There are no customers at the Speaking Rock Casino now. The 1,500 slot machines that attracted 100,000 visitors a month, earning the small Tigua Indian tribe US$60 million a year, are gone.
How the Tiguas got their casino, lost it and have tried to get it back is a complex tale of gambling and politics, and part of the spreading investigations involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
"In two or three years, it will be back to the way it was before we had gaming," tribal governor Arturo Senclair said. "Then we'll be dependent on whatever federal money we can get, after we tried so hard to be self-sufficient."
All but 82 of the 1,000 casino employees have been laid off.
Also gone is the US$15,000 annual distribution to each member of the tribe from casino profits, almost equal to the median per capita income in El Paso of US$17,000.
In 1987, the Tiguas won federal recognition as a tribe with their own reservation, as long as they followed the law of Texas.
The next year, Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which authorizes tribes to open casinos on their reservations if their state permits gambling. In 1991, by constitutional referendum, Texas voters approved several forms of gambling, including a state lottery, and horse and dog racing. The Tiguas seized on the referendum as the legal rationale for opening their casino.
The casino had been open five years when then-governor George W. Bush, seeking re-election in 1998, argued that the casino violated the law, since Texas did not permit casinos.
In 1999, the state's attorney general, John Cornyn (now a Republican senator) sued in federal court and won in 2002.
By 1999, Abramoff, the lobbyist, had hired Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition, on behalf of the Coushatta tribe of Louisiana, which had a casino near the Texas border that competed for gambling business. Reed was to drum up support among conservative Christians for Cornyn's legal attack on the Tigua casino.
Tribal governor Arturo Senclair has a file folder with 250 e-mail messages from Abramoff, Reed and others, outlining their tactics for closing the Tigua casino and, after it was closed, for getting money from the Tiguas to win its reopening.
The messages were provided by the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, which has been investigating whether Abramoff and his friends defrauded Indian tribes.
In one message dated Feb. 11, 2002, the day of the court ruling against the Tiguas, Abramoff wrote to Scanlon: "I wish those moronic Tiguas were smarter in their political contributions. I'd love us to get our mitts on that moolah!! Oh well, stupid folks get wiped out."
Tigua leaders say that Abramoff arrived in El Paso with a plan to reopen the casino by getting a key Republican congressman to insert an amendment in an unrelated bill. The cost was US$4.2 million. The Tiguas were also told to make US$300,000 in contributions to Republicans in Washington or to their political action committees, which they did, Senclair said.
But, Senclair said, "we were betrayed."
Earlier this year, the Tiguas got back about half the US$4.2 million in a settlement with Abramoff's former law firm over his role in working to close the casino and then reopen it. But the Tiguas' casino is still closed. And the years of prosperity are slipping away.
Lori Rivera, 40, once the supervisor in the cashier's office of the casino, is in many ways the embodiment of the tale. She grew up in a one-room mud shack without running water or electricity. She got a job in the casino, and became eligible for a new house.
Rivera is worried about what will happen to her two grandchildren, as school stipends are cut.
"Before the casino, most Tigua kids didn't stay in school, because they were so poor they couldn't afford shoes, and they were embarrassed," she said. "Everything was going really well. Now we're going backwards."
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