We’ve posted on this before here. Here is an oddly written article on this case in the Miami Herald via McClatchy News Service. An excerpt:
By Tim Johnson
McClatchy NewspapersWATERSMEET, Mich. — If any Indian tribe could ill afford to lose money in a Mexico casino scam, it is the disadvantaged Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
Anchored in rolling woodlands of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the tribe’s 600 members have faced constant hardship for more than a century.
As recently as the mid-1970s, the median income per household for the tribe was only $2,300, and fully half of its working age members were unemployed.
When the tribe opened a bingo hall with a few slot machines in 1988, the year it was recognized as a separate nation, the new income allowed some members to move from overcrowded, rundown houses into better dwellings.
Over the past two decades, the tribe built the Lac Vieux Desert Casino Resort, the 76-room Dancing Eagles Hotel and a nine-hole golf course, earning enough to finance 30 new homes, a cultural-recreation center, a clinic, childcare facilities, a police force and water and wastewater treatment facilities.
But there were still too few jobs, and the loss of a $6.5 million casino investment in Mexico and ensuing legal fees have kept the tribe in crisis, unable to upgrade the casino’s aging slot machines or build new attractions.
American Indian Tribal Law
Facing the Future: The Indian Child Welfare Act at 30
Federal Indian Law: Cases and Materials (6th ed.)
The Eagle Returns: The Legal History of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians
The Indian Civil Rights Act at Forty
This is a small sidebar to a far longer and more comprehensive story about the swindle affecting the LVD and other investors at the hands of a Mexican “casino tsar.” Please see: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/11/22/131076/corruption-in-mexico-casinos-takes.html