Any attorney practicing Indian Gaming Law has either received or knows a colleague who has received "The Phone Call." It usually goes something like this: "Let's find some Indians, create a tribe, and build a casino."
Those proposals are easy to walk away from because that's not how it works. Still those kinds of proposals surface on a regular basis, and some of them even gain some traction before falling apart.
A variation of this theme is shown in the recent notion of a Georgia developer proposing to move a small Oklahoma tribe to the Georgia Coast and establish a reservation (and casino, of course) on the lands occupied by the tribe's ancestors prior to the forced removal of tribes from the East Coast during the Andrew Jackson Administration. Apart from the absurdity of proposing to move an entire tribe across several states and assuming that the Department of the Interior will bless the entire deal, the proposed reservation area is nowhere near the lands adjudicated as having been historically occupied by that tribe's ancestors.
There are lots of somewhat nutty ideas out there, and most are relegated to the trash bins of federal agencies. And now we have what may be the wildest of all, only this time it involves a group claiming to constitute an Indian tribe convincing an entire town that it had sovereignty and the right to develop a casino on a crumbling resort property within the town.
The tribe is not recognized and was never even close to attaining that status. Moreover, it had no sovereign immunity from the local taxation of the resort property it purchased (with developers involved) but persuaded the town that it was not liable for those taxes. And its leader was a blond-headed, blue-eyed fellow who created a tribe after having been denied enrollment in several legitimate tribes. And the Middletown (NY) Times Herald-Record is reporting that in 2004, he pled guilty to filing falsified altered documents in an effort to validate his claims to Indian ancestry, citing both federal court pleadings and confirmation from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Yet, this fellow and his so-called "Western Mohegan Tribe" showed up in the Catskills of New York and purchased the formerly grand Tamarack Lodge in Ulster County near Ellenville with promises of restoration of the property and development of a casino operation that would generate an enormous economic boon to the whole area. They completely deceived the County as to the tax status of this "Indian-owned land" which of course was neither in trust nor reservation status. Over the past three years, the Western Mohegan group avoided paying some $240,000 in county real estate taxes, and the number goes up another $40,000 next month.
The property now will be sold at an Ulster sheriff's sale because of a $600,000 judgment against the group, bringing an end to the extraordinary fiction perpetrated for so many years by a fictional tribe and its leader who twice had pleaded guilty to fraud: once for using his son's credits cards and once for filing altered documents to prove that the Western Mohegan group was a legitimate Indian tribe.
This saga may not be over, for the tribal group has been quite litigious in the past. However, their legal claims to land and tribal status have been rejected, and they are running out of options. The Tamarack Resort will be sold and that proposal forever gone. Still, there are many in the local area who reportedly still believe that the Western Mohegans will prevail on all fronts and build the long-promised casino. They believe because they really, really, really want to think that the whole thing is real.
This is a sad story for a lot of people, but it is another example of bad behavior associated with unrealistic dreams of sharing in casino riches. The tragedy here is that the local citizens and government officials accepted representations they should have questioned, and both their hopes and local government treasuries have been devastated in the process. Sometimes, it really is cheaper to call a lawyer.
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