Revenge of the Pequots: How a Small Native American Tribe Created the World's Most Profitable Casino

In the mid-1970s, the Mashantucket Pequot tribe had only one member -- an elderly woman who pleaded with her grandson to come live on the impoverished reservation and save it from falling into government hands upon her death. In Revenge of the Pequots, journalist Kim Isaac Eisler tells the remarkable story of how Richard "Skip" Hayward, then an unemployed ship-worker, granted his grandmother's dying wish, revived the moribund clan, and transformed the Pequots into the richest and most influential band of Native Americans in history.

Established in 1992, Foxwoods Resort and Casino is the world's most profitable gambling establishment, grossing over $1 billion a year at its sprawling complex in the backwoods of Ledyard, Connecticut. Making use of arcane laws and court decisions never intended to benefit Native Americans as they have, Hayward brilliantly laid the groundwork for this staggering economic empire. In a story rife with drama, he challenged a succession of Connecticut governors and such worthy adversaries as casino moguls Steve Wynn and Donald Trump, while forming alliances with Malaysian industrialist Lim Goh Tong, renegade Seminole chief James Billie, and President Bill Clinton. As a result of Hayward's strategizing, for one of the few times in history -- and in a truly ironic reversal -- the bizarre legal structure governing Native Americans actually worked to their advantage in a mainstream enterprise. But the Pequots' meteoric rise to fortune has left many wondering: Is this turnabout fair play?

In this riveting rags-to-riches tale, Eisler deftly explores the wide-ranging issues that have framed the great Native American casino debate and the ramifications of the Native American casino boom in a nation still uneasy about its roots.

Amazon.com Review
Kim Isaac Eisler begins Revenge of the Pequots with a fascinating anecdote: a 1994 phone call between President Clinton and Skip Hayward, the chief of Connecticut's Pequot tribe. Here was the most powerful man in the country thanking Hayward for political campaign contributions totaling half a million dollars--a dramatic reversal from the standard story of American Indians begging the federal government for financial assistance. Eisler calls the incredible Pequot story "one of the greatest about-faces in American history, [how] this obscure Indian tribe, which in 1994 had been federally recognized for only ten years and numbered fewer than 200 people, had nothing if not plenty of cash."

They were (and are) the richest tribe in the United States, and they've done it all on gambling proceeds. The Foxwoods High Stakes Bingo and Casino complex, located in southeastern Connecticut, is "one of the most successful cash-producing enterprises in the world," says Eisler, and a destination for some 25,000 gamblers every day. The entrepreneurial Hayward is at the center of the book's plot, along with a talented lawyer named Tom Tureen, as they carefully go about winning federal recognition for the Pequots and then building Foxwoods. All of this was extremely controversial, with questions about the legitimacy of the Pequots' claims and the probity of their business. (Eisler is considerably more sympathetic to their story than another book on the same subject, Jeff Benedict's Without Reservation.)

The remote descendants of the Pequots had exacted from the system more than a small dose of revenge. They had turned a government, which for four centuries had committed brutal acts of oppression and termination, into knots. Using the same legal processes that had been used against American Indians for so long, they had trumped the ruling class and implausibly become the wealthiest Indian tribe in the history of North America.... Skeptics could and would argue endlessly about whether the new Pequots were or were not authentic Indians, although no one had questioned their right to declare themselves Pequots when they were poor.