How did a defunct band of American Indians resurrect itself into a 600-member tribal nation boasting a billion-dollar business? Political machinations and pit-bull lawyers played a big part. So did guilt, guts and greed, as Brett Duval Fromson reveals in Hitting the Jackpot: The Inside Story of the Richest Indian Tribe in History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).
Fromson, ’76, used to cover Wall Street for the Washington Post. Not surprisingly, he takes a businesslike approach investigating the maneuvers that created the Mashantucket Pequots and the world’s biggest casino. It’s blockbuster journalism with a soulful undercurrent. Foxwoods began with one man’s wild dream for a better life. There were grim side effects when it came true.
Richard “Skip” Hayward was the man who “imagined the tribe before it existed,” in the words of one lawyer. Of course the Pequots existed long ago, until British troops massacred most of them in 1637. Colonial authorities granted land to the survivors, but centuries of intermarriage obliterated the Pequot line. By the mid-20th century, just one descendant—Hayward’s grand-mother, Eliza George—occupied the Ledyard, Conn., reservation. Fromson tells us she was one-eighth Pequot.
For years the old woman had vainly tried to get her immediate family to live on the reservation, while banning the African-American branch created by her sister’s marriage and her own liaisons. Months after George died in 1973, Hayward’s sister did move her trailer there. But developments on other fronts soon sparked her brother’s bolder imagination.
At the time, the U.S. government was renouncing its assimilationist policy toward Native Americans and opening its coffers to help tribal development. A new breed of activist civil servants and legal-aid lawyers, eager to right historic wrongs, began seeking out any possible beneficiaries.
In Connecticut, they found Skip Hayward and ran into giant obstacles. Government aid was meant for functioning tribes recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Hayward wanted funds only for his family. He could barely claim Native American blood, let alone a tribe.
Armed with three years of research and candid interviews, Fromson marches readers through wheeling and dealing that spanned decades. First, Hayward formed his family into a corporation. Then his lawyers figured out how to sidestep BIA scrutiny. In 1976, the Pequots got state recognition, unlocking generous federal housing loans and funds for business ventures from hydroponic lettuce to a pizza restaurant. All of them flopped. But after fierce lobbying, Congress formally recognized the tribe in 1983. That entitled the Pequots to a bingo operation and eventually to the really big plum. Foxwoods Casino opened in 1992. It was grossing a billion dollars annually within six years.
The legal, political and financial shenanigans behind the rags-to-riches metamor-phosis of the Pequots makes an exhilarating read. But the way money poisoned a community will haunt readers longer.
By 1992, the tribe had swelled to hundreds, as a sizable African-American contingent came forward. The Haywards still ran the tribal council and rewarded themselves disproportionately. Even so, new members got annual payouts of at least $50,000 plus generous salaries if they took jobs in the bloated tribal bureaucracy. (At one point more than 1,000 employees, many refusing to lift a finger, served 372 tribal members.)
Fromson cites breathtaking excesses—teenagers blowing $100,000 a year on drugs and BMWs; council members taking six-figure junkets; Hayward spending $225 million on a museum to invent Pequot culture and running a billion-dollar deficit.
Racial tensions and social problems mounted, with rampant drug abuse and violence. Money alone had created the tribe, and money tore it apart. In 1998, Hayward was ousted as president.
Fromson notes the irony of people achieving the American dream by becoming American Indians. But the Pequot dream seems more like an American tragedy.
