Changing Fortunes Foxwoods’ success translates to wealth for tiny Connecticut tribe

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SPECIAL REPORT PART THREE

A four-hour bus ride behind them, longtime friends Mary Joyce and Virginia Jennings gingerly stepped into the vast parking lot of the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Ledyard, Conn., ready for action.

Armed with their Wampum Club cards – the official Foxwoods currency – the middle-aged pair from Portland has been frequenting the casino, owned and operated by the tiny Mashantucket Pequot Indian Nation, a few times a year since its opening a decade ago.

Although they’ve seen it many times, Joyce, a hairdresser, and Jennings, a waitress, still can’t help but take a quick glance up from their respective reading and knitting when the bus rounds a bend and the massive resort looms high in what once was a distant cornfield.

“Oh, my God,” utters one wide-eyed newcomer at the back of the bus, which on a recent Monday morning predictably was packed with senior citizens, most of whom had boarded at 7 a.m. at a parking lot in Portland’s West End.

Their traditional bus trips – and the fun of watching first-timers’ eyes bulge at the resort’s grandiosity – could end abruptly, the women said, if voters approve a plan by the Penobscot Nation and Passamaquoddy Tribe to build a $650 million casino in southern Maine. The most likely destination is Sanford, a struggling industrial town just 30 minutes south of Portland.

“I’d rather be putting money into the state of Maine than the state of Connecticut,” said Joyce, adding that the tribes could count on her vote in the November referendum in which Mainers are set to decide the issue.

Joyce, who spent part of the bus ride playing a handheld video poker game, scoffed at what she called the hypocrisy of the state leaders opposed to the project.

“They’re already in the business,” she said, citing the millions Mainers spend every year on state-run games including Pick 3, Pick 4, Megabucks, Cash Lotto and scratch tickets. “People are going to gamble. Why not get more out of it?”

Connecticut, home to Foxwoods and its nearby rival, Mohegan Sun, is poised to receive $400 million this year from the two casinos, both of which are among the world’s largest. In an agreement with the tribes, Connecticut receives 25 percent of the casinos’ revenues from slot machines.

Under a similar arrangement proposed by the architects of the Maine plan, the state would receive 25 percent, or about $100 million annually, according to estimates provided by casino supporters. The Maine casino would be roughly half the size of Foxwoods, which boasts nearly 6,500 slot machines and more than 1,400 hotel rooms.Based on the projected revenue, it would take just five years for a Maine casino to equal the Maine State Lottery’s contribution to the state’s general fund over 25 years.

Opponents argue that despite the prospect of “easy money,” it never could offset the potential social and financial impacts of a casino. Critics predict the proliferation of problem gamblers, bankruptcies, loan sharks and pawnshops should a casino open in Maine.

“The bottom line is it’s not worth it,” says state Sen. Ethan Strimling, a Portland Democrat and social worker opposed to the project. “It’s just another tax on the poor and there are enough poor people in Maine already.”

Rags to riches

Among the poorest are the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes, both of which lag far behind state averages in per capita income, educational attainment and just about every other poverty indicator recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Tom Tureen, the high-profile Portland attorney representing the Maine tribes in their casino effort, remembers well when Connecticut’s Pequots, whom he represented in the 1980s, also lived in poverty.

Not anymore.

On a recent afternoon, Tureen, sporting a gray scarf over his signature tweed jacket, quickly strode through the Pequots’ $200 million museum, the glass and steel tower of which can be seen from the casino.

While proceeds from the casino made the research center a reality, tribal members are quick to separate their history from the tribe’s massive moneymaking machine just a short shuttle bus ride away.

“This is who we are. That is what we own,” said Colin Ashman, a nephew of the late Pequot leader Elizabeth George, upon the suggestion that the museum was a part of the casino.

In the museum’s lobby, schoolchildren milled about while a Discovery Channel crew, preparing for an upcoming documentary on submarines, filmed the two massive canoes in which sit about two dozen eerily lifelike replicas of early Pequots.

The wooden dugouts are an impressive but tiny fraction of the repository filled with elaborate dioramas of early Pequot life.

But it was one simple photograph in the museum that grabbed Tureen’s attention.

“I remember going there,” he said, adjusting his glasses and coming to an abrupt stop in front of the photograph of a rather shoddy-looking white-and-blue trailer that once served as the Pequots’ tribal offices.

It was there where Tureen, in 1975, first met with tribal leaders in their effort to gain much-coveted federal recognition and reclaim thousands of acres in southeastern Connecticut. In 1983, Congress approved the tribe’s application, and a few years later, Tureen worked with the tribe for the right to build what became Foxwoods, now a $1 billion operation.

Tureen, 59, in Ledyard recently to meet with Pequot Tribal Council Chairman Michael Thomas, remains an adviser to Foxwoods to this day.

The tribes he has counseled have made Tureen a wealthy man, and he, most notably in the Pequot’s case, has made them even wealthier.

In Maine, Tureen made a name for himself in the landmark Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1980, which netted the tribes $81.5 million in federal money, the majority of which was used to buy more than 300,000 acres. Then a driven young lawyer out for justice, Tureen didn’t make a penny beyond his $31,500 salary.

After the settlement, however, Tureen advised Indian tribes from New England to Arizona, including the Penobscots and Passamaquoddys, on business deals, land claims and casino gambling. His work helped tribes make hundreds of millions of dollars, and made him a rich man.

Tureen stands to make more money should a casino be built in Maine, but he insists his main motivation is to help Maine and its once-forgotten Indian tribes. A casino could earn more than $100 million a year for the state and $50 million annually for the tribes, while creating close to 10,000 jobs and a $150 million payroll, he said.

“There is no panacea, but it’s the biggest, most important opportunity the tribes have had in 30 years,” Tureen said during his whirlwind tour of the museum with a reporter.

Hit-and-miss

While Tureen may be confident in the wisdom of the casino, the tribes’ business acumen, at times under his guidance, has been hit-and-miss.

“Not everything can work,” Tureen simply said of the Penobscots’ failed investment in Schiavi Homes, a modular home company that went bankrupt in 1989 and took $1.2 million of the tribe’s money with it.

Tureen was quick to point out that the previous year, the Passamaquoddy Tribe made a $60 million profit on the sale of Dragon Products, a cement plant in Thomaston.

But some tribal members are slow to forgive what they perceive as the failure to achieve sovereignty and financial independence through their land claims settlement with the state. More than two decades later, the mention of Tureen, the deal’s architect, still draws sneers from a few.

“The ones who made the money weren’t us,” said Francis Mitchell, a former Penobscot Nation governor who fired Tureen in 1989 as the tribe’s financial adviser in a cost-cutting move. “It was him.”

Indeed, Tureen lives in relative luxury, most recently in a $5.6 million mansion in Falmouth Foreside, one of Portland’s poshest suburbs. He and his wife of 35 years have a cottage on Whitehead Island in the Bay of Fundy. He owns a 35-foot sailboat that he moors in Falmouth.

Penobscot Indians get between $250 and $400 a year from a trust fund set up by the settlement, according to Dan Nelson, the tribe’s financial director. The Passamaquoddys, who have two reservations in Washington County, receive a similar amount, tribal members said. In contrast, the Pequots are able to pay an unspecified amount – rumored to be in the tens of thousands of dollars – to each of their 677 members annually. Because of its sovereign status, the tribe does not have to disclose how it uses casino revenues.

But Census figures suggest the casino has made a difference, helping to double the per capita income of the 280 Pequots on the reservation in the past decade to more than $27,000.

Some additional benefits, which include college scholarships and homeownership loan guarantees, further illustrate the differences between the Pequots and the Maine tribes, which together have about 4,000 members.

“The Pequots sent their drum group to Russia,” Penobscot Chief Barry Dana said in a recent interview. “We sent ours to Orono.”

Tureen often estimates the economic impact of a southern Maine casino eventually would equal about half that of Foxwoods.

But in crafting the Maine agreement, Tureen said he used lessons he learned from the Foxwoods deal, which critics say shortchanges host communities.

A 2001 report estimated that being host to Foxwoods cost the town of Ledyard, Conn., population 15,000, about $2.2 million, mostly in road improvements and increased police protection. That year, the town received only $689,000 in a predetermined revenue-sharing formula and nothing in property taxes from the tax-exempt Indian nation.Under the Maine legislation, a southern Maine casino – unlike Foxwoods – would be subject to local property taxes, estimated to exceed $5 million a year in Sanford, Tureen said.

Three’s a crowd?

The prospect of a Maine casino hasn’t flustered the powers that be at Foxwoods, which saw its revenue increase despite the opening of Mohegan Sun just a few miles away.

“We have a great deal of faith in the strength and depth of the market,” said Foxwoods spokesman Bruce MacDonald. “Any competitor is going to have to meet a high threshold if they want to be in the ring with us.”

As evidenced by his personal investment of nearly $70,000 in the pro-casino effort thus far, Tureen also has faith in the New England market, which despite its concentration of population has just two – albeit some of the world’s largest – casinos.

Tureen estimated that, like Foxwoods, 80 percent of a Maine casino’s customers would be from out of state, with many coming from the Boston metropolitan area.

Opponents and some industry analysts have warned, however, that despite the market’s strength, similar efforts to open a casino in Massachusetts, if successful, could have a huge impact on a more isolated competitor in Maine dependent on the Boston market.

“There’s definitely a lot of demand, but there’s also a limit,” said Dave Schwartz of the Gaming Studies Research Center in Las Vegas.

Inside the extravagant Foxwoods Resort – set to undergo a $99 million expansion this summer – limit isn’t a word often heard.

But like the majority of those on the bus to Foxwoods, 63-year-old Pat Roberts of South Portland said she always sets a spending limit for herself when she and her husband make the trip, which runs daily.

On this day, the couple, traveling with their 42-year-old daughter, Judy Hill of South Portland, said that they – again like most of their traveling companions – would vote for a Maine casino come November.

Seated amid a sea of blinking slot machines in one of Foxwoods’ five casinos, Roberts said her support for the Maine project wasn’t likely to depend on the political debate sure to come in the months before the vote. Instead, her vote would hinge on the opportunity to enjoy one of her favorite activities closer to home.

“If I win, I win. If I lose, I lose,” said Roberts, explaining her thoughts on gambling while briefly breaking her eyes away from Money Storm, the name of her slot machine of choice for the moment. “I don’t think about it. I just play for the fun.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Tomorrow: High stakes investment