Mohegans' Win Is Wonderland's Loss

During a visit to the Kennedy Library, of all places, I spot a brochure for the newly opened Mohegan Sun Casino and it gets me thinking.

My beliefs about gambling on tribal territory are, as a professor of mine might say, unscrutinized. My thought process goes something like this: Native Americans have been screwed so badly that there are few laws the U.S. wouldn't be justified suspending for them. They want half the annual profits of the Indians and Redskins? Sounds fair. The entire state of South Dakota? Fine by me. But allowing gambling is the least we can do. Damn, we ought to build the casinos for them.

Regardless, I feel like I should probably do what a competent reporter would do to an unscrutinized belief--scrutinize it. So I call the casino and soon I'm talking to Savero Mancini, a man I've got to assume is not one of the tribal elders. Before I can get to my questions, he's unloading facts on me left and right: 170,000 square feet; 2,600 slots, etc. Then he starts into more peculiar terrain. "The day-care program is fully licensed," he explains, "with very tight security...There's only one way in and one way out."

I try to steer him towards a discussion of the cultural, economic and political issues involved in building a tribal casinos, but Mancini pleads ignorance. He doesn't know about the tribe, only the casino. What he can tell me, however, is that, "Mohegan Sun keeps its Indian theme." In fact, one of the restaurants is named after the grandsons of Uncas, the founding father of the tribe. "So the casino serves Native American cuisine?" I ask, at once impressed and surprised. But Mancini pauses, apparently flustered by my line of reasoning. "No, it's Italian food."

I'm 20 minutes late for my meeting with Bob Trieger, assistant general manager of the Wonderland dog track, but he's all smiles. Sitting in his modest office, I offer some bland questions but he fires off detailed responses. We talk about everything, from the track's former incarnation as a "Japanese-style amusement park" to the eight miles of underground snow-melting steel pipe to the "Rhode Island baby-sand" surface installed for the dogs' safety. I ask him about the state's involvement and he explains it thoroughly, all the way down to the "piss-catchers," the state inspectors who perform the urine tests on the dogs.

When I ask about attendance, though, he's terse. "It's dreadful, the greyhound industry is going through its absolute worst times." Before I get a chance to prompt him, he's blaming Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun. They definitely siphon off business, he says, particularly among young people. "When greyhound racing came on the scene, it was one of the only legal forms of gambling," he explains, "but now our customers are dying off, and there's no one to replace them."

Bob takes me all over the grounds, inside the sparsely populated grandstand and the even less crowded restaurant. The place is anything but a dive--it's large, clean and very charming. There are hundreds of televisions scattered all over the recently revamped of televisions scattered all over the recently revamped facility, but somehow, it retains the feel of an old fashioned amusement park. Scores of people say hello to Bob and I begin to see what he means about the age of the clientele. It's hard to find a person under 50.

Bob treats me more like a cousin from out of town than a reporter who might write something nasty; he's taking me places and telling me things I have a feeling he shouldn't. Should I really know about the tattoos they put inside each dog's ears? Should he be showing me the boxes the dogs are held in before the race or the small compartments they are transported in? He tells me they are treated incredibly well and that rumors to the contrary are "an old wives' tale." Still, should he concede that the facility the dogs are housed in is "a shit hole"? I'm not sure if he's just so confident in the treatment of the dogs that he feels no need to load his comments, or if he just doubts that anything I write could have any impact on the track.

We're on the tail end of the tour when all hell breaks loose. A man in his 70s stops Bob to tell him that a mutual friend is being sent to the hospital for high blood-pressure. We race over to the nurse's station where a withered old man is trying to convince anyone who will listen that he's healthy enough to drive himself home. I'm waiting outside as Bob and others try to convince the old man to go to the hospital when a policeman approaches me. "He'd be crazy not to go," he informs me. "He's got to go," I concur, but the cop becomes defensive. "I can't make him go," he retorts. The cop thinks I've started an argument about the coercive power of the police. "Of course not," I assure him.

Eventually Bob surfaces. He asks if I can find my way out, he's going to have to stay to convince his friend. "He doesn't want to go," he explains as he points me towards the exit, "but he's a great bastard and we love having him around.

On Monday I finally get in touch with Jane Fossett, the vice-chair of the Mohegan tribe. She tells me the sad history of the tribe and how the money generated by the casino will go to fund health care and housing for the elderly. I ask her--after she concedes that "ownership isn't part of our culture"--if there is a contradiction in the tribe entering a business venture that grates against its traditional values. But she shrugs off the question as naive. "We have to live in a non-Indian world," she lectures me, "and in order to live we have to compete." Compete they shall.