Smith died of a prescription drug overdose in her suite on the sixth floor of Anna Nicoles favorite venue: the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida.

A twenty-minute drive west from Fort Lauderdale, the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, which opened in 2004, is bounded on the east by Route 441, a stop-and-go commuter artery lined with used car lots, fast food restaurants, X-rated video stores, and pawn shops, and on the west by the Florida Turnpike.

The twelve-story hotel commands the skyline. On the west side of the hotel is a faux-Polynesian swimming lagoon. On the east side is an open-air shopping mall. Between the two, the casino is the anchor.

When Anna Nicole died the casinos gaming floor was jammed with rows of video gaming machines whose software had been programmed to allow players to play bingo, but whose blinking lights and beeping sound effects fostered the illusion that the bingo machines were video slot machines. Today, the fake slot machines are gone, having been replaced with more than 2,200 real ones, as well as with blackjack and baccarat tables.

In keeping with the Hard Rock motif, the casinos walls are covered with rock-and-roll memorabilia ranging from guitars once used by Duff McKagan of Guns N Roses and Richie Sambora of Bon Jovi to three jackets with modish purple collars that Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page wore onstage when they played with the Yardbirds.

What is a sprawling Las Vegasstyle casino complex doing in the midst of the working-class detritus of suburban south Florida? The answer is posted on a sign on the shoulder of the Florida Turnpike west of the hotel that notifies southbound drivers they are: Entering Seminole Indian Reservation.

William Howard Taft signed an executive order that withdrew 480 acres of federal land west of Fort Lauderdale as a reservation for the Seminole Indians in southern Florida. At the time, the reservation was part of the Everglades, a saw-grass swamp whose only dry ground was a hammock known as Big City Island. The reservation also was deserted, since the fewer than four hundred Seminoles in Florida lived deeper in the Everglades or near Miami, where they wrestled alligators for tourists and sold handicrafts. But by 1927, the New River Canal, which Florida governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward had begun dredging in 1906, had dried out the swamp around Big City Island.

Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) constructed an administration building and a schoolhouse on the reservation, as well as a row of cottages into which Ivy Stranahan, the chairwoman of the Seminole Indian Committee of the Florida Federation of Womens Clubs, whose husband operated a trading post at Fort Lauderdale that Seminole alligator hunters frequented, persuaded three Seminole families to move.

Today, several hundred descendants of the Seminoles who lived in Florida in 1911 live on the Hollywood Reservation in a single-family housing tract across the street from the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino and directly south of the tribal headquarters, a gated and guarded office building that has a helicopter pad on the roof.

Most other members of the 4,000-member Seminole Tribe live on the bucolic Big Cypress Reservation in the Everglades west of Hollywood and on the Brighton Reservation west of Lake Okeechobee. At Brighton, the tribe operates a casino, as it does on small parcels of land in Immokalee, Coconut Creek, and Tampa. Like the hotel and casino on the Hollywood Reservation, the hotel and casino in Tampa is a Hard Rock.

Only the Seminole Tribe and the National Indian Gaming Commission, the federal agency Congress created in 1988, know how much money the tribe now earns annually from its video slot machines and card games. for $965 million and which operates restaurants, hotels, and casinos in sixty countries.