Tribes of Gamblers

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

WASHINGTON
We were told that the glitzy gambling casinos springing up on Indian reservations across the land would lift poor Indians out of poverty. Certainly the slot machines and gaming tables produce plenty of money. The nearly 300 casinos pull in almost $13 billion a year in revenue, of which more than $5 billion is pure profit.

But where is that money going? In Time magazine's cover story this week, titled "Wheel of Misfortune: Look Who's Cashing In at Indian Casinos," Donald Barlett and James Steele -- a team twice awarded Pulitzer Prizes when at The Philadelphia Inquirer -- present the troubling answer.

A few tribes near big cities haul in as much as $900,000 per member. States with only 3 percent of the Indian population -- California, Florida and Connecticut -- take in 44 percent of the gambling revenue, while states with half our 1.8 million Indians account for less than 3 percent of the take. The poorest of our aboriginal Americans are getting poorer, while non-Indians get rich hiring lobbyists to get federal recognition of a tribal front for the sole purpose of buying land to build a casino.

Lim Goh Tong, for example, is the Malaysian contractor billionaire behind the Foxwoods spread in Connecticut. As a foreigner, he can legally avoid most U.S. taxes on his profit, likely to run about $40 million a year. The South African developer Sol Kerzner, "first of the Mohegans," worked a similar deal that was O.K.'d by a federal official now doing just fine as a lobbyist. And Minnesota's Lyle Berman, a tycoon reported to have taken down $18 million a year in salary and stock options in his leather business, has a hot casino deal going near Chicago. And those are only the most blatant examples of non-Indians cashing in.

I'm a free-enterprise freak who doesn't begrudge big profits to investors who take big risks, but this is no gamble; rather it is a financial-political scandal of stunning proportions. Under the cover of helping the 28 percent of Indians now mired in poverty, financial vultures and highly paid, revolving-door lobbyists are ripping off the U.S. taxpayer and promoting a noxious something-for-nothing slots philosophy -- not to mention degrading the countryside's moral and physical environment -- by gaming the American political system.

Who's to blame? The Department of the Interior, with its moribund Indian Affairs bureau, professes to have no authority to oversee the National Indian Gaming Commission, whose three members have just been appointed by Secretary Gale Norton to be sworn in today. The new chairman, Philip Hogen, a friendly member of South Dakota's Oglala Sioux, was a commissioner through the late 90's and will rock no boats.

He tells me he was "disappointed" with the critical tone of Time's story (another one coming next week) and notes that even the small, less profitable casinos far from big-city markets provide some jobs for Indians. What about the secrecy, fraud, corruption and intimidation rife in so many lucrative tribal casino operations? Hogen's agency has only 63 employees to inspect and audit the $13 billion take in the nearly 300 all-cash businesses. Despite many complaints, that toothless tiger has never uncovered a single case of corruption.

Here's why: The casino tribes lobbied for, and Congress supinely agreed to, a cap of $8 million that can be collected from casinos to finance the nation's Indian gaming commission. That should be tripled.

Will Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, next chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, ask why, as Representative Frank Wolf notes, 80 percent of the Indians in the U.S. have received not one nickel from skyrocketing gambling revenues? Will Representative Jimmy Duncan of Tennessee, likely to head House Resources in January, pull that committee's head out of the sand? Will House Government Reform, under Tom Davis or Chris Cox, dare to hold hearings on a scandal rooted in the manipulation of Congress?

Hard-hitting reporting will help. Casino press agents will continue to trot out warm and cozy stories of hospitals and schools built and Indian lives rehabilitated by gambling money, each one true, but distorting the whole truth of a rapacious operation protected by politicians fearful of seeming unkind to Indians. The result has been attention to the few, neglect of the many, and the herding of a proud people into the demeaning culture of slots and croupiers.