The Houston Press cover story from last week is about the Alabama-Coushatta tribe’s efforts to get a casino again. It covers a lot of the same ground as that Chron story I blogged about on Sunday, but it also reminds us of a very sordid aspect of the original casino and why it was closed.
A federal court had ruled that the Alabama-Coushatta had violated the terms of their recognition, which, as argued by then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn, stated that all gaming prohibited by the state of Texas was “hereby prohibited on the reservation and on lands of the tribe.” The challenge came with the full-throated support of Texas’s evangelical population, spurred on by a now-notorious lobbyist named Jack Abramoff. (Ironically, the Alabama-Coushatta remain a heavily Christian community and even forbade alcohol at their former entertainment center.)
“We already knew that when we opened, we were going to be in litigation,” Williams continues. “We were prepared for that.” The Louisiana-Coushatta, a related tribe just one state over, had been concerned about consumers opting for their Texas cousins and ended up enlisting the aid of Abramoff, the fedora-topped lobbyist later sentenced to nearly six years for conspiracy and tax evasion in 2006.
While secretly disparaging the Native Americans as “stupid mofos,” “monkeys” and “fucking troglodytes,” Abramoff used Christian connections in Texas to mobilize anti-casino forces. Through shell corporations and blatant corruption — Abramoff and his partner are believed to have received a total of $85 million from their Indian clients — the lobbyist managed to muster enough opposition to shutter the casinos of both the Alabama-Coushatta and El Paso’s Tigua tribe in 2002. Less than a year in, the Alabama-Coushatta’s best modern opportunity for self-sustenance collapsed.
With equal parts gall and venality, Abramoff then approached the Alabama-Coushatta with an offer to restore their casino but was found out before he could swindle more Native-American money.
“It was devastating,” Williams says, his voice moving slowly through the subsequent drop-off. “Everyone could see what was possible — at the time, when we were open, we were one of the highest-paying employers here in the surrounding area.”
A visitor asks Williams about Abramoff, but the chairman claims the name provokes no reaction on the reservation. Nobody brings him up. No one thinks about him. But it’s Abramoff’s work — his choice to blinker both Texas legislators and tribes — that ended the only casino the Alabama-Coushatta have ever known. It was Abramoff’s slimeball politics that forced the Alabama-Coushatta to revert once more to smoke shops and land cultivation as their sole, and depreciating, sources of income. It was Abramoff’s grease-stained fingerprints, his choice to skim the profits and to try to lobby both for and against the tribe’s casino, that directed Williams and his people back onto Washington’s dole.
That was more than a decade ago. In the interim, the tribe, which sued Abramoff and settled out of court in 2007, has sunk nearly $3 million into attempting to change the federal language prohibiting its casino.
See here, here, and here for more on that story. One person that was prominently involved in screwing the Alabama-Coushatte tribe but who wasn’t mentioned in the Press piece is longtime religious right mouthpiece Ralph Reed. Reed has maintained a fairly low profile in recent years, but lowlifes like him never truly go away. It’s important to remember just how awful a person he and his cronies are and were. Be that as it may, between the Congressional action and the better-than-I’d-have-thought prospects in the Lege, this could finally be the year the Alabama-Coushatta get the opportunity that had been denied them. I remain ambivalent about gambling, but I do wish them the best of luck.