Wind River Casino
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Wind River Casino is a Native American Casino
in Riverton, Wyoming and is open daily 24 hours. The casino's 20,000 square
foot gaming space features 429 gaming machines and four table games. The
property has one restaurant. News Brief: The Northern Arapaho Tribe's Wind River Casino has discontinued offering bingo. Wyoming Tribal Casino Adds Machines, Tables 23 September 2005 News Brief: Higher-stakes gambling machines and blackjack tables could be installed in the Northern Arapaho Tribe's existing bingo parlor near Riverton within 60 days, the Wind River Casino's chief executive officer said. Northern Arapaho Tribe Near Casino License Deal 15 November 2004 |
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Wyoming Tribal Casino Adds Machines, Tables
23 September 2005
LANDER, Wyoming – As reported by the Jackson Hole Star Tribune: "Higher-stakes
gambling machines and blackjack tables could be installed in the Northern
Arapaho Tribe's existing bingo parlor near Riverton within 60 days, the Wind
River Casino's chief executive officer said.
"A day after the U.S. Interior Department gave the tribe permission to offer
some Las Vegas-style games on the Wind River Indian Reservation, officials
offered some details Thursday on their plans for expanded gambling.
"Casino CEO Jim Conrad said the agreement signed Wednesday was based on previous
talks between the tribe and the state of Wyoming and allowed only a limited
range of Class III games. But he said the tribe would seek an amendment, based
on a ruling by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, to allow all Class III
games.
"…Conrad said the current facility, formerly known as 789 Bingo, would probably
house between 300 and 400 Class III machines. They'll start with three blackjack
tables, then add more table games as dealers are trained and as the market
demands.
"The tribe also has plans for a $10.3 million casino that Conrad said would
probably hold 600 to 700 machines and expanded table offerings…"
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Wyoming
Tribe Pushes for Own Casino 1 September 2005 FORT WASHAKIE, Wyoming – As reported by the Casper Star-Tribune: " -- The Eastern Shoshone Tribe is moving aggressively toward having its own casino and intends to have a site for the facility selected by the end of September, a tribal leader said. |
"Elsewhere on the Wind River Indian Reservation, the Northern Arapaho Tribe plans to build a casino near Riverton. Tribal representatives will meet with U.S. Interior Department officials next week to learn how the department wants to proceed with and regulate the Las Vegas-style casino. "Ivan Posey, chairman of the Eastern Shoshone Business Council, said in a Wednesday interview that the business council is looking at three potential sites for an Eastern Shoshone casino and has the finances lined up to proceed with architect selection once a final site is selected. "…Meanwhile, Gov. Dave Freudenthal, speaking at his weekly news conference Wednesday, said he has designated a team to negotiate with the Eastern Shoshone on behalf of the state regarding casino plans and has asked Fremont County to send a delegate to those talks. "The state's failure to reach a gambling compact with the Northern Arapaho prompted litigation that resulted in that tribe receiving court approval for Las Vegas-style gambling. Instead of being based on an agreement with the state -- the way most tribal casinos across the country have sprung up -- the Arapaho casino will operate under a compact between the tribe and the Interior Department…" |
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Wyoming Won't Appeal Casino Ruling
15 July 2005
CHEYENNE, Wyoming – As reported by the Casper Star-Tribune: "Wyoming will
probably not appeal a recent court ruling that grants the Northern Arapaho tribe
permission to offer casino-style gambling on the Wind River Indian Reservation,
state Attorney General Pat Crank said.
"…Meanwhile, the tribe is waiting on Interior Secretary Gale Norton to issue the
final rules that will govern gambling on the reservation, and Wyoming's
congressional delegation does not plan to involve itself in that process.
"Last week, the full U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals
ruled that the tribe is entitled to
offer 'the full gamut of casino-style Class III gambling' on the reservation.
The state's only avenue of appeal of a full federal court decision would
be to the U.S. Supreme Court.
"…The Northern Arapaho won a ruling that the state failed to negotiate in good
faith on a compact to govern gambling on the reservation. When both the tribe
and the state gave their last, best offers to a mediator, the mediator picked
the tribe's offer.
"…Andy Baldwin, attorney for the tribe, said he expects tribal and Interior
officials to meet within about three weeks…"
State Drops Legal Challenge to Casino
30 November 2005
CHEYENNE, Wyoming -- As reported by the Caspar Star Tribune: "After a
five-year fight to block the Northern
Arapaho Tribe's Nevada-style casino, the state of Wyoming has formally
conceded defeat. However, to the dismay of tribal leaders, Gov. Dave Freudenthal
has asked federal officials to clarify whether the Arapaho should reimburse the
state for oversight of gambling operations.
"In the courthouse, though, the state raised the white flag.
"'The State has exhausted all appeals that were, in good faith, available to the
State,' Attorney General Patrick Crank wrote in an eight-page brief filed
Tuesday with the U.S. District Court of Wyoming.
"...The court has no ability under federal Indian gambling laws to order further
negotiations between the state and the tribe, Crank concluded..."
"...The legal squabble began in 2000
when gambling negotiations broke down between the Northern Arapaho and the
administration of former Gov. Jim
Geringer..."
Northern Arapaho Tribe Near Casino License Deal
15 November 2004
by Our Partners at the Las Vegas Sun
RIVERTON, Wyo. -- A Northern Arapaho Tribe representative told a legislative
committee that they believe an agreement is near with the Interior Department on
issuing a high-stakes gambling license for a new tribal casino now under
construction.
David T. Staddon, general manager of 789 Bingo and Casino, last week also showed
members of the Select Committee on Tribal Relations the artist's rendering of
the new casino, along with floor plans.
Mark Howell, consultant to the Northern Arapaho Tribe, which is building the new
casino, said he believes agreement is near with the Secretary of the Interior on
the issuance of the federal permission for gambling at the site.
Arapaho tribal leaders, including Business Council Chairman Burton Hutchison,
said the Arapahos are using their own resources to construct the casino, which
they hope will be issued a Class III gambling permit from Interior. Class III
gambling includes casino-type games.
Currently, the tribe provides Class II gambling, including bingo, pull tabs,
punch cards and similar games.
Howell said draft documents are being exchanged between the tribe and Interior
with what he hoped would be the definitive meeting planned for Nov. 23.
Cruz
Decades after the likes of [Adam] Worth and Cohen, famous Jewish underworld
figures like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky made the American scene. Siegel was
instrumental in creating the legalized crime-laden playground of Las Vegas,
starting things off at the Flamingo Hotel. Joseph Sacher headed the nearby Sands
Hotel; Sacher "was second only to Lansky in the [crime] Syndicate. Years ...
[later] he fled the U.S. and went into exile in Israel." [KELLEY, K., p. 219]
Allen Friedman notes another early Jewish criminal influence in Sin City: "The
real potential of Las Vegas was not understood until Moe Sedway arrival in
1941." [FRIEDMAN, A., p. 82]
Meyer Lansky eventually "retired" from a successful life of crime with some
$150-300 million after corrupt escapades that included Florida's "Gold Coast,"
the Bahamas, and a gambling resort in pre-Castro Cuba. "At the height of his
notoriety," says Robert Lacey, "Meyer Lansky was reckoned to be, and was
targeted by the U.S. Justice Department as, the biggest gangster in the United
States -- a dangerous lawbreaker of extraordinary power. He was identified as
the Mafia's banker, the boss of the National Crime Syndicate, the head of the
Combination -- the Chairman of the Board." [LACEY, R., p. 10-11]
Las Vegas has long been a hotbed of underworld influence and a worldwide
attraction for gambling and prostitution. The Italian Mafia has also, from the
conception of Las Vegas as a leisure Mecca, held great sway in the city, but its
most famous underworld personages have always been Jewish mobsters Bugsy Siegel
and Meyer Lansky. The great scope of Jewish contribution to the creation, and
dubious ethics, of Las Vegas may be measured by the words of professor Allen
Balboni. Here he discusses the development of the desert city as a gambling
resort area:
"Most of the [Las Vegas] hotel builders were Jewish Americans. Jay Sarno and
Nate Jacobson were associated with Caesar's Palace [Sarno later created Circus
Circus]; Moe Dalitz, Morris Kleinman, and Sam Tucker with the Desert Inn (and,
along with Jake Factor, with the Stardust after [Italian-American Tony]
Cornero's death); Sidney Wyman, Al Gottesman, and Jake Gottleib with the early
years of the Dunes; Gus Greenbaum, Moe Sedway, and Charlie Resnick with managing
the Flamingo after Bugsy Siegel's death; Ben Goffstein, Willie Alderman, and
David Berman with the booking and running of the Riviera; Milton Prell with the
establishment of the Sahara and then with the transformation of the Tally-Ho
into the Aladdin; Hyman Abrams, Carl Cohen, and Jack Entratter with the
ownership and operation of the Sands [concurrently the president of both the
Sands Hotel casino and the Temple Beth Sholam synagogue]; and Ben Jaffe, Phil
Kastel, and Jell Houssels (of Anglo-Saxon background) with the construction and
operation of the Tropicana ... A few Italian-Amerians hold minor ownership
shares in casinos." [BALBONI, p. 27]
Jewish singer Eddie Fisher recalls a Las Vegas offer he had at the peak of his
career that he now regrets turning down: "When I was working at the Desert Inn I
met with a man named Billy Weinberger, who told me, 'We're building a new hotel
and we want to give you fifty percent of it.' In return I would perform there
permanently and would use my influence to attract other major stars. That
sounded interesting. 'What's it going to be called?' I asked. 'Caesar's
Palace.'" [FISHER, E., 1999, p. 292]
Bernie Rothkopf also owned the MGM Hotel. Allen Glick was, between 1974-79, "the
mob's front man at the Stardust, Fremont, Hacienda, and Marina hotels."
[MORRISON, J.A., p. 1A] "In July, 1979 Allen Glick was stripped of his Nevada
gambling license and fined over $500,000 for a variety of improprieties." Glick
sold his interests in casinos to Allan Sachs, who was, with a partner,
"figureheads for the Chicago mob responsible for providing skim monies" from Las
Vegas gambling operations. [MOLDEA, 1989, p. 336] Jerome Mack, past president of
the Dunes and Riviera, was a former national chairman of the Israel Bonds
Campaign. Jewish entrepreneur Hank Greenspon owned the Las Vegas Sun newspaper
and a local TV station. [See his efforts for Israel in the mass media section]
In more recently years, Arthur Goldberg is the CEO of Park Place Entertainment,
a conglomeration of 29 hotel-casinos [JENKINS, P., 5-30-99] worldwide (Caesar's
Palace, Bally's, etc.) that is twice the size of its nearest competitor. Its
Stardust division is the world's largest hotel company.
Elsewhere, Sheldon Adelson, chairman of the Sands, is also the owner of
Venetian, a new Las Vegas complex built in 1999 at a cost of $1.6 billion.
Adelson is "one of richest men in America," in 1998 worth about $600 million.
[STOLL, I., 1-7-00, p. 1] Adelson, noted the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "is one
of the country's largest donors to Jewish groups and he has influence in the
national Jewish community." [RALSTON] Adelson, notes the (Jewish) Forward, "has
paid for 75 congressmen to visit Israel with the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee [the pro-Israel lobbying organization]." [STOLL, I., p. 1] As Joe
Gelman noted in 1999, "A number of these sin-palace operators are Jewish and
strong supporters of Israel." [GELMAN, p. 15B] [Author Gelman complains about
the use of this citation here].
The chairman of the Mirage, Steve Wynn, is also Jewish. (The funds for Wynn's
first casino, the Golden Nugget, was in large part raised by convicted Jewish
financier Michael Milken). [JOHNSTON, D., p. 74] The Las Vegas mayor, Oscar
Goodman, elected in 1999, is the former president of Temple Beth Sholom. He also
has a reputation as a "mob lawyer," defending, among others, Jewish mobster
Meyer Lansky and Frank Rosenthal. Rosenthal, notes the Las Vegas Review-Journal,
"is credited by some with founding the modern day Las Vegas sports book but was
repeatedly denied a gambling license because of association with organized crime
members." [ZAPLER, p. 1A]
All of this, in more recent years, has its mirror image in Atlantic City and,
increasingly, other American gambling Meccas. Kenny Shapiro, for instance, was
"the Atlantic investment banker for [Italian American mafioso] Nicky Scarfo, the
vicious killer who ruled the Philadelphia Mafia, the most murderous mob family
in America." [JOHNSTON, D., 1992, p. 82]
Another influential Jewish gambling mogul today is Sol Kerzner, founder and
principal owner of Sun City (also known as "Sin City"), a resort playground
created in 1979 in a poverty-stricken area of apartheid South Africa. Kerzner's
modern empire has expanded with extravagant casinos in Atlantic City, New
Jersey, the Bahamas, Mauritus, France, and a Native American site in
Connecticut. An alleged bribery scheme involving the Jewish mayor of Capetown,
David Bloomberg, in 1986 held up -- for a while -- his United States
investments. "Sun City," notes reporter Jay Clarke, "started out as a 'Sin
City,' a place where South Africans could let their hair down because it was
located then in the so-called 'independent homeland' of Bophuthatswana.
Gambling, show-girl revenues, and prostitution were the lures." [CLARKE, p. TR1]
"If ever there was an appropriate setting for corruption it is Sun City," noted
the (London) Guardian, "situated as it is in one of nine homelands which
represent the cornerstones of that most corrupt of social systems, apartheid."
[BERESFORD, p. 18] One of the Israelis who made millions off the immoral
socio-political system surrounding Sun City is Shabtai Kalmanovitch; he worked
as an "economic advisor" to Bophuthatswana' s dictator. [BERESFORD, p. 18] )
In recent years Sun City has attempted to diversify by creating a
family-oriented "Lost City" adventure park adjoining the casino. "The patent
reason why the Lost City has been designed as a family playground and
entertainment centre," says the (London) Guardian, "is that it entices the
public into gaming. The corridors leading to the main casino even feature
children's versions of slot machines -- game machines -- which could with some
justification be described as nursery slopes inculcating the joys (or otherwise)
of adult addiction to the one-armed bandits packing the main 'treasure hall.'"
[BERESFORD, p. 18]
Many Jewish (and other) mob figures were also involved in the gambling industry
in Cuba until the communist revolution destroyed their operations. "After the
loss of Cuba and the clampdown on the Mafia by the Kennedy Justice Department,"
notes Dan Moldea, "Meyer Lansky and the organized crime syndicate had targeted
the Bahamas as its new off-shore gambling and narcotics empire." [MOLDEA, 1989,
p. 128]
In the casino/resort/hotel world of the Bahamas, and its criminal underworld,
Jews have also been prominent. Among those who find a place in Alan Block's book
about organized crime on these islands are
* Louis Arthur Chesler who "served as [mobster] Lansky's point man ... Among
Chesler's criminal specialties was the handling of stolen securities." [p.
34-35]
* Morris Mac Schwabel, a Manhattan attorney, formerly convicted of securities
fraud. [p. 36]
* Joseph Jacob Frankel, who in the early 1960s "teamed up with Charles 'Ruby'
Stein and [Italian mafioso] Nicholas 'Jiggs' Farlano who were major organized
crime figures." [p. 89]
* Arthur Millgram, president of Automated Ticket Systems (it had contracts with
the New York lottery system), who was murdered in 1977. [p. 91]
* Joel Mallin, a lawyer who had "ties to the mob." [p. 91]
* Irving Kahn, partner with "mob attorney Morris Shenker." [p. 95]
* C. Gerald Goldsmith, who "was the Board Chairman of the [Nassau] Port
Authority, DEVCO, and several related firms. This put him in the middle of one
of the largest political payoff scams in the Bahamas. ... One of his duties was
the illegal siphoning of company funds into the hidden bank accounts for
political payoffs." [p. 95, 98]
* Ben Novack, owner of Miami's Fountainbleau hotel, who was an "associate of
prominent gangsters Lansky, Coppola, and others including Max Eder, a loanshark
and suspected labor racketeer with a history of gambling, robbery, narcotics,
and homicide arrests." [p. 115]
* "Cleveland racketeers Morris Kleinman and Moe Dalitz." [p. 116]
* Burt Kanter, a lawyer who had "direct ties to organized crime. [p. 162] He was
a senior member of the law firm Kanter, (Milton) Levenfeld, (Charles) Lippitz
and (Roger) Baskes.
* Allen Dorfman, who was "murdered in 1985 to prevent him from talking about mob
investments ... [He] was in the same league as Glick, Shenker, and Malnik." [p.
164]
In 1970 Moe Dalitz, "a leading member of the Cleveland crime syndicate," and
controller of the Stardust and Desert Inn Las Vegas casinos, was awarded the
City of Peace Award of the State of Israel "in recognition of distinguished
service to the people and state of Israel." [ROCKAWAY, p. 227] In 1985 the
Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith bestowed their "Torch of Liberty" award
upon him for his cash support of that group. [ROCKAWAY, p. 227] A gangster
associate revealed to a 1947 organized crime commission that Dalitz was in fact
the chairman of the Nevada United Jewish Appeal. [ROCKAWAY, p. 227] In 1982,
Dalitz was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the 400 wealthiest people in
America. [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 37] In terms of the criminal underworld, he was
also known as "the godfather of Las Vegas." [ROEMER, p. 52]
Also in Las Vegas, Ze'ev Chafets notes the story of "a local Jewish madam [who]
had given a talk to a B'nai B'rith meeting. Prostitution is legal in Nevada, and
the madam, a Jewish lady named Beverly Hurel, is a highly regarded
businesswoman." [CHAFETS, p. 101]
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Herman "Hank" Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, once noted that he was
a Zionist "before I could even identify a picture of George Washington." [RAVIV,
p. 40] During Israel's "War of Independence" in 1948, Greenspun traveled to
"Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Panama, where he organized false
documents, bank guarantees, and arms shipments to Israel." [RAVIV, p. 41] "Hank
Greenspun," notes Alex Pelle,
"embarked on an incredible odyssey, plundering a naval depot in
Hawaii, seizing a private yacht at gunpoint near Wilmington, California,
and posing in Mexico as a confidential agent of Generalissimo Chiang
Kai-shek's government. A single driving purpose generated over the
span of seven months all those seemingly unrelated events: to fill the
holds of a ship ... with six thousand tons of contraband rifles, machine
guns, howitzers, cannons, and ammunition, destined for the port of
Haifa and Israel's beleaguered Jews. In so doing, Hank Greenspun
had violated the United States' Neutrality Act, the Export Control
Law, and Presidential Proclamation 2776." Thanks to Jewish lobbying
pressure, Greenspun was pardoned by President John F. Kennedy
in 1961. [GREENSPUN, H., 1966, p. ix]
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Hollywood's "Sin City" entertainment playground, Las Vegas, especially renowned
for gambling, prostitution and other vices, must also be added to the list of
great questionable Jewish influences upon popular culture. (In Hollywood, Al and
Lew Wertheimer founded an illegal gambling den in Hollywood called the Clover
Club. The Jewish Hollywood crowd later set up such a resort near Tijuana,
Mexico, called Agua Caliente.) [GABLER, N., 1988, p. 261] Las Vegas, as an
institution, has been profoundly influential in its efforts to sanitize,
normalize, and popularize some of the most troubling expressions of human nature
as acceptable recreation in western society. As professor Alan Balboni observes,
"The Jews and Italians who made up 'the Boys' [the Mafia] were able to develop
the burgeoning gaming industry to the point where it eventually became a
significant influence on the American scene." [BALBONI, p. ix] Jewish
entrepreneurship was not alone in this, but it was central.
For purposes here, we may wonder about the observations of Jewish commentator
James Yaffe: "If Jews can be said to have a characteristic vice, that vice is
gambling. Even back in the shtetl they were gamblers. Many psychiatrists have
mentioned this phenomena to me, yet nobody has been able to explain it exactly."
[YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 268]
We may also note the case of Mike Rose, the Jewish CEO of Holiday Corporation
(Holiday Inn, et al), who "steered [the company] into gambling when it bought
into Harrah's in 1980, causing Holiday's president and two directors to resign.
Rose later sold the namesake motel chain to create a gambling concern called the
Promus Corporation." The company's president, L. M. Clyde, retired "because he
could not reconcile his Presbyterian religious beliefs with gambling ... Clyman
did not go quietly, and two Holiday directors joined him in resigning on moral
grounds." [JOHNSTON, D., 1992, p. 49, photo section]
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DISCUSSIONS ABOVE EXCERPTED FROM:
WHEN VICTIMS RULE. A CRITIQUE OF JEWISH PRE-EMINENCE IN AMERICA
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Links to online articles about Jews in Las Vegas, and other gambling centers:
BILL MILLER (1904- ) Mr. Entertainment Agent extraordinaire, who began his
career as a hoofer with chutzpah, virtually invented the lounge show and brought
everyone from Mae West to Elvis to Las Vegas,
by Y K.J. EVANS, Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1999
"Seductive 1930s screen actress Mae West still looked pretty good by the
mid-1950s, enough so that she still was able to pack the guys in just by showing
up. They came to see flashy costumes wrapped tightly around her generous
hourglass figure. And, of course, to hear her famed witticisms. She would
slither up to a front row customer, give him the up-and-down scan, and issue her
trademark invitation. "Why don't you come up and see me some time? Make it
Tuesday, that's amateur night." But she was a screen star, not a nightclub
performer. 'I brought in people nobody believed could do a nightclub act,' says
Bill Miller, the man who virtually invented the Las Vegas lounge show ...
Miller, a relatively robust 94, allowed that time was on his side when he booked
West at the Sahara in 1954. Her last major screen appearance was 11 years behind
her, she was 61 years old, and was traveling with a marginally successful stage
revue. Miller hired a group of spectacularly buffed-out male bodybuilders. Clad
only in bathing trunks, they posed, flexed and strutted. West leered, inspected
lats, delts and pects and fluttered her eyelashes in excitement. 'I wrote her a
song for the very finish," laughs Miller. 'It went, 'I've got something for the
girls: boys, boys, boys' ... William Miller was born in 1904 in Pinsk, Russia,
the son of David and Lena, Jews who wanted to get to America ... One of the
nightclubs where Miller booked many of his clients was the Riviera, in Fort Lee,
N.J. It was a swank joint with an illegal casino upstairs. When World War II
commenced, it was closed. Miller bought the club in 1945, renamed it 'Bill
Miller's Riviera" and reopened ... ' Every one of the Rat Pack came from the
Riviera," says Miller. 'Sinatra played there, so did Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis
when nobody knew who they were. I brought in the Will Mastin Trio, starring
Sammy Davis Jr. and also Joey Bishop.' When the Copacabana Club closed in New
York, one of its employees, Jack Entratter, was sent to Las Vegas to handle
entertainment at the new Sands Hotel ... Milton Prell, who had opened the Sahara
Hotel in 1952, heard about the closing of Bill Miller's Riviera, and called.
'We'd love for you to come out and take a piece of this place, and be part of
our group," said Prell. Miller bought a 10 percent interest in the property and
was named entertainment director in 1953 ... But Miller wanted to create a new
entertainment venue, one unique to Las Vegas. He thought lounges could produce
profits on their own ... In 1955, Miller left the Sahara and bought an interest
in the new Dunes Hotel, and signed on as entertainment director."
IRWIN MOLASKY (1927- ) The Developer's Developer From high-rise bank buildings
and hospitals to horse racing and motion picture making, the projects of this
construction king continue to flourish in Las Vegas and the West,
Las Vegas Review Journal, 1999
"[Irwin] Molasky opens a conversation by establishing immediately the central
theme of his life. He builds. He works. He's been doing it since boyhood and is
still going strong at 72. Since 1951, he has done it mostly in Las Vegas.
Outside those who built the most innovative Strip hotels, he probably has been
Las Vegas' most significant developer. He built Las Vegas' first enclosed
shopping center, Boulevard Mall; its first modern private hospital, Sunrise
Hospital and Medical Center; and its best-known office building, the Bank of
America Plaza. With Las Vegas partners he built the La Costa resort near San
Diego, and started a successful television and motion picture production company
... A few years later he met Merv Adelson. The son of a Beverly Hills grocer,
Adelson moved to Las Vegas to start Market Town, a 24-hour foodstore at Oakey
and Las Vegas Boulevard South. They founded Paradise Development Co. which
remains active today. One of their first projects was Paradise Palms, the
neighborhood bounded by Desert Inn and Flamingo Roads and by Maryland Parkway
and Eastern Avenue. From 1957 through 1959, said Molasky, it sold a house every
day for $30,000 to $40,000 ... The hospital was originally financed by a local
savings and loan business, said Molasky, 'But we ran out of money and had to
take in some investors.' The investors included Allard Roen and Moe Dalitz, both
associated with the Desert Inn. Sunrise opened its doors in December 1958 with
58 rooms; now it has 688, and is the largest private hospital west of Chicago,
said Molasky ... After not doing well financially with professional hospital
administrators, the hospital hired Nathan Adelson, Merv's father, who had been
in the grocery business ... The development loans, more than $100 million, had
been made in an era when the pension fund was mob-influenced. After an
investigation, Molasky said the federal authorities found nothing wrong with
those loans. Although Dalitz had conducted himself respectably since moving to
Las Vegas in the 1950s, he was a former bootlegger and illegal gambler who had
been publicly grilled in the U.S. Senate. His associate Roen had pleaded guilty
to securities violations in a major stock fraud case in 1962. Dalitz and Roen
were partners in developing La Costa, but inactive. Neither Merv Adelson nor
Molasky, the active partners, had ever been charged with a crime. Nevertheless,
Penthouse Magazine published an article asserting the resort had been built and
frequented by gangsters. 'Penthouse made allegations that weren't true,' said
Molasky. The four partners sued for libel. After years of litigation, they won
no money, but Penthouse issued a letter saying it did not mean to imply that
Adelson and Molasky 'are or were members of organized crime or criminals.' The
statement did not include Dalitz or Roen. Molasky was involved in the
development of most of Maryland Parkway from Sahara Avenue to Flamingo Road,
including Boulevard Mall. Opened in 1968, it was the first enclosed mall in the
valley. He also developed Best on the Boulevard, a smaller shopping center just
south of the Boulevard Mall, concentrating on what he calls 'big box' retailers
such as Best Buy and Copeland Sports. He used the same concept in 1996 at the
'Best In the West' center at Lake Mead and Rainbow boulevards. About 1966,
related Molasky, he and Adelson met Lee Rich, who produced TV shows for ad
agencies and dreamed of producing TV specials and scheduled shows. Lorimar was
born ... Lorimar also produced "Eight is Enough," and the less wholesome
"Dallas," "Knots Landing" and "Falcon Crest." Lorimar's feature films included
"Sybil," "Being There" and "An Officer and a Gentleman." Molasky is no longer
involved with Lorimar. Adelson, who reportedly had wanted to be in the
entertainment industry since his Beverly Hills childhood, became more and more
associated with Hollywood; he even married Barbara Walters [like all bold-typed
individuals here, also Jewish]. Lorimar eventually merged with Time-Warner, and
Adelson became one of its board members ... Parry and Molasky purposely built it
as the tallest downtown building, to dominate the skyline ... Molasky and
Adelson also were key figures in the development of UNLV ... The Molaskys became
mentors to several of [University of Nebraska coach Jerry] Tarkanian's
basketball players ... Molasky's interests in sports have been more than casual.
He was named as a member of 'The Computer Group,' a ring of sports betters
investigated and unsuccessfully prosecuted by the Las Vegas Organized Crime
Strike Force. Molasky was given immunity but testified in the 1992 trial that he
bet small fortunes ... He owns the horses in partnership with the well-known
trainer, Bruce Headley. One of Molasky's horses is Kona Gold, acknowledged the
nation's fastest sprinter, though now rehabilitating from an injury."
STEVE WYNN (1942- ) The Winner In a bloodless coup with the help of a
banker-turned-mentor, a boy from back East took over a downtown hotel and
everything he touched from then on was golden,
Las Vegas Review Journal, 1999
[Wynn is chairman of Mirage Resorts -- holdings include Bellagio]
"Steve Wynn, whose father ran bingo games back East and squandered his profits
on the gambling tables of old-time Vegas, has become a tycoon in the business of
marketing snob appeal. He's also shown Las Vegas better ways to please the
laid-back millions who aren't snobs. He created a new era not only in Nevada
resorts but in Nevada politics; although Nevadans have long worried casino
interests might dominate state politics, Wynn is one of the few to aggressively
pursue political agendas ... Wynn's father opened a bingo parlor here but was
unable to obtain a gaming license and was forced to close. He returned to Utica,
N.Y., and reared Steve and his brother, Kenneth, who is 10 years younger, in an
atmosphere of affluence ... The Wynns moved to Las Vegas in 1967 and Wynn
invested in the Frontier Hotel, perhaps the most controversial deal he would
ever make. Though Wynn was never accused of wrongdoing, several of his
associates in the hotel were mob-connected. And they were not merely people who
had formerly been in illegal gambling -- which has always been winked at in
Nevada because illegal gambling was once the only way to get experience -- but
involved in a hidden ownership and skimming scheme. Wynn had been there less
than a year when image-sensitive state authorities persuaded billionaire Howard
Hughes to buy the Frontier, hoping his corporate security people could clean up
the problems. Wynn has said he made no money on the deal. Hughes brought in his
own people, so Wynn was also out of his job as keno and slot manager ... Wynn
announced plans to build the world's narrowest casino thereon, forcing the hotel
to buy it for $2.25 million. Wynn and a partner had invested only $1.2 million
in the deal, borrowing the funds from [Parry] Thomas, so they split a profit of
more than $1 million. This gave him enough money to participate with Thomas in
the most famous bloodless coup in Las Vegas casino management. Thomas said The
Golden Nugget had one of the most desirable locations on Fremont Street, but was
managed by a group of old-timers who were content to coast. The stock was
undervalued and the managers didn't own much of it. Wynn and a group of new
investors bought enough to get elected to the board of directors, then
documented mismanagement including employee thefts from the casino. Next, Wynn
called on Golden Nugget President Buck Blaine and threatened to sue if Blaine
didn't resign ... By August 1973 Wynn ran the company, and in one year he
increased the pre-tax profits from $1.1 million to $4.2 million. To a downtown
that had become content to live on local business and spillover from the Strip,
Wynn in 1977 added 579 rooms, some of them the finest Las Vegas then had to
offer, and the Nugget was soon making $12 million a year. He used Golden Nugget
profits to buy an aging hotel in Atlantic City, where gambling had just become
legal, tore it down, and by 1980 had built another Golden Nugget with 506 rooms
... The published price tag of the new Mirage was $630 million, and $565 million
of that was raised by the sale of junk bonds -- bonds rated risky by investment
analysts and, therefore, paying a high interest rate. It was an enormous gamble;
the new hotel would have to make $1 million a day to service the debt ...
Caesars Palace cut a deal to construct the Forum Shops, a mall of quality stores
unprecedented in Las Vegas, linking its own resort with The Mirage ... Wynn may
project a new, cleaner image of Las Vegas, but has in fact used some of the
old-time personalities who continue to tarnish Nevada's image. In 1992 and 1993
casino host Charles Meyerson fought to regain his right to work in the industry
after Sheriff John Moran yanked his work card for hosting organized crime
figures. He regained the card and subsequently was licensed by the state of
Nevada. Meyerson, a former bookmaker from New York City, claimed he did not know
the men had mob ties. Both Julie Weintraub and Ash Resnick, casino hosts with
unsavory reputations, worked in Wynn-controlled casinos. In 1995 Review-Journal
columnist John L. Smith published a biography of Wynn called 'Running Scared.'
Wynn sued the author and the publisher, Lyle Stuart. He won a $3.1 million libel
judgment against Stuart, not for the book's contents, but for statements made in
an ad promoting the book, which Wynn said implied he was connected to organized
crime. That verdict is on appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court, but Stuart was
forced into bankruptcy. Wynn subsequently dropped his suit over the book itself.
The 1998 opening of the 3,000-room Bellagio was anti-climactic. Never mind that
its $1.6 billion price tag made it the most expensive resort ever built ...
Since then Mirage Inc. has opened a similarly European-themed hotel on the Gulf
Coast in Biloxi, Miss. With 1,780 hotel rooms, the Beau Rivage is the largest
hotel-casino in the United States outside Nevada. And the company has purchased
a site in Atlantic City, planning a return to the New Jersey gaming venue. ... .
In 1998 Review-Journal political reporter Jane Ann Morrison analyzed campaign
donation records and discovered that Wynn was the second-most active gaming
executive in donating to politicians. Sheldon Addleson, chairman of the Las
Vegas Sands and builder of the new Venetian Resort, gave about twice as much as
Wynn to state and local campaigns, and nearly as much at the national level.
Wynn's donations did not seem to particularly favor either the Democratic or the
Republican party, though he is registered as a Democrat."
Las Vegas, Guardian Weekend [London]; [posted here at journalist/novelist
Melanie McGrath's web site]
"Everyone knows Vegas is a made-up world, a desert Disneyland, but I had been
trying over the weeks to build up a picture of the town beneath the smile and
what I had found was troubling me. If there is a single truth about Las Vegas,
it is that nowhere on earth so efficiently evades it. In a city whose
$5.7bn-a-year gambling business it is to serve up pleasure, reality doesn't sit
so well as fantasy. Vegas is a city in denial of the facts. A city where the
birds are scared from the trees by ultrasonic bleepers to stop them pooping on
passers-by, where prostitution is illegal but there are seventy pages of Yellow
Pages ads for private entertainers, where to water a single golf course costs
$12m a year ... It wasn't so much the Mob 'n' Mormons who built Las Vegas as the
Jews. Bugsy Siegel and his boss, the Mob financier Meyer Lansky, were Jewish.
Casino moguls Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn are Jewish too. The town boomed not
because gambling was legal but because the railroad ran right through it. And
far from being the centre of licence it likes to think itself, Vegas was
racially segregated right into the mid-seventies. (Twenty years before Bugsy
Siegel booked Lena Horne to perform at the Flamingo but made her sleep elsewhere
and instructed the chambermaid to burn her bedlinen.)"
Isle of Capri casinos,
Isle of Capri webiste
"A genuine entrepreneur, Bernard Goldstein has been active in the development of
riverboat gaming in a number of states and was instrumental in lobbying for the
original legislation for riverboat gaming in Iowa. Currently, Mr. Goldstein
serves as chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Isle of Capri
Casinos, Inc., which operates casinos in Mississippi, Louisiana, Colorado, Iowa,
Missouri, as well as a harness race track in Pompano Beach, Florida. Often
referred to as the Father of Riverboat Gaming, Goldstein was awarded the
American Gaming Association’s 'Top Performing C.E.O. of the Year' in 2001. Mr.
Goldstein was chairman of the board of the Steamboat Companies which operated
the Diamond Lady and Emerald Lady casino riverboats beginning in April 1991. He
also served as chairman of the board and president of Casino Cruises, Inc.,
which managed the gaming operations of the Par-A-Dice Riverboat Casino in
Peoria, Illinois through March 1993. An addition to his involvement in the
riverboat gaming industry, Mr. Goldstein is chairman of the board of the Alter
Companies which are involved in scrap metal recycling, river freight
transportation and affiliated businesses ... Mr. Goldstein, active in the
community, created a Civilian Search and Rescue Fund and has received the Simon
Wiesenthal Distinguished Community Award. In 1993, he was selected Outstanding
Business Leader by the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County, Florida."
Isle of Capri casinos,
Isle of Capri web site (see above)
"Allan B. Solomon has been an executive officer and a member of Isle of Capri
Casinos, Inc. board of directors since its inception in 1992. He presently
serves as executive vice president, general counsel and secretary for the Isle
of Capri Casinos, Inc. ... He has served as president of the Florida Association
of Jewish Federations and as a vice president of the Council of Jewish
Federations."
Leonard Steinberg, chairman,
Gaming Magazine,
"Leonard Steinberg, the founder and chairman of sports betting and casino group
Stanley Leisure [in Great Britain], has a big smile on his face. He has much to
smile about. Next month, the chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, is
expected in his Budget speech to lift the duty on betting for the first time
since the levy was imposed under Stanley Baldwin in 1926. And the bookies are
bracing themselves for a bonanza ... There is also good news in the pipeline for
Mr Stanley's gaming business. In July, the gaming review body, the betting
industry's regulator, is likely to recommend a loosening of restrictions on slot
machines - again something Mr Steinberg has been pushing over many years ...
Since he started running an illicit betting business from his family-owned
Belfast milk bar in the 1950s, legitimacy is something Mr Steinberg - who is
from a Jewish family that fled the pogroms of Riga - has striven after with
herculean tenacity, and not a small amount of patience. Unable to make a success
of the family opticians' business after his father died in 1954, Mr Steinberg
found more success in the lower end of the betting shop trade, gradually
acquiring 10 shops across Ulster. By the early 1970s, he decided to leave the
increasingly violent province behind and expand his business across the Irish
Sea - firstly with two shops on the Isle of Man, then four in Yorkshire,
followed by 11 in Liverpool and a casino in Stockport. Still mainly focused on
areas ignored by the big three - William Hills, Ladbrokes and Coral - Stanley
now has an estate of some 645 shops across the UK, and its chairman is regarded
as an elder statesman of the industry ... In 1997, he even established a Centre
for Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Salford as part of his
efforts to bring an air of respectability to the industry. As if to underline
Stanley's establishment credentials, in 1999 the company bought Capital
Corporation, owner of three prestigious London casinos including Crockfords, the
eighteenth century private gaming club in Mayfair."
[Here's the Jewish angle to gambling casinos in Palestine and the implicit
degredation of ruined Palestinian culture. Why wouldn't this be so? It's the
rape of Palestine. Jews dominate Las Vegas and are instrumental in running many
Native American casinos in America, as well as southern Africa.]
PA's partner in the Jericho casino is Sharon's buddy, new report finds,
Ha'aretz (Israel), March 2, 2003
"Palestinian Finance Minister Salam Fayyad and the rating company Standard &
Poor's have traced $658 million worth of the Palestinian Authority's assets and
funds, according to a preliminary report issued recently. Among the more
interesting details are the PA's part in the Oasis casino in Jericho. The PA
owns 23.08 percent of CAP, the company that owns the Jericho Casino. The Oasis
is also partly owned by Jewish Austrian businessman Martin Schlaf - a close
friend of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon - who also sits on the board of directors.
According to the report, CAP is registered in Lichtenstein and most of its
owners are not known. Among its registered owners is an Austrian casino company,
in which Schlaf is prominently involved. Schlaf last visited Sharon about two
weeks ago in Hashikmim farm. The Prime Minister's Office director general, Dov
Weisglass, represented CAP in Israel before entering his present office and his
former law office still handles the company's business. The Austrian Casino
company received, according to the report, a franchise to operate the Jericho
casino until 2028, with a 10-year tax exemption from the day it opened, and
exclusive rights to operate other casinos in PA territories."
Stop Moskowitz,
A website devoted to activism against Hawaiian Gardens (metropolitan Los
Angeles) gambling mogul Irving Moskowitz, a heavy supporter of right-wing
activities in Israel.
[The Jewish Conquest of "Working Class Redneck."]
Las Vegas Hosts Country Music Awards, Earthlink (from Associated Press), May 21,
2003
"The show, televised by CBS, moved to Las Vegas this year for the first time in
the event's 38-year history."
[Las Vegas has always been a Jewish-created fantasy. Below, both Steve Wynn and
Oscar Goodman are Jewish.]
Jackson's Roots Run Deep in Las Vegas,
Earthlink (from Associated Press), December 2, 2003
"Michael Jackson's roots run deep in Las Vegas, his playland away from Neverland,
where he holds a key to the city, loves browsing magic shops for a clever card
trick and his family owns property in exclusive neighborhoods. In the neon
desert, where practically anything goes, there are no warrants for his arrest.
No lewd allegations. No "big lie" as the singer proclaims on his new Web site
about the child molestation charges he's facing. The ties were apparent when
Jackson surrendered Nov. 20 after an arrest warrant alleged he committed lewd or
lascivious acts with a child under 14. After posting $3 million bail, he shunned
his Neverland Ranch in California and flew to Las Vegas. Jackson hopscotched
around the city for three hours as media helicopters hovered overhead and giddy
fans swarmed to get a peek of the King of Pop ... Gossip columnists report
Jackson might be staying at one of his family's redoubts. His parents and sister
LaToya Jackson own homes in Las Vegas. But Las Vegas is more than a convenient
hideaway that leaves paparazzi and reporters guessing where Jackson has escaped.
The city serves up everything the eccentric superstar craves - especially that
"glitter" Jackson loves, said Robert Wegner, Jackson's former head of security,
who now lives in Reno, Nev. The casinos offer shopping extravaganzas where
Jackson can spend while being blanketed in impenetrable security. He was filmed
last year in a British documentary during an outrageous spending spree at The
Venetian hotel-casino, and reportedly has a $25,000 bill at The Mirage
hotel-casino for trashing his villa before returning to Santa Barbara to face
the warrant for his arrest. These are places he has been coming for years, ever
since the Jackson Five first played the old MGM Grand hotel-casino on the Strip
in 1974. He claims friendship with casino developer Steve Wynn and was recently
given a key to the city by former mob lawyer-turned-Mayor Oscar Goodman ... A
city known for second chances, Las Vegas would probably embrace Jackson, who
some critics claim is washed up. Experts say anything is possible in this
fantasyland. Everybody gets another shot, no matter how they look. "Elvis bombed
here when he was young, taut and ripped," said Hal Rothman, a University of
Nevada, Las Vegas history professor. "He succeeded here when he was a blimp."
Peccole Ranch co-developers face lawsuit by Canadian bank. A lawsuit alleges a
banking exec took bribes to approve a new loan for the world's largest mall,
By John G. Edwards, Las Vegas Review-Journal, September 16, 1998
"A family of Canadian developers with several major Las Vegas projects is
fighting a $297 million lawsuit filed by a Canadian government bank seeking to
throw the world's largest shopping mall into receivership. Alberta Treasury
Branches, a bank run by the province of Alberta, filed a lawsuit earlier this
year that until recently was in large part kept secret. The bank accuses Elmer
Leahy, former head of ATB, of accepting bribes from the mall's four owners --
the brothers Nader, Eskandar, Raphael and Bahman Ghermezian, according to the
Globe and Mail in Toronto and other Canadian newspapers. The Royal Canadian
Mounted Police Tuesday acknowledged they were investigating the matter but
declined to elaborate. The lawsuit alleges the bribes were made to obtain $279
million in refinancing for West Edmonton Mall in 1994 ... The Canadian lawsuit
will have no effect on the $300 million in real estate developments the family
plans over the next four years in the Las Vegas area, said spokesmen for Triple
Five Nevada Development Corp., the family's Nevada development arm. Nader
Ghermezian said the family's developments in Las Vegas and around the United
States are held by corporations separate from their interests in Canada ... The
Ghermezians own the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., which is the world's
second-largest shopping center, and have other interests in San Jose, Calif.,
Seattle and Phoenix, company executives said. "Vegas is our No. 1 priority
across North America," Walrath said. The company has 12 years of developing
experience in Southern Nevada, including the Ghermezians' role as co-developers
of Peccole Ranch community with the Peccole family. Triple Five will hold grand
opening celebrations today for Village Square at Peccole Ranch, a retail center
on the northwest corner of Sahara Avenue and Fort Apache Road. The project
includes the 18-screen Act III movie theater complex and 60,000 square feet of
space including shops, cafes, a hotel, the Sahara West Library and Fine Arts
Museum. Also, it has apartments and 50,000 square feet of office space,
according to Triple Five Nevada. It will operate 350 apartments. The company
also is developing $150 million Boca Park on the northeast corner of Charleston
and Rampart boulevards. The 96-acre project will include a Target and other
retail outlets as well as offices, condominiums and hotels. It developed Rainbow
Sahara & Rainbow Center, Grand Canyon Commercial Center and other projects for a
total of 4 million square feet of retail development in Las Vegas. It has two
apartment complexes, Wellington Meadows and La Villa Estates. "Las Vegas has
gone through a tremendous growth spurt in residences and now we believe it will
be going through a tremendous retail commercial growth in the suburbs," Walrath
said. The family applied to establish Peoples First Bank in Las Vegas, but
withdrew its bank application from the Nevada Financial Institutions Division in
August."
Jewish settlers find Las Vegas to be a good bet. Their numbers have doubled in
the past decade,
by Steve Friess, San Francisco Chronicle, April 5, 2004
"In fact, southern Nevada has become North America's fastest-growing Jewish
community. There are now 18 synagogues in "Sin City," along with a kosher
supermarket, a Jewish mayor and a Jewish congresswoman. Two major casino- hotels
have added special items to their menus for today and Tuesday, when Jews hold
the ceremonial seder, at which the story of their flight from Egypt is retold.
"Jews come here for the same reason everyone else does, for affordable housing,
great weather, no state income tax, lots of opportunity," said Rabbi Jeremy
Weiderhorn of Midbar Kodesh, a synagogue that grew from six families to more
than 300 in the past decade. An estimated 80,000 Jews live in the Las Vegas
area, about 5 percent of the local population of 1.5 million, double the number
from a decade ago, according to a population study by the Jewish Federation of
Las Vegas. About 10 percent of the 6,000 people who move here each month are
Jews, federation CEO Meyer Bodoff said. "What's happening in Las Vegas is part
of (the national trend in which) Jews are moving from the Northeast and the
North to the South and Southwest and from older regions into the West and
South," said Laurence Kotler- Berkowitz, research director for the National
Jewish Population Survey, which published a Jewish census last year. For Las
Vegas, that's a dramatic shift from the way things were when Rep. Shelley
Berkley, D-Nev., and her family arrived in 1962 from New York. Back then, there
was just one synagogue, and the city's most famous Jew was the late mobster
Bugsy Siegel. "Even in Israel, when I tell them I'm from Las Vegas, everybody
from the taxi driver to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon all know about it and they
love it, " said Berkley, who is Jewish. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak
starred at last month's annual fund-raising gala for the local Jewish
Federation, whose offices are home to a Holocaust museum and a library
frequently visited by groups from public schools and churches. Responding to the
gambling capital's changing demographic, several supermarkets, including the
recently opened Kosher Mart, provide a variety of kosher products. Every Krispy
Kreme donut shop in town is kosher, as is a Chinese eatery called Shalom Hunan.
Two hotels, the Four Seasons and the Rio, have dedicated kosher kitchens
available for private functions and conventions ... Then there's this summer's
Kosher Poker, a private poker tournament at the Sunset Station casino put on by
the Federation's young adults group. Bodoff admits he hesitated about whether to
support Kosher Poker, then decided it was clever in an only-in-Vegas sort of
way."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Where did bingo come from?
"One day, Edwin Lowe, a nineteen-year-old toy salesman, was driving back to his
New York home from Florida when he happened upon the county fair where beano had
become popular. The European-born son of a Polish Orthodox rabbi who had risked
his life to come to America, Lowe was part of an American generation determined
to succeed ... Lowe had to see what all the excitement was about ... Lowe
learned the details of how the game and the beano cards had been discovered at a
fair in Germany, and he bought a handful of cards from the operator to bring
back to New York. When Lowe got home, he created his own cards, bought some
dried beans, and invited over a number of friends ... The most dramatic moment
of the evening came when a young woman looked down and saw her five beans in a
straight row across her card. Rendered dumb, she momentarily couldn't remember
the name of the game. So instead of calling out 'Beano,' she began imitating the
sound of a winning slot machine bell, yelling 'Bing, bing, bing, bingo!"
In an interview years later, Lowe recalled that moment: 'I cannot describe the
sense of elation which that girl's cry brought to me, all I could think of was
that I was going to come out with this game and I was going to call it Bingo.'
But before he journeyed off to the patent office to unsuccessfully register the
Bingo trademark, Lowe showed his game to the parish priest of a Catholic church
in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The priest immediately saw the fund-raising
prospects for such a game ... With the Catholic Church as a ready buyer, Lowe
quit his job and dove headlong into the bingo business. Within a few years, he
had 226 presses printing out bingo cards around the clock. By 1934, there were
an estimated 10,000 bingo games a week across the United States, and Lowe's firm
had 1,000 employees trying to keep up with the demand. He was never able to
trademark the word 'bingo,' but he still became the dominant player in the
industry and made even more money selling small plastic chess and checkers sets.
In 1973, Lowe, had had invented and marketed a dice game called Yahtzee, sold
his company to the Milton Bradley company for Springfield, Massachusetts, for
$26 million. Lowe later turnd to more adult pursuits, eventually buying the
322-room Tally-Ho Inn in Las Vegas, which later became the Aladdin Hotel."
-from Eisler, Kim Isaac. Revenge of the Pequots. How a Small Native American
Tribe Created the World's Most Profitable Casino, Simon & Schuster, New York
..., 2001.
See also the Jews behind the Native American gambling casinos.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman is Jewish and lends government sanctioning to the
following. (Sanker turns up a Jewish surname. Amiri?)]
Las Vegas Mayor Oscar B. Goodman Welcomes KRAVE, The First Alternative Nightclub
on the Strip,
U.S. Newswire, October 7, 2004
"Krave Nightclub, the first alternative club on the world-famous Las Vegas Strip
opened this week with all the spectacle the city is known for. Krave owner Sia
Amiri, along with event promoter Jeffrey Sanker and producer John Stagliano
pulled out all the stops to host a grand opening celebration for this
"Omni-Sexual G-spot (Guys, Girls, Gay!). Kicking off the festivities, Las Vegas
Mayor Oscar B. Goodman issued a proclamation welcoming Krave to the Strip and
officially declared it "Krave Week" in Las Vegas to let the whole world know
that "this town welcomes everyone!" At the corner of Las Vegas Blvd. and Harmon
Ave., VIPs and special guests lined up on the red carpet early to catch a first
glimpse "THE avant garde gay club on the Strip to bring your metrosexual friends
to." Once inside, guests discovered a sensuous playground filled with food, fun
and frolicking. Sanker, known as "the high priest of gay parties," seduced
attendees with a mind boggling display of showmanship including state-of-the-art
lighting and effects, a red-hot armada of pumped up Go-Go Gods and Goddesses and
an aura of nocturnal excitement reminiscent of the wild 70's disco era. As the
party continued, Stagliano unleashed a preview of his erotic stage spectacle,
"The Fashionistas," allowing guests to become voyeurs to a sexually charged
fashion and fetish fantasy."
[Spreading decadence via the Jewish Wide Web: Here's a new effort to make Great
Britain yet another Jewish casino colony. Who runs the world Las Vegas matrix?
Sol Kerzner is an Israeli. Michael ("Lord") Levy was noted by the Daily
Telegraph in 1996 as the 'millionaire record producer and philanthropist [who]
is the power behind Labour leader [Tony Blair's] throne ... His crucial gift to
Labour's war chest will be through fund-rasing, something he is extremely good
at." [SYLVESTER , p. 9] Levy, noted the Independent, "owns luxurious homes in
north London and Israel." [WOLMAR, p. 3] He "is estimated to have raised some
$60 million for Blair, much of it from Jewish donors and much of it channeled
through a blind trust to shield the identity of the donors and protect Blair
from scandal." [DAVIS, D., 2-10-2000, p. 5].]
Blair Fundraiser Met Casino Boss,
by Andrew Porter, The Sunday Times (London -UK), October 24, 2004
"[British prime minister] Tony Blair's chief fundraiser met a high-ranking
executive of the world’s biggest casino firm weeks before the government
published plans to allow Las Vegas-style casinos in Britain. The private meeting
with Lord Levy in the House of Lords raises fresh questions about Labour’s links
to American gambling companies and why the prime minister appears so keen to
rush through laws allowing huge casino resorts to be built in Britain. MPs last
night said that they would be raising the issue in parliament at the earliest
opportunity. The disclosure that one of Labour’s most controversial figures has
held a meeting with a senior executive from MGM Mirage occurred after it emerged
last week that other American gambling executives had visited Downing Street.
Levy, who has raised millions for the Labour party in the past decade and is
building up a war chest for next year’s expected general election campaign, met
Lloyd Nathan, MGM’s European chief, in the summer. Levy’s spokesman said the
appointment was “purely a social meeting” and that the peer “knows zero about
gambling and has no connection to the current proposals”. He said that Nathan is
the brother of Elliot Nathan who is best friends with Levy’s son Daniel. MGM
Mirage is one of the companies that will benefit most from the gambling bill,
which is likely to become law next year. Downing Street has been surprised by
the adverse reaction to its plans. Ministers, including Tessa Jowell, the
culture secretary, are trying to convince Labour backbenchers and a wider public
that there is a need for new rules that will make it easier to walk into casinos
to gamble. MGM predicts that 10% of its profits could come from Britain in the
future. The company has confirmed that if all its plans come to fruition it will
spend “in excess of £1 billion” building casinos that will contain entertainment
complexes as well as 1,250 slot machines with £1m jackpots and numerous gaming
tables. Nathan declined to confirm the meeting with Levy. “I have met a lot of
people, including lords. But I do not want to go into this,” he said. The
encounter is bound to raise questions among Labour MPs and officials about the
role of the party’s fundraising operation in the context of the furore over
gambling. James Gray, Conservative MP for Wiltshire North, last night urged the
Labour party to look at its links with the big American casino firms and “come
clean”. He has tabled parliamentary questions asking key ministers, including
Blair and Jowell, what their connections are and what meetings they have had
with the overseas firms ... The key criticism is over the government’s plan to
restrict jackpot machines offering unlimited cash prizes to only the largest
casinos. It says that the plans will cause most existing British casinos to
suffer. The other overseas corporations lining up to take advantage of the new
laws include Las Vegas Sands, Caesars Entertainment and Sun International. Also
involved is Kerzner International, the South African casino giant run by Sol
Kerzner. Last week Downing Street officials denied that Blair had met Kerzner on
a recent trip to South Africa ... Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary, claimed
that opponents of the new gambling laws were snobs. “There’s a whiff of snobbery
in some of the opposition to new casinos: people who think they should remain
the preserve of the rich; others who find them gaudy and in poor taste; others
who don’t want the big investment that will come from the United States,” she
said."
Secret deal to cut casino tax fuels Brown anger,
by Greg Hurst and Sam Coates, Times {UK), October 25, 2004
"The Treasury reacted with fury last night after details of a secret offer by
government officials to slash tax on gaming were uncovered by The Times. US
casino industry leaders said they had been promised by the Government that tax
on gaming in Britain would be cut by more than half to attract large foreign
operators. The news dragged Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, further into Cabinet
divisions over the Gambling Bill as officials at the Treasury made clear he was
unaware of the offer. Yesterday it emerged that Mr Brown is one of at least
three senior ministers unhappy about parts of the Bill, which is expected to
lead to a dramatic expansion in the size and number of casinos The revelation
that non-Treasury officials had been discussing a more generous tax regime has
caused anger in the Treasury, where officials said no one had the authority to
make statements on the Bill’s revenue implications Frank Fahrenkopf, the head of
the American Gaming Association, said government officials proposed to cut tax
on gaming from 40 per cent to between 15 and 20 per cent."
[JTR contributor's comment: "Is 'anti-Americanism' becoming a code expression
for 'anti-Semitism?'" Our comment about the author below: Lady, blast the
British Labor government but name the Jewish foundation behind the gambling
industry -- and prime minister Tony Blair.]
I can't vote for Tessa now that she pimps for casino bosses,
by Janice Turner, Times (UK), October 24, 2004
"A LEAFLET from my local MP came through my door this week. There is a picture
of jolly Tessa Jowell with a class of smiling seven-year-olds supporting a
longed-for new secondary school in my area. Here is warm and understanding Tessa
meeting a D-Day veteran. Overleaf is concerned Tessa — “a parent herself” — at a
nursery, empathising with child-care problems But none of these Tessas will get
my vote again. Because the Tessa I cannot get out my head is the one who has
been in every newspaper: the Culture Secretary smiling as she places a chip on a
roulette table at a Piccadilly casino. The publication of the Gambling Bill
makes me feel I have tumbled into an Alice in Wonderland moral universe where I
stand shoulder to shoulder with the Daily Mail and religous leaders against a
Labour Government promoting greed, venality and vice. Because gambling is a
vice. Why will no one say this any more? Why are Labour ministers so worried
about being modern, populist and — to use Tessa’s word “grown-up” — that they
must pretend that roulette is a leisure activity like ten-pin bowling, that
casinos are no worse than multiplex cinemas, that sitting at a slot machine
shovelling in the wage you strived all week to earn is a bit of innocent fun?
Gambling is the most heartless and rapacious manifestation of capitalism: it
takes money from the poorest and gives them nothing in return. Except the
insatiable desire to do it again. Socialism has always offered a route to
working-class betterment through education, self-control, by living honourably
and working for the common good. What a travesty that under this Labour
Government the British have become Europe’s biggest gamblers. Gambling is about
living for a ten-million-to-one chance, wealth and glory for zero effort,
squandering the present for an imaginary tomorrow. We already have a culture of
instant gratification where fame is just a reality TV show away, where a dream
holiday is only unaffordable until you fill in a credit card application.Young
people are habitually in debt, they struggle to afford mortgages, postpone
having children. They can already gamble on the internet, their TV digibox, at
the newsagent, on a mobile phone. And yet now the Government wants to create
even more outlets for them to squander what they have on the spin of a wheel ...
But when they have, the super-casinos will be waiting. Huge US companies have
already earmarked sites in run-down areas such as Salford and Hull. How enticing
MGM Mirage’s wad must be to hard-up councils. But it will be a short-term gain:
political clout transferred from elected officials to almighty, irremovable
casino bosses Gambling is a moral issue: gambling revenue is quite simply dirty
money. I don’t want our cities regenerated with young couples’ house deposits. I
don’t want our new secondary school created with family Christmas funds or
pensioners’ gas bills. I voted for Tessa, expecting an MP who would combat the
gambling industry, not act as its pimp."
Terrorists could use super-casinos as a cover to channel funds, senators say,
MGM Mirage fined for breaching financial rules,
By Sam Coates and Abigail Rayner, Times (UK), October 26, 2004
"Giant casinos present an “unusual opportunity” for terrorists and criminal
gangs to launder money, members of an influential Senate panel have claimed.
Their comments came after a record $5 million (£2.7 million) fine imposed on MGM
Mirage — which has plans for super- casinos in Newcastle upon Tyne, Sheffield
and London — for failing to comply with US measures to combat money-laundering.
MGM Mirage neglected to submit 14,903 currency transactions to the US Treasury
Department for The Mirage casino in the 18 months to December 2002. Casinos are
required to report transactions over $10,000 to the Treasury’s Financial Crime
Network Service to monitor illegal activity. As well as the record fine from the
Nevada Gaming Control Board, Christopher Morishita, a former compliance officer
at The Mirage, was prosecuted. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three
years’ probation ... Senator Richard Shelby, the Republican chairman of the
committee, asked how it was possible to prevent the abuse of casinos given the
recent proliferation, with 600 casinos now in 30 states. “How do we ensure that
the explosion in legalised gambling is not abused by those seeking to launder
the proceeds of crime or to finance criminal or terrorist activity?” he asked.
Senator Jim Bunning concurred, saying that MGM Mirage’s failure to follow
anti-money-laundering measures was “very disconcerting” ... Alan Feldman, a
senior vice-president of public affairs from MGM Mirage, said that the financial
link between terrorism and casinos was “ephemeral” at best. He said: “It is
unfortunate that this has come up in election-year politics. That said, we
failed to file the reports.” Casinos in the UK have to adhere to the second EU
Directive on Money-Laundering, which will mean that gamers will have to show ID.
MGM Mirage opposes this directive and has said that itthreatens its investment.
Lloyd Nathan, its European managing director, said: “We want a large number of
people coming through the doors, but the EU is saying casinos need to identity
everyone before they enter. This is impossible if you have 15,000 coming into a
casino on a Saturday night.”
Isle of Capri Casinos, Inc. Founder, CEO Receives Award From University of
Illinois,
Yahoo! Financial News, November 1, 2004
"Isle of Capri Casinos, Inc. founder, chief executive officer and chairman,
Bernard Goldstein, was honored Friday with the Distinguished Alumnus Award by
his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Law.
Goldstein, who graduated from the college in 1951 with a juris doctorate,
received the award at the university's homecoming and reception dinner ...
Goldstein, often referred to as the "Father of Riverboat Gaming," was active in
the development of the industry in a number of states and was instrumental in
lobbying for the original legislation for riverboat gaming in Iowa. Goldstein is
also chairman of the board of the Iowa-based Alter Companies, founded in 1898,
which are involved in scrap metal recycling, river freight transportation and
affiliated businesses ... Isle of Capri Casinos, Inc., a leading developer and
owner of gaming and entertainment facilities, operates 16 casinos in 14
locations. The company owns and operates riverboat and dockside casinos in
Biloxi, Vicksburg, Lula and Natchez, Mississippi; Bossier City and Lake Charles
(two riverboats), Louisiana; Bettendorf, Davenport and Marquette, Iowa; and
Kansas City and Boonville, Missouri. The company also owns a 57 percent interest
in and operates land-based casinos in Black Hawk (two casinos) and Cripple
Creek, Colorado. Isle of Capri's international gaming interests include a casino
that it operates in Freeport, Grand Bahama, and a two-thirds ownership interest
in casinos in Dudley, Walsal and Wolverhampton, England. The company also owns
and operates Pompano Park Harness Racing Track in Pompano Beach, Florida."
Civil servant is 'victim of smear campaign',
By Paul Waugh, Evening Standard (This is London) - UK, November 1, 2004
"The senior civil servant in charge of the Gambling Bill is the victim of a
"smear campaign", Tessa Jowell said today. Gideon Hoffman, head of gaming at the
Department of Culture, Media and Sport, sent his CV to bookmakers Ladbrokes just
before taking up his current job. Shadow culture secretary John Whittingdale
said it was "extraordinary" that Mr Hoffman had applied for the post and said
there should be an investigation into a possible conflict of interest. But Ms
Jowell hit out angrily at the revelations, adding that it was "nobody's
business" if Mr Hoffman had three personal betting accounts as claimed this
weekend. She said: "This individual is facing a smear campaign because there are
parts of our media that don't like this policy. I say to those people I'm
responsible for this policy. Don't attack civil servants who can't go to the
despatch."
See also Jewish influence in "Indian casinos" (scroll down page to Native
American section)
JEWISH TRIBAL REVIEW
NATIVE AMERICANS are run by
the Jewish crowd
Who Gets the
Money? Needy Native Americans, you'd think. But Indian casinos are making
millions for their investors and providing little to the poor,
Time, December 8, 2002
 Abe Berman |
|
Actually, calling these people investors understates their role. They often serve as master strategists who draw up the plans and then underwrite the total cost of bringing a casino online: ferreting out an amenable tribe, paying a signing bonus, picking up tribal expenses and paying the salaries of the tribe's officials, all of this before a spade of dirt is turned. If an Indian band isn't federally recognized as a tribe and is thus ineligible for a gaming venture, these full-service backers will bankroll genealogists to construct a family tree, then hire lawyers and lobbyists in Washington to help change the band's status. And if a reservation isn't prime real estate for a casino, the investors sometimes purchase a more suitable patch and instruct their lawyers and lobbyists to persuade the government to designate the land as a trust, as reservation property is called ... Say what you will about Lyle Berman—and people have called him a lot of things: a pit bull, an intimidator, a fearsome competitor—but no one has ever accused him of modesty. Of his casino-development company, Lakes Entertainment Inc., Berman once told reporters, 'We're the most successful company in Indian gaming' ... By his account, as of September 2001, he was worth almost $69 million."
October 30, 2001 Casino case raises issues of money, politics Contributions
coincide with favorable decisions,
By Sean P. Murphy, Citizens Alliance (from Globe),
October 30, 2001
"Arthur
Goldberg, owner of Caesars, Bally's, and other casinos in Atlantic
City, knew a threat when he saw one: When an Indian tribe, the St. Regis
Mohawks, announced plans last year to build a casino in Monticello - an hour
closer to New York City than his casinos - Goldberg knew his business
would suffer. But Goldberg, a fund-raiser for the Democratic Party, had
friends in high places. Pretty soon he was arranging meetings with President
Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. Then came a cascade of ''soft money''
contributions to the Democrats. Over a five-month period following the April
2000 announcement of the Mohawk casino deal, Clinton's Bureau of Indian Affairs
made several unusual decisions helpful to Goldberg. First, the bureau
withdrew the federal government's longstanding support for the group of Mohawks
who planned the casino in Monticello; instead, the bureau backed a group of
tribal leaders allied with Goldberg; and finally, the bureau intervened
to help prevent the enforcement of a Mohawk tribal court's $1.8 billion judgment
against Goldberg for interfering in tribal affairs. On the very day -
Oct. 6, 2000 - that the Bureau of Indian Affairs issued a letter declaring that
the tribal court had no authority, Goldberg's company contributed $10,000
to the Democratic National Committee. It was the second time a Goldberg
contribution was registered on the day of a decision favorable to him ... ''Arthur
Goldberg reached right into the government to protect his Atlantic City
casinos by controlling gaming in New York state,'' said
Robert Berman,
a businessman who headed the group planning the Mohawk casino at the
Monticello Raceway."
Kerzner's son lobbying for casino,
 |
|
The Boston Globe reported the partnership, Trading Cove Associates,
will have received an estimated $1 billion from the tribe
that owns the casino over the life of the partnership -- apparently hundreds of
millions of dollars more than allowed by federal law. Critics charge that amount
is exploitative and well above the 30 percent limit on profits non-Indians are
allowed to earn from Indian casinos. Trading Cove and Mohegan
officials have defended their arrangement as appropriate, though that deal has
prompted Congress to consider tightening the law to ensure tribes are not
exploited by non-Indian developers."
Tribal Gamble. The Lure and Peril of Indian Gambling,
Boston Globe, August 26, 2001
One of a series of Globe articles on this subject:
"Focusing on the huge profits some investors now take from Indian-owned casinos,
an angry Senator John McCain yesterday grilled two government officials on the
deal-making behind the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut and on the Clinton
administration's last-minute recognition of the Nipmuc tribe of Central
Massachusetts. In his questioning, McCain made clear his concern that non-Indian
investors at the Mohegan Sun casino dodged federal law to get hundreds of
millions of dollars in extra profits that rightfully belonged to the tribe. "Do
you find that disturbing? Outrageous, even?" McCain asked Montie Deer, the
chairman of the National Indian Gaming Commission, a panel established to
enforce a strict limit on casino profits for non-Indian investors ... McCain
pinpointed the Mohegan tribe's relationship with a group of investors known as
Trading Cove Associates, a syndicate headed by international gambling
mogul Sol Kerzner,
creator of Sun City in South Africa. In 1988, Congress recognized that some
tribes were so poor that they might agree to give as much as 90 percent of any
profits to their non-Indian investors. Congress set 30 percent as the maximum
profit margin for those investors, though in exceptional circumstances the
tribes could grant up to 40 percent. The Indian Gaming Commission was charged
with enforcing that limit by approving contracts between tribes and investors
who would also act as casino general managers. The Mohegan tribe made its deal
with Trading Cove Associates, which originally proposed to develop both a
casino and an on-site hotel in exchange for the development rights. But before
submitting the proposal to the National Indian Gaming Commission, Trading
Cove withdrew the hotel component. The commission approved maximum
compensation for Trading Cove in 1995 anyway -- an arrangement worth close to
$500 million, to be paid over seven years. After the casino opened, Trading Cove
and the tribal leadership agreed on a 'buyout' whereby the tribe would take over
direct management of the casino. Nevertheless, the tribe promised to pay
Trading Cove in full, as if Trading Cove had continued as general
manager. But with Trading Cove no longer managing the casino, the National
Indian Gaming Commission lost authority to enforce restrictions on Trading
Cove's share of profits. That was the ruling of the commission's general
counsel in 1998. As a result, Trading Cove could then negotiate for
profits above the maximum set by Congress. And it did so by selling the hotel
rights back to the tribe for as much as $450 million, according to interviews
and documents reviewed by the Globe. Trading Cove, in all, will
receive an estimated $1 billion from the tribe."
Casino operator offers
to buy, donate massacre site,
by Deborah Frazier, Rocky Mountain News (at
mytwobeadsworth.com),
 |
|
That same year, he had taken his family to the Nazi death camp at Dachu,
where his father, an Army captain, had helped evacuate the starving survivors at
the end of World War II. The Drucks
are
Jewish, but none of
their close relatives died in the concentration camps, he said ... Druck,
who calls himself a 'recovering attorney' who did well in real estate, also did
pro bono work for Native Americans in Minnesota until he closed his law practice
in 1976. Years later, some of his Indian clients approached him to run a casino.
Druck went to work for the Arapaho and Cheyenne in Oklahoma in 1992 on
the first Indian bingo casino approved by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Druck
also owns the Gold Rush Casino in Cripple Creek."
At $500 an Hour, Lobbyist's Influence Rises with G.O.P.,
New York Times (posted at gtlaw.com), April 3, 2002
"In the last six months of 2001, the Coushatta Indians, a tribe with 800 members
and a large casino in southwestern Louisiana, paid $1.76 million to the law firm
of Jack Abramoff
[law firm: Greenberg Tausig], a Republican lobbyist here. Last
month, the Bush administration handed the tribe a big victory by blocking
construction of a casino by a rival tribe that would have drained much of the
Coushatta's business. William Worfel, vice chairman of the Coushattas, views the
administration's decision as a direct benefit of the eye-popping lobbying his
tribe paid Mr. Abramoff, more money than many giant corporations like AOL,
Time-Warner and American Airlines paid lobbyists in the same period ... Mr.
Abramoff, 43, has used his close ties to Republican Tom DeLay of Texas, the
Republican whip, and other conservatives in the Hose to become one of the most
influential -- and, at $500 an hour, best compensated -- lobbyists in Washington
... Unlike many lobbyists who take almost any client who is willing to pay their
fee, Mr. Abramoff says he represents only those who stand for
conservative principles. They include three Indian tribes [actually five
noted in this article: the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana, the Coushetta Tribe of
Lousiana, the Sagninaw Chippewa Tribe, the Hopi Tribe, and the Missississippi
Choctaw] with big casinos and, until recently, the Northern Mariana Islands ...
[Abramoff] is an Orthodox Jew whos ays that even more than politics, his
religion is a cnetral element of his life ... The Mississippi Choctaw paid
Greenberg Traurig more than $1 million in the last half of 2001 ... The other
big issue for Mr. Abramoff in 1995 that promoted his career was a bill
pased by the Senate that would have stripped the Norhern Mariana Islands of
their exemption from the United States minimum wage and immigration laws ...
Representative George Miller, a California Democrat who sponsored the
legislation in the House, is still furious about Mr. Abramoff's action. In a
recent interview, Mr. Miller said, '[Abramoff] spent a lot of time,
effort and money to protect a system that was a growth industry for sex shops,
prostitution, abuse of women, slavery, illegal immigration, worker exploitation
and narcotics, and he did it all in the name of freedom.'"
One little, two little, three little Indian casinos,
by Kenny Pearlman, Game Master Online,
October 1, 2002
"Southern California is inundated with Indian casinos. When the idea of building
casinos on Indian reservations came up in the California legislature it would
have been soundly defeated except for the fact that the Indian tribes
contributed millions of dollars to the Governor's race, as well as to the
various Senate races in the state. The Indian's land was sovereign and so
couldn't be regulated by any state agency ... The Indians promised there woud be
no hanky-panky, that they would run their casinos just like the Nevada casinos;
in fact, since most of their start-up money was coming from the Nevada casinos [Who
owns these?] anyway, they would their 'investors' check their operations.
That's like sending the fox to the chicken shed to count the chickens. When it
came time to do any checking, the Indians had their Jewish lawyers claim
soverignty and it was a done deal. The books could be cooked and no one was
allowed in the k itchen to even see what they hell they were putting in the
food."
Tribal
Gamble, The Lure and Peril of Indian Gambling,
A Big Roll at Mohegan Sun,
Boston Globe, December 10, 2000
First of four parts,
"It rises out of the rolling hills with the promise of grandeur, its massive
glass towers designed to loom 440 feet over the reflected countryside, an
instant landmark, a beacon to a palace built for gamblers. At a cost of $1.1
billion, this expansion of the Mohegan Sun Casino is one of the country's
largest private construction projects, a steel testament to the extravagant
profits in the rapidly expanding Indian gaming industry. But it also stands as a
monument to a classic American deal, a latter-day version of Indian treasure
being carried off by non-Indians, despite a federal law designed to keep Indian
gaming money firmly in tribal hands ... In all, the investor group headed by
Sol Kerzner, developer
of the Sun City Casino in South Africa, will take at least $800 million out of
the Mohegan Sun Casino. The Mohegans were almost penniless and landless and
relying on lawyers apparently financed by the Kerzner group when they
struck the deal that cost them so dearly. Since then, the terms of the deal have
largely been kept quiet by the Mohegans and the investors. At least two of the
three members of the regulatory agency responsible for reviewing the finances of
Indian casinos only learned of the lucrative hotel component when contacted by
the Globe. The heavy share of profits being carted off by non-Indian
businesses like Kerzner's is only one failure of the federal Indian gaming
system. Born partly of a desire to apply the '80s faith in free enterprise to
the nation's poorest ethnic group, the story of Indian gaming is now one of
congressional intentions gone awry. The gaming act has failed to broadly improve
the living conditions of most Indians. A Globe analysis revealed that
just 2 percent of the country's Native Americans earn 50 percent of the
country's $10 billion in Indian gaming revenues, and two-thirds of Indians get
nothing at all ... The explosion in Indian gaming casinos, already allegedly
infiltrated in some places by underworld figures, is occurring with little
government oversight. The commission responsible for policing more than 241
Indian gaming operations has a budget of only $8 million and a staff of 70. By
contrast, the commission supervising the 12 Atlantic City casinos spends $58
million and employs a comparative army of 800 regulators While hundreds of
millions of Indian dollars are being spent on lobbying and campaign
contributions in states where gaming is prime - including more than $100 million
in California alone - tribes have witnessed per capita government spending on
Indian health, education, and housing drop in real dollars, while human service
spending for all Americans has soared. ... Kerzner and two other
businessmen spent freely for lawyers and other professionals to negotiate the
tribe through a labyrinth of federal and state regulations, Mohegan leaders say.
... In 1998, Trading Cove cashed out. Their take: a flat five percent of all
money spent at Mohegan Sun, not just profits, for every year until 2015, without
doing any further work. Based on the tribe's estimate, it's worth $675 million
to Kernzer and his two partners. The remaining years of the management contract
- the subject of all the commission's wrangling - was worth $245 million,
according to federal disclosures by the tribe. The largely unnoticed hotel
portion of the deal was worth $430 million. Combined with the $145 million
already paid out on the management contract, the Kerzner group will leave the
deal with more than $800 million ... Leonard Wolman, one of Kerzner's
partners, said ''All the agreements were properly filed.' Wolman, a South
African native who has become one of Connecticut's leading developers, said he
and his Trading Cove partners were ''fairly compensated'' for the ''incredible
risk'' they took in the deal."
Genting MD lending US $80mil to tribe to build Niagara Falls casino,
The Star, November 15, 2002
"GENTING Bhd managing director Tan Sri Lim Kok Thay will lend US$80mil to the
Seneca Nation of Indians to build a casino at Niagara Falls, according to a
report in The Buffalo News. The five-year loan from Lim’s family
investment company, carrying an interest rate of 29% per annum, would provide
the fuel for the plan to turn the New York side of Niagara Falls into a gambling
haven, said the report dated Nov 12. Several other Indian tribes had approached
Lim seeking financing for casino projects around the United States but
Steven G. Horowitz, a New
York attorney representing Lim, said his client had turned them down because
they did not have what the Senecas have – a Niagara Falls address ... The report
said that while most US bank real estate development loans were going for about
5%, the interest rate Lim would get from the Senecas was more than
two-and-a-half times the rate paid on junk bonds."
12.7 billion industry
Corruption of
Indian casinos no surprise,
by Bill Steigerwald,
Jewish World Review, Dec. 13, 2002
 |
|
|
 |
But the folks who put out Forbes - America's best, most gleeful
and most consistent booster of free-market capitalism, would only have yawned
and said, 'So what else is news?' For 85 years, Forbes has made its
living reporting and studying the bad things government does when it sticks its
politicized nose into the people's business. Its special anniversary issue is,
as usual, generously crammed with smart, well-written, readable and completely
biased articles that, as its editor, William Baldwin, says, 'celebrate the
success of capitalism in spreading prosperity by spreading innovation.'
Forbes knows the obvious and never tires of repeating it: Capitalism and
economic freedom improve lives. As proof, it profiles 85 innovations created by
inventors and entrepreneurs of all levels of savviness and craziness - from
sneakers, frozen food and wallboard to FM radio, cell phones, Pampers,
three-point seatbelts and Viagra - that we either take for granted or can't live
without."
Ex-FSIN chief praises Hitler in speech
The StarPhoenix, December 14, 2002
[Note: the StarPhoenix is owned by Jewish/Zionist activist media mogul
Izzy Asper. This article is
also highlighted
here, in his paper, the Leader-Post, in Regina, Saskatchewan, which
Asper also owns]
"A respected Saskatchewan Indian leader said Friday Hitler did the right thing
when he 'fried' six million Jews during the Second World War. In comments one
local Jewish leader described as unfortunate, David Ahenakew, a senator with the
Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN), a former chief of the
organization and a former chief of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), said in
an interview Friday the Nazi leader was trying to clean up the world during the
war. 'The Jews damn near owned all of Germany prior to the war,' Ahenakew said.
'That's how Hitler came in. He was going to make damn sure that the Jews didn't
take over Germany or Europe. That's why he fried six million of those guys, you
know. Jews would have owned the goddamned world. And look what they're doing.
They're killing people in Arab countries' ... When asked how he could justify
the Holocaust, Ahenakew said: 'How do you get rid of a disease like that, that's
going to take over, that's going to dominate?" Ahenakew said when he served in
Egypt in 1964. he saw Jews kill people. When asked for details, he said mines
planted by the Israeli army killed civilians. 'All I know is what the Germans
told me. Of course, I believe them. I saw the Jews kill people in Egypt when I
was there. The Palestinians, Arabs. I saw them (Israel) f---ing dominate
everything ... I don't support Hitler. But he cleaned up a hell of a lot of
things, didn't he? You would be owned by the Jews right now the world over.
Look, a small, little country (Israel) like that and everyone supports them. Who
the hell owns many of the banks in the states, many of the corporations? Look at
here in Canada. Izzy Asper (chair of CanWest Global, the owner of The
StarPhoenix). He controls the media. What the hell does that tell you?
That's power. That's f---ing power.' Ahenakew, who was FSIN chief from 1968-78
and AFN chief from 1982-85, grew impatient when told non-Jews own media
companies, as well. 'The hell with the Jews. I can't stand them. And that's it.
I don't want to talk about them.'"
[Stating that Jews dominate the mass media is true. In Canada, saying this
is apparently punishable as a "hate crime."]
Ahenakew claims
'racial control' of media,
CBC (Canada), August 14, 2003
"An aboriginal leader who faces hate crime charges for comments about Adolf
Hitler and the Jews has made controversial new comments about racial control of
the media, a Toronto-based magazine says. David Ahenakew In its July/August
edition, This Magazine quotes David Ahenakew as saying no one race should
have control of the media. "When a group of people, a race of people, can
control the world media, then there's got to be something done about that,"
Ahenakew is quoted as saying before hanging up the phone on reporter Alex Roslin.
The article says Ahenakew later told the reporter that he is frustrated that he
has to defend himself over his views on Jewish control of banks and the media.
"For me to keep defending myself in my own land is not going to happen," This
Magazine quotes Ahenakew as saying. It is Ahenakew's first interview since
his controversial comments last year about Hitler. FROM JUNE 11, 2003:
Ahenakew charged with spreading hate. In December, he told a Saskatoon
reporter at a conference that Hitler was trying to "clean up the world" when he
"fried" six million Jews in the Holocaust. World domination Ahenakew said
Hitler's rise to power was a response to the "disease" of Jewish world
domination. He was head of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations senate
at the time but later quit the post. In June, the Saskatchewan Justice
Department charged him with promoting hatred. He later apologized for his
comments and said he doesn't hold the views expressed in the December interview.
But the article in This Magazine quotes sources familiar with the former
native leader who say he has long held racist views which have been largely shielded
from the public."
[What does the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl
have to do with Canadian Indians? Nothing. But the Jewish Lobby bends everything
into their orbit of pro-Israel fanaticism.]
Cree chief supports fight against anti-Semitism,
CTV (Canadian Press), June 1, 2003
"Shared experiences of oppression and racism bind Canada's Jews and native
people in a common battle to fight hatred, the grand chief of Quebec's northern
Cree told a conference on Sunday. "Part of a shared experience between
aboriginal peoples and Jews is a history of oppression, of marginalization, and
of struggling to retain our identities as societies within larger, often hostile
and hateful societies," Grand Chief Ted Moses told an anti-Semitism conference
organized by the Canadian Jewish Congress. The event attracted the father of
slain American reporter Daniel Pearl, Canadian political leaders, human
rights experts and a variety of Quebec political commentators. In an emotional
speech, Judea Pearl denounced the growing global scourge of anti-Semitism
and discussed his family's efforts to address the root causes of hate that
resulted in his son's death. Pearl was a Wall Street Journal reporter who
was kidnapped and killed last year in Pakistan while researching militants and
terrorism in Pakistan. In a videotape of his killing, Pearl defiantly told his
captors that he was Jewish ... A series of conference speakers described the
worsening anti-Semitism that has arisen around the world since the attacks on
New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington. "We are entering a
new, escalating, virulent, global and even lethal anti-Semitism," said Irwin
Cotler, a renowned human rights professor and Liberal MP. Traditional
anti-Semitism against Jews in Canada, the U.S. and elsewhere has been replaced
by increasing attacks against the Jewish people and the right of Israel to
survive among nations, he said."
[Abramoff is Jewish. Scanlon? More on the many Jewish-run rip-off "Indian
casinos," here. (See
Native American section down the page)]
U.S. Investigating GOP Lobbyists
with Ties to Indian-Run Casinos,
BY JACK NEWFIELD, New York Sun, September 8, 2004
"A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., is hearing testimony and analyzing
thousands of banking and billing records connected to two
prominent Republican lobbyists and strategists as part of a
racketeering probe involving Indian-run casinos.
The men,
Jack Abramoff
and Mike Scanlon,
have received a total of more than $45
million since 2001 from 11
tribes with gambling casinos ranging
from Louisiana to Mississippi, to
California to Michigan, and to Texas. They are under investigation
for possible money-laundering, racketeering, and tax fraud, federal law
enforcement and Senate sources say. The investigation is opening a window on the
murky world of Indian gambling, Washington lobbying, money washing, and campaign
finance. It also is a cautionary tale for New York, which has four Indian-run
casinos and is considering adding at least four more. A task force that includes
the FBI, IRS, and the Justice Department's public integrity section is running
the criminal probe. Indictments are expected this fall, according to sources
close to the task force. Mr. Abramoff was ousted from his prominent law
firm - Greenberg Traurig - in March, reportedly after his partners
discovered he took more than $10 million in payments from Mr. Scanlon without
the firm's knowledge. Investigators say most of the $45 million was paid to Mr.
Scanlon as a public relations consultant, meaning he did not have to make public
disclosure. Mr. Abramoff, one of Washington's top
lobbyists, must report such payments. Mr. Scanlon, 33, is the former
press secretary to the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. Mr. Abramoff,
45, who was the registered lobbyist for the dictatorship of the late Mobutu Sese
Seko of Zaire, received $7 million from the government of the Mariana Islands to
keep the protectorate exempt from American minimum-wage laws ... The federal
prosecutors, who have amassed a "war room" of more 100,000 documents, have
subpoenaed the banking records of a foundation created by Mr. Abramoff
and his wife and of a campaign consulting company and a "think tank" in Delaware
run by Mr. Scanlon. These institutions are suspected of
laundering large sums of money "donated" by the tribes for personal and
political use by the lobbyists ... Mr. Scanlon's think tank - the
American International Center - received a $556,000 donation from the 800-member
Coushatta tribe of Louisiana. The AIC, was run by a former lifeguard and a
former yoga instructor, produced no policy work, and went defunct after a year.
The AIC, located on property owned by Mr. Scanlon, paid Mr. Abramoff $1.5
million in fees, much of it after it after it closed. Mr. Abramoff's
Capitol Athletic Foundation received $1 million each from the Coushatta tribe of
Louisiana, and the Choctaw tribe of Mississippi. This
foundation then made a $1.8 million donation to an Orthodox Jewish private
school founded by Mr. Abramoff. The school closed when Mr.
Abramoff was expelled from his law firm. A 2003 audit of the Coushattas by the
tribe's former controller, Erick LaRoque, found the tribe had a $40 million
deficit, and that "operating equity and cash reserves have suffered significant
decline. "The audit reported that
$24 million had
been taken from the tribe's education, health care, and housing funds,
and, "There is no documented plan for reimbursement." Three dissident
leaders of the tribe - secretary treasurer Harold John, tribal council member
David Sickey, and Ben Langley - have told The New York Sun they were excluded
from all meetings and decision-making involving the lobbyists, their fee
structure, and what the men did to earn these fees. Mr. Sickey said he is
"disgusted" by the donation of "sacred tribal education funds" to the foundation
and think tank "without proper documentation." Law enforcement sources have told
the Sun that one aspect of the "hydra headed" grand jury probe is that the
Coushatta tribe paid Mr. Scanlon's company to spy on dissidents and their
lawyers ... The Agua Caliente tribe of California, which has been resisting a
union organizing drive, gave $100,000 to the Republican National Committee
shortly after hiring Mr. Abramoff. The Agua Caliente tribe paid Mr. Abramoff
$1.6 million in lobbying fees for one year and hired Mr. Scanlon to run a
$7.4 million letter-writing campaign to then-governor, Gray Davis, a Democrat,
for more slot machines. This failed effort generated 2,000 letters, at a cost of
$3,700 per letter, according to tribal dissidents."
[Yet another in the kaleidescope of professional Jewish scamsters and
it's the usual: skimming off millions somewhere to fund a private Jewish
school.]
Records Detail Spending By GOP Lobbyist Abramoff,
by R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post, September 28,
2004; Page A01
"T
Fleecing the 'monkeys,'
by Jerry Reynolds, Indian Country Today, The
Nation's Leading American Indian News Source,
October 5, 2004
"Days after the week-long celebration of the new National Museum of the American
Indian, tribal members and Congressmen were fuming over revelations about a new
scandal in Indian country, the doings of lobbyist Jack Abramoff
and his associate, Michael Scanlon. At a Sept. 29 Senate Indian Affairs
Committee hearing on $66 million in lobbying fees that the two received from
several tribes, Sen. Daniel K. Inouye noted the contrast, saying that attention
now turns from the museum and its promise for the Native future to ''another
most unseemly manifestation of the exploitation of the American Indian.''
In e-mail exchanges that the Committee blew up on large panels in the hearing
room, Abramoff and Scanlon referred to tribal clients who paid
them $66 million over three years in terms of ''absolute contempt,'' said
Chairman Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo. Campbell said Abramoff
on one occasion sent an e-mail stating ''I have to
meet with the monkeys,'' referring to his clients, the Mississippi
Choctaw tribe. On other occasions, Campbell said, the e-mails refer to tribal
clients as ''morons, stupid idiots ... troglodytes,
losers.'' Campbell, the only Indian in the Senate, said the words
offended him personally. Witnesses and senators at the hearing referred to the
two men variously as ''vultures,'' ''con men,'' ''crooks,''
''charlatans'' and ''a pathetic, disgusting example of greed run amok.''
No one called them guilty of criminal wrongdoing though. The committee has
issued at least 45 subpoenas and reviewed thousands of documents in exposing an
alleged pattern of business practice aimed by Abramoff and Scanlon at
''impressionable'' tribal leaders, in Sen. John McCain's word. During the years
when the e-mails were exchanged, 2001 to 2004, the committee alleges that
Abramoff and Scanlon received or directed the spending of at least $66 million
from six tribes: The Mississippi Choctaw, the Louisiana Coushatta, the Agua
Caliente, Sandia Pueblo, the Saginaw Chippewa and the Tigua of Ysleta del Sur
Pueblo. Despite assertions from the committee that Abramoff and
Scanlon put minimal effort into earning their fees, newspaper accounts indicate
that some of their efforts went into keeping track of likely competitors for
casino tribes. In one incident, reported at length in the Washington Post, the
two along with Christian conservative Ralph Reed, worked to support efforts of
the state of Texas to shut down the casino of the Tigua in El Paso. (Reed, a
known foe of gaming, has not been implicated in the other Indian-specific
ventures of Abramoff and Scanlon.) Upon succeeding,
the e-mail trail shows, the two gloated over the
unemployment of casino workers. Having fulfilled the requirements of one
tribal contract by lobbying to get the Tigua casino shut down, they turned
around and took $4.2 million from the Tigua to lobby for its reopening. Along
the way, in an exchange of e-mails, they belittled the Tigua for needing their
help. The casino has never reopened. In securing lucrative contracts for
themselves, Abramoff and Scanlon may have interfered in at
least two tribal elections by backing slates of candidates favorable to them,
said senators and witnesses. Agua Caliente Chairman Richard Milanovich told the
committee that the two tried to arrange his defeat ... In addition, the
committee alleged, Abramoff directed tribal contributions to a
charity he controlled."
Abramoff Allies Keeping Distance. Lobbyist under scrutiny for dealing with
Indian tribes,
by Thomas B. Edsall, Washington Post, November 8,
2004
"Shortly after Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, tribal leaders of
the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians approached lobbyist Jack
Abramoff with a problem. The tribe's Silver Star Hotel & Casino had
barely opened and already legislation was moving forward in Congress calling for
Indian casinos to be taxed in the same manner as Las Vegas gambling facilities.
Abramoff knew how to take care of the Choctaws. He convinced
the House Republican leadership that it had violated a core principle of the new
conservative majority: It had raised taxes. The legislation was scuttled. With
Indian gambling revenue now exceeding $16 billion annually, Abramoff's
success saved the tribes hundreds of millions of dollars. Soon,
he was representing half a dozen other Indian tribes, some
paying his firm $2 million or more a year. In less than a decade,
Abramoff's ties to Republican congressional
leaders and powerbrokers in the conservative movement catapulted him into the
highest ranks of Washington lobbyists. By 2003, Abramoff's
clients -- including the Business Roundtable, Atofina Chemicals, Humana,
Primedia Inc. and tribal clients -- paid his law firm $11.57 million in fees,
one of the highest such sums in Washington. Paving the way for Abramoff's
rise were his ties to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), Americans for
Tax Reform President Grover Norquist and former Christian Coalition executive
director Ralph Reed. Abramoff's success lay in his ability to
portray clients as exemplars of successful free market competition under attack
by overzealous Democrats. On behalf of Indian tribes and other clients,
Abramoff convinced the GOP majority that Democrats were bent on
regulating and taxing the entrepreneurial vitality out of the U.S. economy. In
effect, he turned conservative orthodoxy into a cash spigot
... Now, however, the $66 million that Abramoff and his
business partner, public affairs consultant Michael Scanlon, charged Indian
tribes has become the focus of separate investigations by a federal grand jury
and Congress. The controversy has produced disclosures embarrassing to some of
Abramoff's political allies. Already, the inquiries have
revealed that Abramoff and Scanlon -- DeLay's former spokesman -- channeled
money to Reed and Norquist's organizations. Reed has been forced to explain
receipt of money channeled from casinos through Abramoff;
Norquist, in turn, has denied that the payments he received drove the pro-tribe
agenda of Americans for Tax Reform
... The 1994 Republican takeover of the House and Senate was a
crucial moment in Abramoff's transformation from a conservative
ideologue into an influential lobbyist. He became a valuable commodity, a
conservative K Street figure with direct access to the
newly powerful right wing of the Republican Party ... Two years later,
Abramoff and Norquist took over Citizens for America, a
conservative advocacy group created by drugstore magnate Lewis Lehrman.
After the two arranged a costly "summit meeting" of anti-communist leaders in
Angola, Lehrman, according to media accounts, let
Abramoff and Norquist go. In 1986, Abramoff became
chairman of the International Freedom Foundation, which was
secretly financed with $1.5 million a year from the white South African
government, according to sworn testimony to the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission. Mirijanian said Abramoff denies receiving money from
the South African government. Between 1986 and 1994, Abramoff
was president of Regency Entertainment Group, a company that financed
ideologically conservative movies, including the 1989 film "Red Scorpion' ... In
1995, Abramoff took on another major client, the Commonwealth
of the Northern Mariana Islands, an American protectorate in the Pacific. Again,
he capitalized on his ability to exploit conservative ideology. The Marianas
sought to retain exemptions from U.S. immigration and labor laws
to import laborers from China at $3.05 an hour -- $2 under
the federal minimum wage -- to make garments labeled "Made in the U.S.A."
Abramoff portrayed the Marianas as a case study of the success
of the free market unfettered by wage and immigration laws."
"On May 20, 1981, in a unanimous en banc opinion, the Court of Claims awarded [Arthur] Lazarus, [Marvin] Sonosky, and Payne $10,595,943 in attorney fees, the maximum 10 percent. 'The result the attorneys have obtained for their clients has been extraordinary,' Chief Judge Friedman wrote in summary of the court's views. "Starting with a case that appeared doomed, they obtained an award of more than $100 million -- which is more than twice as alrge as any other made in an Indian claims case. Both the attaining of any award and the magnitude of the award made were attributable soley to the endeavors of the attorneys. Considering all the circumstancs -- the nature of the case, the obstacles the attorneys had to overcome, the low intial prospect of success, and the great skill and dedication with which the attorneys did their work -- we conclude that attorneys' fees of 10% of the award, or $10,595,943, are appropriate."
The fee decision, not surprisingly, made front-page news, as in the New York Times, which ran a long story and a photograph of Lazarus, Sonasky, and Payne under the banner headline 'Big Wampum for a Legal Tribe.' According to Stephen Glasser, publisher of the Federal Attorneys' Fee Awards Reporter, the $10.6 million Sioux fee ranked as one of the largest, if not the largest, fee ever awarded by a court.
The response in Sioux country was predictable. Having argued for years that Sonosky and Lazarus represented the Sioux soley out of financial self-interest, AIM leader Russell Means denounced the lawyers as 'parasites' and called the fee 'the largest rip-off of Indian claims money in the history of this country.' To [lawyer Mario] Gonzalez, the whole fee proceeding was a 'sham.' Other commentators concurred in the judgment of prize-winning author Peter Mathiessen, who wrote in his book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (a Sioux history focused on the 1975 Pine Ridge murder of two FBI agents) that the Black Hills claim 'had been won by the wealthy lawyer [Lazarus] and lost by his poverty-stricken clients ...'
Sonosky shrugged off the criticism, most of which (because of the Ogalala contract expiration issue) was directed at Lazarus. In 1956, Sonosky had gambled that he could win the Black Hills claim and that gamble had paid off handsomely. The Court of Claims fee decision made Sonosky a rich man overnight. His personal share amounted to more than $4.8 million."
-- Lazarus, Edward. Black Hills White Justice. The Sioux
Nation Versus the United States from 1775 to the Present, HarperCollins
Publisher, 1991, p. 409-410
[Note: thisbook was written by the son of the head lawyer
for the Sioux nation, and is biased in this manner .]
