Author: Dan Kennedy

The casino just got deader

Since I already believed the Middleborough casino was dead, I suppose it would be silly of me to argue that it somehow got deader today. But it did.

The Enterprise of Brockton and The Standard-Times of New Bedford report that the Pokanoket Wampanoag tribe, based in Rhode Island, has sent letters of protest to Gov. Deval Patrick and the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs contending that the proposed Middleborough pleasure palace — which would be operated by the Mashpee Wampanoags — encroaches on their own tribal lands.

The Pokanoket are seeking federal status as a tribe, which the Mashpee won earlier this year. If the Pokanoket succeed, I think we can assume that the lawsuits will start flying.

Kyle Alspach writes in The Enterprise:

Clyde Barrow of UMass-Dartmouth said the Bureau of Indian Affairs will definitely take the claims into consideration.

At the very least, this will add extra time to the approval process, he said.

“The BIA will have to determine whether or not [the claims] are accurate,” said Barrow, who studies casinos through his Center for Policy Analysis.

So what about it? Do the Pokanoket and Mashpee lands overlap? Here is David Kibbe, writing in The Standard-Times:

Last year, legislation was filed in the Rhode Island General Assembly supporting their [the Pokanokets’] recognition. The bill said the tribal community “has existed in the vicinity of their ancestral lands in North-Central and Eastern Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts since prior to the first European contact…. The Pokanoket Tribe of the Wampanoag Nation entered into treaties and warred with the colonial governments, in particular the Great New England War of 1675-1676 aka the King Philips War.”

Middleborough, in case you didn’t know, was a major battleground in King Philip’s War.

My standard disclosure: I’ll be making an unpaid speaking appearance at a fundraiser this fall for Casinofacts.org, an anti-casino group based in Middleborough.

Today’s casino update

Except for major developments, this should be the last one for a while.

  • The video from yesterday’s “NewsNight” is now online.
  • The Cape Cod Times interviews new tribal chairman Shawn Hendricks. More to the point, the paper reports that about 150 dissident tribal members are moving ahead with an effort to recall the entire leadership, including Hendricks.
  • According to the Boston Daily blog, the casino money guys never did a background check on disgraced former tribal chairman Glenn Marshall. According to the Times, they won’t do one on Hendricks, either.
  • Peter Kenney has a moving account of Monday night’s tribal meeting, and of the return to the fold of the five members whom Marshall had ordered “shunned.”

Finally, Steven Bingham, a formerly shunned member who is adopting a high profile in the wake of Marshall’s implosion, says something very intriguing, according to The Enterprise of Brockton. Reporter Alice Elwell writes:

He said the federal land trust for a reservation could be in jeopardy if any illegal acts are uncovered.

“Everything has to be questioned at this point,” Bingham said.

Bingham said he does not want to stop a casino, but the contract with Middleboro only benefits the investors, “not the tribe, not Middleboro.”

Presumably nothing can be done about that without voiding the agreement with Middleborough and starting over. Isn’t that interesting?

Update: I missed this, but Bingham has already said that if the recall of tribal leaders succeeds, the agreement with Middleborough is null and void. And let’s not forget that three of the five selectmen are facing recall next month.

A disclosure: I’ve accepted an invitation to speak at a fundraising event being organized by Casinofacts.org, the anti-casino group in Middleborough. It hasn’t been scheduled yet, but I thought I should disclose that immediately. For the record, there’s no speaking fee.

A victory for free speech

Tufts University president Lawrence Bacow deserves a lot of credit. Earlier this week, he issued a ringing endorsement of freedom of speech on campus by reversing the punishment that had been handed out to a conservative student publication by a faculty-student committee.

According to the Boston Globe, Bacow overturned a decision that required editors of The Primary Source to put bylines on all articles and editorials. Unfortunately, he left in place a ruling that the publication had engaged in “harassment” and “creating a hostile environment” by running racially insensitive materials. But that’s symbolic. Anonymous speech, on the other hand, is a crucial right.

I wrote about the Tufts case in the Phoenix’s “10th Annual Muzzle Awards” earlier this summer, picking up on previous work by Harvey Silverglate and Jan Wolfe. There’s no question that The Primary Source’s sins against political correctness — which began with the editors’ publishing a mock Christmas carol called “O Come All Ye Black Folk” — were demeaning and sophomoric. But so what?

As the Tufts Daily editorialized at the time:

[H]olding others accountable must not mean threats, either implicit or explicit, of censorship; it must not mean tying funds to “behavior”; it must not mean dictating the style, format or attribution of content. The freedoms we treasure are most honored when we hold others accountable through words of our own, through debate and through the preservation of an open forum for ideas — even ideas we find objectionable.

Offended students were free to ignore The Primary Source, organize a protest or start their own publication. What they should not have done was haul the editors before a disciplinary committee, hector them and approve official sanctions against them. Bacow, at least, recognizes that.

Update: Silverglate and Wolfe praise Bacow for reversing the “no anonymity” provision, but criticize him for allowing the “harassment” finding to stand. They write: “An ominous sword of Damocles still hangs over the head of any Tufts student who wishes to make a social or political point by making fun of someone. Colleges need to learn that poking fun at a sacred cow doesn’t always mean the poor animal’s being harassed.”

Robert Dushman

Robert Ambrogi’s Media Law blog passes along word that First Amendment lawyer Robert Dushman has died of lung cancer. Dushman, just 59 years old, was considered one of the country’s leading media lawyers, according to this obituary (PDF) from the New England Press Association.

Dushman represented the Boston Herald in the libel case brought by Superior Court Judge Ernest Murphy. The two most impressive people in the courtroom during the 2005 trial were the lead lawyers, Dushman and Howard Cooper, who represented Murphy. Dushman had the harder task — a tough case and an unsympathetic client.

Talking casinos on NECN

I’ll be on New England Cable News’ “NewsNight” today at 7 p.m., talking about Glenn Marshall’s meltdown and the fate of the Middleborough casino with host Jim Braude.

Here’s your morning roundup of casino-related developments:

  • Marshall is out as chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, with members refusing even to give him the 30-day grace period he had requested (Cape Cod Times).
  • Marshall’s legal woes continue (Cape Cod Times).
  • His false claims of war heroism will be reported to the FBI (The Day of New London, Conn.).
  • More questions about how tribal funds were spent (Cape Cod Today).
  • Officials of neighboring towns ask the Patrick administration to move slowly on the casino (Boston Globe).
  • But Gov. Patrick blows the biggest decision of his tenure, reportedly deciding to endorse casino gambling (WBZ-TV). Perhaps this is just a pre-Labor Day trial balloon?
  • Hal Brown spins like crazy (Casino-friend.com).

Obviously the Middleborough casino will never be built. The big-money players will move on once they realize that this will be tied up in the courts for years. Dissident tribal members are already suing in federal court. Middleborough casino opponents vow to keep fighting. The Jack Abramoff connection must be explored more deeply. In that context, New Bedford’s going to start looking better and better.

But casino gambling will be bad news anywhere, and I hope Patrick comes to his senses before making this official.

Update: This is hilarious. WBZ Radio (AM 1030) reports that Patrick’s office is denying that the governor has made up his mind, but WBZ-TV (Channel 4) is standing by its story.

More on the Abramoff connection

Boston Magazine has posted on its Web site a profile of disgraced former Mashpee Wampanoag leader Glenn Marshall, slated to appear in the September issue.

Tough timing — the article went to press before last week’s implosion. But writer Geoffrey Gagnon does have more on Marshall’s ties to Jack Abramoff, the former Washington lobbyist now in prison for his corrupt dealings. Gagnon writes:

Marshall doesn’t apologize for the fact that some of his efforts involved questionable characters, chief among them the notorious Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, with whom the tribe signed on in 2003….

Never major political donors before then, the Mashpee and their lobbyists started giving generously to select congressmen. Following Abramoff’s lead, they donated at least $20,000 to California Congressman Richard Pombo, who had taken over the committee charged with managing tribal issues. They also secured some face time with North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan, who, in his capacity as vice chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, pressed the Interior Department in the fall of 2003 to finally rule on the long-delayed status of the Mashpees’ application.

Abramoff is now serving time in federal prison for bilking other tribes and corrupting public officials. (The Mashpee were never implicated in any wrongdoing.) And though Abramoff himself became political kryptonite for the lawmakers and organizations he did business with, a couple of his lieutenants, Kevin Ring and Michael Smith, still work with the Mashpee.

Fortunately for Ring and Smith, they get a good character reference — from, uh, Marshall. “Kevin and Michael are very bright young men,” he tells Gagnon. “If they had done anything wrong, they would have been indicted — they wouldn’t be working for us. These are good guys.”

Of course, Ring’s and Smith’s reputations shouldn’t be smeared just because of their former association with Abramoff. But the Abramoff connection is something that needs to be thoroughly investigated before anyone breaks ground on a casino in Middleborough.

Who is the “Great Gadfly”?

Peter Porcupine offers some insight into Peter Kenney, the Cape Cod Today reporter/blogger who broke the story about disgraced Mashpee Wampanoag leader Glenn Marshall last week. Why didn’t the mainstream media get there first? “It took a curmudgeon with a long memory to do that,” writes Porcupine. Wish we could get Kenney’s local-access show up here in Media Nation.

I talked with Kenney in 1997, when I was reporting a story on the late auto magnate Ernie Boch’s hate radio station on Cape Cod. Kenney had been fired by the station’s general manager, Cary Pahigian, for whom he had some choice words. Still does.

Tribal politics threaten casino

Middleborough Selectman Adam Bond and others who think the casino is still on track should take a look at today’s Cape Cod Times. K.C. Myers reports that long-simmering anger over the way disgraced tribal leader Glenn Marshall has managed the Mashpee Wampanoags’ finances and cast out those who disagree with him is about to explode at a special meeting tomorrow night.

Marshall’s dealings with “wealthy investors” to bring a casino to Middleborough are also the subject of a federal lawsuit brought by dissident Wampanoags. That suit was almost certainly given new life because of what’s happened over the past week.

In the Boston Globe, Christine Wallgren reports that officials from 17 surrounding communities and two regional planning agencies will meet tomorrow with Gov. Deval Patrick’s economic-development czar, Dan O’Connell, to ask that Patrick make no decision on casino gambling until the issue has been thoroughly studied. From the context, I’d say they want it studied to death. Good.

At Cape Cod Today, Peter Kenney keeps pounding away at Marshall, and opines that he’s still calling the shots behind the scenes. Well, maybe not after tomorrow night.