Peter Kenney over at Cape Cod Today is the place to be if you want to know what’s going on with the Wampanoags. His latest is pretty dramatic.
FBI agents served documents on members of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribal council yesterday at council headquarters demanding that they submit tribal and personal financial records to federal investigators for scrutiny, according to sources in the tribe. Presented to council chairman Shawn Hendricks, treasurer Nelli Ramos and council member Desire Hendricks Moreno were formal demands for the council’s financial records as well as personal financial records from all three officials.
A reliable source reports that local police were stationed at the residences of the three council members to assure they were available to be served the documents from the FBI. Mashpee police told this reporter that their agency had previously not been involved in this matter.
FBI agents sought earlier this week to speak with former tribal council chairman Glen Marshall, as first reported here. Marshall stepped down last month after revelations first reported here that he was a convicted rapist and had lied about his military experience.
Good grief. Things seem to be going from bad to worse for the tribe. Anyone more familiar with Indian law than I am have a sense whether this kind of thing can result in federal recognition being placed in jeopardy, or on the potential to have land placed in trust?
UPDATE: The Globe has picked up on the story. No acknowledgement of Kenney. That’s too bad.
Peter Kenney's investigative reporting has been exciting to follow. The scandal-ripples are bringing attention to the casino issue that many would have ignored otherwise. Deval's delay is buying time for people to get back from summer mode and begin to think. These events must be pissing the investors off. Their game plan is select prey, move fast and strike.
Regional coalitions are forming
[http://www.masslive….]
and more people are asking if this is what they want for the Commonwealth
[http://www.barnstabl…]?
Maybe the promise of easy money, really is too good to be true.
Big win for the Sox tonight, me thinks.
That's one of the things I can't stand about the media. So many MSM outlets are downright sanctimonious; they make demands of blogger ethics, yet so frequently don't abide by basic sourcing of blogs, themselves, when they're the likely source of the knowledge in the first place. And let's not kid ourselves here, journalists are some of the people who pay the most attention to the blogs… it's how they get a bunch of their stories in the first place.
We reference our sources. The MSM should reference blogs. It's as simple as that.
Mind you, this can't be too shocking. Though there's no doubt who has the ultimate culpability for the Third-World quality of life for so many Native Americans, there's a long history of incredibly corrupt tribal leadership. Mind you, the Wampanoag are not the Lakota, and it's not a case of a small educated elite taking it to a larger, less literate population. I'd imagine here it's more a case of apathy on the part of many who are, or could, consider themselves Wampanoag. Where there's government largesse, and a lack of oversight, corruption will bloom, be it in Mosul, Modesto, or Mashpee.
As for the casino, the only way all this could directly affect the deal is if the incorporated govermnent of the Mashpee tribe is indicted (in this case, on RICO grounds), and the whole structure delegitimized. I can't imagine this will happen.
Indirectly, this mess could lead the Wampanoag to rise up and demand better of its leadership. The Binghams come to mind here, and they have said that they don't like this particular deal on the casino.
There's also the chance that this could affect other procedural things. As mentioned earlier, Trust status from the feds. However, I can't see how that would be the case. Remember, tribes only get one shot at this, so denying it requires some stringent grounds. Denying trust to a tribe over this seems a permanent solution to what is (hopefully) a temporary problem.
There's the outside hope this could push some waverers against going through with the procedural steps to introduce gambling in Mass.: the governor's entering a compact, and the Legislature legalizing Class III gambling. Given that Deval is currently resolute in hiding from this issue, I'm not sure that'll happen. It could, however, influence some state legislators not directly impacted by this issue.
Regretably, it seems that he is going to say yes to casinos, why else would he wait 9 and half months to say no! I hope he treads very carefully on this issue…this is a messy business..
…The FBI could get the financial records from the banking and other financial institutions that the individuals involved made use of merely by subpoena.
<
p>
This strikes me as being little more than another grandstanding operation by a law enforcement agency. I actually wonder who the instigator of this was. It appears to be an internecine battle between two factions of the Wampanoags.