by albion » Sun Jun 26, 2005 3:48 am
interesting that hopsicker mentioned chief james billie and the seminole since the stuff in the abramoff hearings centers mostly around the choctaw. still, i think this might be of interest by way of general background. an excerpt from <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The Merger: The Conglomeration of International Organized Crime</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->, by Jeffrey Robinson:<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>America's first high-stakes Native American gambling parlor belonged to the tiny Seminole tribe in south Florida. Born in 1979 as a bingo hall in Hollywood, not far from Fort Lauderdale, it was such an instant success that the tribe soon challenged the state ban on gambling by installing video poker and video slot machines. Everything lay in their claim of sovereignty. The courts upheld it, and today the Seminoles operate a bunch of casinos, turning over around half a billion dollars a year. Pretax profits are apparently about $120 million a year, which is the same as after-tax profits, because the tribes don't pay tax.<br><br>The floodgates having opened, there are now nearly two hundred tribes in twenty-eight states sharing in the $5 billion Indian reservation gambling boom. But gambling is one of those industries that attracts strange bedfellows, and the idea of Indian sovereignty being a back door into legalized gambling has not gone unnoticed by a whole slew of strange bedfellows.<br><br>According to the California Department of Justice, one of the Seminoles' early partners was linked to Sebastian Larocca's crime family in Pittsburgh, who, in turn, was linked to the Genoveses. It now appears that some of the seed money for that first bingo hall may have come from people controlling Meyer Lansky's funds. Though this was categorically denied for years by the Seminoles, Chief James Billie finally acknowledged in 1999, "There might be some semblance of truth" there.<br><br>The man in the middle is said to have been the late Stephen Hennington Whilden, a Harvard-trained Nixon White House Lawyer who was general counsel to the Seminoles when they first brought in gambling. He is said to have been the one who set up the meetings with the Lansky people. He is said to have been the one who first realized that the Indians were sitting on this fabulous asset called sovereignty. Hie line was, tribes reserve sovereignty except where it is expressly abrogated, and therefore the tribes can do things on their land because they are a sovereign nation.<br><br>"Wherever you've got jurisdictional confusion," notes Alexis Johnson, a New Mexico attorney who has been one of the most vocal opponents of Indian reservation gambling, "you get 'the guys' surfacing. They understand how confusion works for them, how chaos is their friend. The government can't figure out what the straight line is on how to bust these guys, so they don't get busted. These are not poor Indians running casinos across the country, these are mobbed-up Indians."<br><br>"Indians are cover," insists Johnson. "Indians are a geopolitically significant description. Cross out Seminole. Cross out Mohawk. Just talk about stuff. What Indians resemble is transnational stuff. Geopolitical stuff. What do they look like? They look like tax havens. They look like the on-shoring of an offshore concept. They look like law enforcement breakdowns and we know, axiomatically, they involve jurisdictional conundrum and jurisdictional confusion. Most tribal leaders aren't as smart as the real bad guys, although there seem to be some. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Look at the political liaisons, and the lobbying and the lawyering, that's how the deals get brokered</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->. There is always a non-Indian involved somewhere."<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><br>also, this site seems to be covering the abramoff hearings fairly closely:<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Jewish Whistleblower</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Accountability and transparency within our institutions and leadership.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://jewishwhistleblower.blogspot.com/">jewishwhistleblower.blogspot.com/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <p></p><i></i>
