Opinion: County falls victim to off-reservation gaming scam

Monday, May 9, 2011  

"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."

Get the Story:
Dennis J. Whittlesey: United States: The Catskills Tribal Casino Scam (Mondaq 5/9)

Related Stories:
Illegitimate 'tribe' owes county $240K in failed casino bid (4/25)