Remote N.Y. casino faces challenges

Special Report Part One

HOGANSBURG, N.Y. – This is no Las Vegas strip.

There are no roller coasters or giant replicas of the Eiffel Tower along New York State Route 37, which skirts this border town in the heart of the St. Regis Mohawk reservation, home to the Akwesasne Mohawk Casino.

Instead, the mile-long stretch of highway – four long hours north of Syracuse – is lined with tax-free cigarette stores, gas stations and the Bears Den restaurant, a popular eatery on the isolated reservation just across the border from Cornwall, Ontario.

While a southern Maine casino might prove a boon to the tribes and the state, the experience of this upstate New York tribe suggests that a satellite in an isolated place such as Calais would do little more than provide employment for jobless Passamaquoddys and their neighbors in Washington County.

St. Regis Mohawk Chief Alma Ransom said she isn’t pinning her tribe’s future on its 4-year-old casino.

“It certainly hasn’t been the answer to everything, but we’re surviving,” Ransom said of the unassuming $30 million facility, which she guardedly described as “holding its own.”

Major newspapers in the area instead use words such as “failing” and “struggling” to describe the casino, which, set back from the highway, easily could be mistaken for a modern high school if not for the roadside sign.

The Mohawk casino is not an anomaly. Rural tribes – including some of the nation’s largest in otherwise sparsely populated sections of the Midwest – rarely see big returns from their gaming operations.

Inside on a recent weekday afternoon, a smattering of mostly middle-aged men methodically taps blinking buttons as they stare at video poker and slot machines. Just a few feet away, country singer Conway Twitty’s 1965 red Ford Mustang convertible – the casino’s latest giveaway – sits atop a pedestal near the blackjack tables.

Although the casino might not be pumping truckloads of cash into tribal coffers, Ransom said it is providing much-needed paychecks to 450 people, about half of whom are tribal members.

“That’s where the rubber hits the road,” said Ransom, who has led the 10,000-member tribe for six years.

Ransom remembers when there was a lot more Canadian rubber on the two-lane road that skirts the tribe’s remote, 40-square-mile reservation along the St. Lawrence River.

Before the 1988 federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which set the ground rules for Indian casinos, the St. Regis Mohawks operated what now would be considered an illegal casino on their New York reservation, Ransom said.

At that time, gamblers from Montreal and Ottawa, both about an hour away, flocked to the converted bingo hall for its mechanical slot machines, now outlawed in New York in favor of electronic versions.

“I could walk faster than the cars could move,” Ransom said of the Canadian traffic, which slowed to a trickle a few years ago with the opening of casinos in Montreal and Ottawa, both of which offer the more popular mechanical slots.

Now at a competitive disadvantage after being cut off from their two biggest markets, the St. Regis Mohawks are looking south for financial salvation to the once-thriving resort town of Thompson, N.Y., in the Catskills, just an hour from New York City and 20 million people.

There, on 66 acres at Kutsher’s Resort Hotel and Country Club, the tribe hopes to build the $500 million Mohawk Mountain Casino Resort, artists’ renderings of which are displayed prominently in the lobby of the tribal offices.

The St. Regis Mohawks are one of three tribes planning a Catskills casino, potential revenues from which have piqued the interest of state leaders.

Earlier this month, Gov. George Pataki, facing a $11.5 billion budget shortfall, signed a tentative $100 million deal with the St. Regis Mohawks to end their land claim dispute, equalize sale prices at reservation stores with nearby competitors and allow a Mohawk casino in the Catskills.

No one is banking on a return more than the St. Regis Mohawk tribe.

“No one’s getting rich now,” Jennifer Jock, the tribe’s public relations director, said of the need for the Catskills project, which has yet to gain the needed federal approval. “That would make a difference.”