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The contractor is at the center of a bribery probe in Connecticut, the consultant was thrown off the reservation by the last Indians he worked for amid allegations of insider stock trading, and the shadowy Chinese billionaire said to be putting up the money for the project may or may not have helped finance Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
What could go wrong with a deal like this? Nothing, if you believed anything presented at the touchy-feely multicultural public relations event held Sunday at Lackey Plaza, where the State of New York and the Seneca Nation entered into a compact for casino gaming.
The signing was supposed to have been held at the Niagara Falls Convention and Civic Center, but the governor's office waited until late Sunday afternoon to let convention center officials in on their plans.
Because a convention of 3,000 National Guardsmen was taking place in the center, Pataki changed the event to Lackey Plaza, where dozens of business-suited officials sweated profusely in the hot August sun.
Seneca President Cyrus Schindler pretended to like Gov. George Pataki and Pataki pretended to like him back. Never mind that, just three days earlier, Schindler charged that Pataki disrespected him by not showing up for a scheduled meeting, leaving the proud Seneca leader with "egg on his face." And never mind that the proud governor said no such meeting was ever scheduled in the first place, essentially calling Schindler a liar.
The miscommunication and the unavailability of the convention center Sunday were the latest in a series of boondoggles that have repeatedly delayed the signing since Pataki announced his agreement with the Senecas in June of last year.
If everything goes smoothly, the Niagara Falls casino will be up and running in the former convention center by January, Pataki said Sunday.
On Niagara Street, the betting is heavy that everything won't go smoothly. The deal must now be approved by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. Unlike Pataki, the BIA regulators aren't running for re-election this year, and may take a harder look at the deal than the state.
Only three off-reservation Indian casinos have ever been approved by the BIA, and Niagara Falls would be the first to be located in a metropolitan area. Furthermore, the approval process for the existing off-reservation casinos took years, not the two-to-three months predicted by Schindler and Pataki.
Sources in Albany say Pataki's close relationship with President George W. Bush should ease the process, but federal officials may balk at any of a number of red flags associated with the project.
"Anybody who says this is going to be a slam-dunk doesn't know what he's talking about," said a source familiar with Indian gaming.
To begin with, the construction company hired by the Senecas, C.R. Klewin, has been named in a 24-count federal racketeering indictment handed down against Joseph Ganim, the mayor of Bridgeport, Conn. Neither Klewin nor any of its officers have been named as defendants in the case, a fact that leads many to believe the company is cooperating with the FBI and the Justice Department.
According to the indictment, Klewin agreed to pay Ganim $350,000 through an intermediary in order to secure a contract to build Bridgeport's Harbor Yard minor league baseball stadium. Klewin was brought to the Senecas by Michael "Mickey" Brown, a former federal prosecutor turned gaming consultant. Brown worked with Klewin in conjunction with the Pequot Indians on the construction of Connecticut's Foxwoods casino.
Records show the project resulted in so many worker's compensation claims that the Pequots ultimately went to court claiming that, as a sovereign nation, they were not bound by Connecticut's worker's compensation laws.
Several years after Foxwoods opened, Brown resigned under pressure after members of the Pequot tribal council accused him of profiting on the sale of stock in a company he had chosen as one of the casino's vendors.
But Brown's money man, an 84-year-old Chinese-born billionaire named Lim Goh Tong, continues to receive 9.9 percent of Foxwoods' adjusted gross revenue as well as interest on his original $60 million loan to the Pequots under an agreement that will last until 2016. According to the Wall Street Journal, Tong would also finance the Seneca casino in Niagara Falls.
Tong operates out of Malaysia, home of the largest Muslim population in the world. He is the owner of that country's only legal casino, Genting Bhd., which the increasingly fundamentalist government licenses from year to year. Genting pays dearly to operate in the country, where gambling is expressly forbidden by the Koran.
U.S. officials have charged the Malaysian government with allowing the operation of al-Qaeda training camps in the country, and recruiting men to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. were plotted there, and Malaysian banks provided the conduit for funding the operation.
The relationship between Genting and radical Islamic elements within the Malaysian government is unclear, but sources say federal regulators are likely to be keenly interested in any deal that would allow the company to set up shop on this side of the international border.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | August 20 2002 |