Editorial: Mashantucket Tribe a victim of success

Monday, September 7, 2009  

"The next chapter of the rags-to-riches story of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe - the precipitous fall from near the top of the gaming world's pinnacle - won't be written for months, if not years, to come.

But when it is, undoubtedly the Pequot's insatiable appetite to be the biggest - at whatever the cost - will surely be cited as a significant contributor to the bad times.

The recent disclosure that the tribe owes more than it has the ability to pay shouldn't surprise anyone who has followed the Pequot's story since former chairman Richard “Skip” Hayward led the effort in the 1970s to return the Mashantucket Pequots to their reservation on the edge of a cedar swamp in the Ledyard woods.

While the tribe's current embattled chairman, Michael Thomas, has tried to pin much of the Pequot's present financial fiasco on Mr. Hayward, who led the tribe from 1975 to 1998, that's clearly not the case.

But what may have caused the tribe's downfall is the Pequot's apparent inability to foresee the possibility of economic hard times and to save for a rainy day. Since the tribe first opened its casino in 1992, it has never stopped expanding, and gone out of its way to add more gaming space and slot machines in an obvious effort to be “bigger” than its rival across the Thames River, the Mohegan Sun.

And during much of that expansion, the economy was seemingly healthy and business was thriving. But the obsession to be the biggest - as evidenced by the tribe's decision to build the billion-dollar MGM Grand at Foxwoods as clear signs of the recession were emerging in 2007 - didn't stop them."

Get the Story:
Editorial: Pequots Have Come Too Far To Fail Now (The New London Day 9/6)

Also Today:
Indian casinos not immune to troubles during recession (The Atlantic City Press 9/6)