Schenectady Gazette article 12-27-02

BETS IN PLACE

Impoverished Indian tribe, faded resort cityhave high hopes as state's newest casino opens

America's next Indian casino arrives on New Year's Eve, bought and sold as an antidote for barren Niagara Falls and as salvation for the Seneca Indians. Little more than 100 days after work began on converting a leaky downtown civic center, the casino will open.

The brash builders of the Seneca Niagara Casino are bringing 2,000 jobs to a city that hasn't seen a major development in decades. So confident were the Senecas and their investors that they began construction of the $110 million project six weeks before the federal government even approved the deal and the 50-acre urban Indian reservation in downtown Niagara Falls - and while New York's state constitution still expressly prohibits commercial gaming.

Here, a desperate city, willing politicians, an Indian tribe and gambling make a snug fit.

"Niagara Falls is one of the seven wonders of the world, but we need so much," said Michelle Martinez, a 27-year-old waitress at the Goose's Roost, a diner across from the future casino. "A lot of people have left."

By New Year's Eve, casino executives promise that the austere civic center, a massive concrete bunker of a building, will re-emerge blinking and ringing, pulling in thousands with round-the-clock free cocktails for players and nearly 100 gaming tables and 2,600 slot machines.

The players
The payout will begin as soon as the slots start accepting quarters. Lining up for their piece of the action are a Malaysian investor who put up $80 million at 29 percent interest; the state of New York, which will collect up to 25 percent of slots revenue; and an army of lawyers, lobbyists, strategists and casino developers who have made it all possible. Eventually, the Seneca Nation will get its cut, a figure estimated at "significantly" more than $2 billion over the next 14 years.

Meanwhile, plans also are under way for larger, more lavish Seneca casino resorts both here and in nearby Buffalo.

As in Connecticut, with the opening of Foxwoods Resort Casino, much may never be the same in this despondent city, in Buffalo and on the Senecas' nearby Cattaraugus Reservation.

In Niagara Falls, the federal government has created an inner-city reservation - a sovereign nation - expressly for the purpose of opening a gambling casino.

Many people here couldn't be happier. They've watched the Canadians, across the thundering Niagara River, build their own casino Disneyland in recent years, and start a massive expansion as well.

Brawny native son Eddie Gadawski, who has hung in while his city faded away, recalls a time "when the plants were open" and factory workers crowded his East Side cafe at all hours. Gadawski, 82, now gazes down the half-dozen vacant blocks from his tavern to the new casino and sniffs the forgotten scent of new money. "I love it," he said.

Worry about culture
Sixty miles to the south, Susan Abrams, a Seneca mother of two, predicts that gambling will accomplish what centuries of conflict with Europeans failed to do: destroy her native culture.

"What happened?" Abrams asks. "Power, greed, corruption and the seductive promise that we are all going to become rich."

Economic reality for the 7,000-member Seneca Nation today is dozens of tax-free "smoke shops" and gasoline stations crowding the Cattaraugus Reservation. A high-stakes bingo hall also lures outsiders to this 20,000-acre reservation south of Buffalo, one of three that belong to the tribe.

Cyrus Schindler sees the possibility of something much bigger.

"You can sit back and have nothing," said Schindler, a Seneca leader who just finished two years as president, successfully pushing the casino agenda after years of angry debate within the tribe. "Or you can move forward. We had 100 percent of nothing."

The tribe spent much of the 1990s in a virtual civil war, with killings, firebombings and violence dividing its two main political parties. Debate about gambling was never far off, with tribal members divided on the question of casinos.

Most homes on the reservation are house trailers. Some members still follow traditional, spiritual ways and shun contact with the non-Indian world. Others, though, are fantasizing about fabulous casinos, hotels and a native-inspired rebirth of greater Buffalo, where the ghosts of a mighty industrial past still lurk about the empty factories and grimy art deco skyscrapers.

Demise of Buffalo
Schindler, a former ironworker who owns a reservation cafe and, with his daughter, runs one of the profitable tobacco shops, emphasizes the honest jobs and the economic development that gambling will bring. It's hard to dismiss him; Buffalo's population has plummeted by 65,000 since 1980, to under 300,000 and still declining.

"Who the hell wants to go to Buffalo? I like going to Las Vegas because there is always something to do there. We will create that in Buffalo," said Schindler, now chairman of the board of the tribe's Niagara Falls Gaming Corp. "It's going to bring people and money to Buffalo. Look for a store in Buffalo now. You can't even buy a tie in Buffalo."

His opponents within the tribe, though, speak darkly of alleged secret deals between investors, politicians, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the White House - and their fears of what could happen to them if they fight the casino.

"I've received death threats over this casino stuff," said Abrams, a former tribal council member. "You wonder why people aren't rising up? Police don't come here when people are shot. Nobody gets prosecuted. . . . It's all about money, over and above principles."

In the former Niagara Falls Convention and Civic Center, construction workers, slots installers, painters, electricians and computer technicians scurry about 20 hours a day on this newest acquisition to the sovereign Seneca Nation.

Foxwoods visionary
Watching over it all from his second-floor office window is G. Michael Brown, the man largely responsible for the creation of Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut. Brown, known ubiquitously as "Mickey," is the president and chief executive officer of Seneca Niagara Falls Gaming Corp. A dozen years ago he was Foxwoods' first chief executive, the man who turned a rural bingo hall into the world's largest and most profitable casino.

Brown's arrival coincides with a stunning transformation among the Senecas. After a decade of skirmishes over gambling, things took form rapidly after Brown began working with Schindler and the influential former tribal President Barry Snyder. Then, in quick succession, came a deal with the state, legislative approval, federal government endorsement, the selection of Malaysian banker Lim Kok Thay for an $80 million loan and, finally, the frantic 100-day construction of the new casino.

Now, Brown believes he holds another winning hand. A blunt-speaking casino executive and former prosecutor from New Jersey, Brown said the Senecas must move fast, before anti-gambling forces awaken.

Lawsuits challenging New York Gov. George Pataki's deal to allow up to six new Indian casinos in the state, including the Catskills region, have yet to be ruled upon by the courts. Local opposition is largely dormant as well, although a Buffalo News poll found the public - like the Senecas - evenly split on gaming.

2,000 jobs at stake
"The quicker we get going, the quicker we kill the opposition," Brown said, acknowledging that shutting down a business with 2,000 employees, most from economically depressed Niagara Falls, is an unlikely scenario. "It's the biggest construction job in Niagara Falls in 50 years."

The tribe's deal with Pataki and the state Legislature guarantees it the right to open casinos not only in Niagara Falls, but in Buffalo and on the Cattaraugus Reservation.

Like Foxwoods, Brown sees the Buffalo region as a stars-in-alignment sort of opportunity, where it is critical to move aggressively before opponents can muster a fight, before the federal government clamps down on Indian gaming, and while the state is still desperate for easy tax revenue.

"Niagara Falls is a resort, kind of run down. But it's one of the wonders of the world," Brown said. "This, the Catskills and Boston are the last opportunities for large gambling projects in the Northeast."

To read Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton's views, it would appear that opponents of urban Indian casinos have a great friend.

"Tribes are increasingly seeking to develop gaming facilities in areas far from their reservations, focusing on selecting a location based on market potential rather than exercising governmental jurisdiction on existing Indian lands," Norton wrote in a letter to Pataki last month. "The [Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988] does not envision that off-reservation gaming would become pervasive."

Norton said she was worried that off-reservation gambling could proliferate "on lands selected solely based on economic potential. . . . The principles underlying the enactment of IGRA are being stretched in ways Congress never imagined. I believe that Congress, in enacting IGRA, struck a delicate balance between State and tribal interests that did not create an absolute right to off-reservation gaming."

Norton also said she would not object to the Senecas' deal - even though it hands a single tribe exclusive gambling control of a 10,500-square-mile region and gives the Senecas the right to acquire additional reservation land, miles from their existing reservation.

Norton, in her Nov. 12 letter, said she agreed with the tribe that a 1990 congressional act settling a long-standing land dispute also allows the Senecas to acquire new reservation land in "near proximity" to their aboriginal home.

But in choosing not to challenge the Seneca deal, Norton set up an unusual potential conflict with two other Buffalo-area tribes. The Tonawanda Seneca Nation and the Tuscarora Nation, both opposed to gambling, say they were not consulted in the deal that handed the Senecas land and gambling rights in Buffalo and Niagara Falls.

To the Senecas, there is no debate. "At one point, the Seneca Nation literally owned all of western New York," said Seneca lawyer Barry Brandon, an honorary tribal member. On its reservation land, "the tribe is entitled to conduct that type of gaming that is already authorized by the state."

Constitution cited
But Cornelius D. Murray, lawyer for plaintiffs challenging Pataki's casino deal, said the question is more complex because of New York's constitutional prohibition against gambling.

"Federal law can't force a state to amend its own constitution," he said. Still, Murray acknowledged, an up-and-running casino in Niagara Falls, and perhaps another in Buffalo, that offer thousands of jobs to a depressed area may be virtually impossible to shut down.

"I'm trying to draw a line in the sand and say `No more,' " Murray said. "If they can get away with this in Buffalo, they are not going to get away with it in the Catskills."

The oversized envelopes began arriving in the mail two weeks ago, coveted invitations to the biggest party in western New York this New Year's Eve - the arrival of Las Vegas-style gambling in Niagara Falls.

Mickey Brown promises that the $12,000-apiece slot machines, lavish food buffet and lobby waterfall all will be ready, even if parking isn't quite perfect.

Many of the locals are ready, too.

At Gadawski's Restaurant in Niagara Falls, one of the few establishments left on the old Polish east side, except for a mammoth stone Catholic church and a bar with nude female dancers, they lament the recent past and look out and see hope, instead of just the casinos and hotels right across the river in Canada.

"I hate giving the land away, but something is better than nothing," Eddie Gadawski said of the deal that handed the Indians the civic center for $1. "When all the plants left the area, my business went down from 17 hours a day to six hours a day," said Gadawski.

Nursing his usual late afternoon beverage in the tavern, Gadawski's buddy, Larry DeLong, said these are the most exciting times he's seen in his 31 years here.

"It does have some drawbacks though," said DeLong, owner of the town's only strip bar. "Two of my best dancers got hired down at the casino."

Schenectady Gazette article 12-1-02

U.S. approves land transfer for casino

As expected, the federal agency ruled Friday that a Seneca casino at the Niagara Falls Convention Center will have no adverse environmental impact, the Buffalo News reported in Saturday's editions.

The ruling approves the transfer of 12.8 acres of land in downtown Niagara Falls, including the convention center site, to the Senecas.

The casino, set to open on New Year's Eve, is expected to create 2,000 permanent jobs and another 1,400 jobs during its construction.

The state, which has projected casino revenue of up to $825 million, would get up to 25 percent of the gross profits from the slot machines.

The casino is also expected to boost the economy of the Senecas and help tourism and revitalization in downtown Niagara Falls, wrote Neal McCaleb, the assistant secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs, who approved the transfer.

"This is a historic day. I don't think there are any more obstacles left," Seneca Nation President Rickey Armstrong said Friday.

Gaming opponents are challenging the casino plan in court, claiming it violates the state constitution's ban on casino gambling.

U.S. OKs pact between Senecas, state