Indians join with lawyer, chief on deal Group, developer to share profits from proposed casino

BOSTON – If Maine Indians get the go-ahead to build a resort-casino in southern Maine, an undisclosed portion of the proceeds will go to a partnership between longtime Indian lawyer and adviser Tom Tureen and former Penobscot Gov. Tim Love, a published report said.

A partnership called Nedeebh, the word for “friend” in Passamaquoddy and Penobscot, will join the two tribes and casino developer Marnell Carrao in sharing profits from the $650 million casino, according to a copyrighted story in Sunday’s Boston Globe magazine.

In the article, Tureen did not disclose details of Nedeebh’s deal with the tribes, but said, “I can tell you that the Maine Indians will get the lion’s share of the benefits.”

Marnell will collect a portion of the revenues, but how much is confidential, parties to the deal say.

Tureen has a relationship with Maine Indians that dates back decades. He represented the Indians in a land claim suit that resulted in an $81.5 million settlement, signed by President Carter in 1980.

Tureen put $270,000 of his own money into the casino campaign, and has been reimbursed by Marnell, according to the magazine report.

While not disclosing his share of the casino proceeds, Tureen said he has a large personal stake in the outcome of the casino vote: winning justice for the Penobscots and the Passamaquoddys.

“This would close the loop on the whole process,” he said, “because [the right to open a casino] was the one thing that the Maine tribes didn’t get out of the settlement.”

Meanwhile, a lawyer and law professor, hired by Portland newspapers to legally analyze the casino proposal, said it is no model of regulatory perfection as its supporters insist, nor is it filled with loopholes as claimed by casino opponents.

“The document does not to my way of thinking have the hallmarks of internal consistency and clarity you might hope for in something like this,” Gerald Petruccelli, an expert in corporate law, told the Maine Sunday Telegram and Portland Press Herald.

In terms of regulation, the bill breaks from standard practices and allows the self-appointed regulator to define the regulations.

“You don’t usually ask the paper company to write up a set of good paper-company regulations and appoint executives at the paper company to enforce them,” Petruccelli said.

If passed, the law cannot be changed for 20 years without the consent of those who wrote it, Petruccelli said. And any legal challenges would have to be interpreted in favor of gaming by the tribes, he said.

Petruccelli disagrees with opponents who say the casino will be exempt from all state regulations and laws except those spelled out in the proposed legislation.

The analysis says the state has jurisdiction to enforce all of Maine’s criminal laws, except for gambling laws. A provision concerning tribal exemption from federal income taxes is unclear, it says.