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SPOILS: Foxwoods Casino’s
moneymakers.
Mario Tama/Getty Images |
How did a defunct band
of American Indians resurrect itself into a 600-member
tribal nation boasting a billion-dollar business? Political
machinations and pit-bull lawyers played a big part.
So did guilt, guts and greed, as Brett Duval Fromson
reveals in Hitting the Jackpot: The Inside Story
of the Richest Indian Tribe in History (Atlantic
Monthly Press, 2003).
Fromson, ’76, used to cover Wall Street for the
Washington Post. Not surprisingly, he takes
a businesslike approach investigating the maneuvers
that created the Mashantucket Pequots and the world’s
biggest casino. It’s blockbuster journalism with
a soulful undercurrent. Foxwoods began with one man’s
wild dream for a better life. There were grim side effects
when it came true.
Richard “Skip” Hayward was the man who
“imagined the tribe before it existed,”
in the words of one lawyer. Of course the Pequots existed
long ago, until British troops massacred most of them
in 1637. Colonial authorities granted land to the survivors,
but centuries of intermarriage obliterated the Pequot
line. By the mid-20th century, just one descendant—Hayward’s
grand-mother, Eliza George—occupied the Ledyard,
Conn., reservation. Fromson tells us she was one-eighth
Pequot.
For years the old woman had vainly tried to get her
immediate family to live on the reservation, while banning
the African-American branch created by her sister’s
marriage and her own liaisons. Months after George died
in 1973, Hayward’s sister did move her trailer
there. But developments on other fronts soon sparked
her brother’s bolder imagination.
At the time, the U.S. government was renouncing its
assimilationist policy toward Native Americans and opening
its coffers to help tribal development. A new breed
of activist civil servants and legal-aid lawyers, eager
to right historic wrongs, began seeking out any possible
beneficiaries.
In Connecticut, they found Skip Hayward and ran into
giant obstacles. Government aid was meant for functioning
tribes recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Hayward
wanted funds only for his family. He could barely claim
Native American blood, let alone a tribe.
Armed with three years of research and candid interviews,
Fromson marches readers through wheeling and dealing
that spanned decades. First, Hayward formed his family
into a corporation. Then his lawyers figured out how
to sidestep BIA scrutiny. In 1976, the Pequots got state
recognition, unlocking generous federal housing loans
and funds for business ventures from hydroponic lettuce
to a pizza restaurant. All of them flopped. But after
fierce lobbying, Congress formally recognized the tribe
in 1983. That entitled the Pequots to a bingo operation
and eventually to the really big plum. Foxwoods Casino
opened in 1992. It was grossing a billion dollars annually
within six years.
The legal, political and financial shenanigans behind
the rags-to-riches metamor-phosis of the Pequots makes
an exhilarating read. But the way money poisoned a community
will haunt readers longer.
By 1992, the tribe had swelled to hundreds, as a sizable
African-American contingent came forward. The Haywards
still ran the tribal council and rewarded themselves
disproportionately. Even so, new members got annual
payouts of at least $50,000 plus generous salaries if
they took jobs in the bloated tribal bureaucracy. (At
one point more than 1,000 employees, many refusing to
lift a finger, served 372 tribal members.)
Fromson cites breathtaking excesses—teenagers
blowing $100,000 a year on drugs and BMWs; council members
taking six-figure junkets; Hayward spending $225 million
on a museum to invent Pequot culture and running a billion-dollar
deficit.
Racial tensions and social problems mounted, with rampant
drug abuse and violence. Money alone had created the
tribe, and money tore it apart. In 1998, Hayward was
ousted as president.
Fromson notes the irony of people achieving the American
dream by becoming American Indians. But the Pequot dream
seems more like an American tragedy.
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