REVENGE OF THE PEQUOTS by KIM ISAAC EISLER

Author:KIM ISAAC EISLER
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Native American History
Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Published: 2001-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

THE LAND BRIDGE TO ASIA

LOWELL WEICKER and his top assistant, Stanley Twardy, had worried endlessly about organized crime getting its hooks into the Pequots. But as Twardy would later come to admit, his fears were largely unwarranted. Crime figures shared the view of many of the residents of Ledyard, that the new casino wouldn‘t amount to much. Their business was running illegal gambling games, and they quickly dismissed the idea of even investing in this legal casino, the newest competitor to their numbers, football betting, and illegal horse books.

Twardy, the former federal prosecutor, had only himself to thank for the mob‘s lack of influence in New England. As the U.S. district attorney in Connecticut before hooking up with Weicker, Twardy had been part of the prosecution team that in March of 1990 had indicted twenty-one members of the Raymond Patriarca crime family, a sweep that spread out over Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Weicker had warned Skip Hayward that the Pequots did not have the muscle to deal with organized crime. But not even Weicker was aware of just how anemic the Providence organized crime family had become by 1991. Twardy‘s prosecutions of key mob members, and the incarceration of Raymond J. “Junior” Patriarca, the head of the family, had severely depleted the family‘s criminal operations. One prosecutor noted, “We‘ve come as close as ever to destroying the Patriarca family. I‘d be close to declaring victory on this one.” Nor did Foxwoods have to fear threats of shakedowns or extortion from Patriarca‘s rival, John Gotti, the head of the New York—based Gambino family, one of the five powerful New York City crime families. Gotti specifically rejected a proposal that his operation get involved in Foxwoods, telling underlings that they could make as much money loan-sharking to individual losing gamblers at the casino as they could trying to shake down or intimidate the owners. Indeed, the casino provided an unexpected bonanza for mob operations in a totally inadvertent fashion. When gamblers run out of money, they can‘t usually get help from the loan officers at Chase Manhattan. Mobsters would be the venture capitalists who kept the money flowing into Foxwoods‘ gaming tables.

Though neither Gotti nor Patriarca may have been interested in a legal gambling palace in Ledyard, halfway across the globe‘ in a tall glass-enclosed skyscraper in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia‘ someone else was. It was here in his headquarters in Kuala Lumpur that an eighty-year-old industrialist named Lim Goh Tong had thirsted for decades to own a casino in the United States. But until the Pequots went to court to win the right to open a gambling palace, it seemed to be the only thing he wanted in the world that he could never have. Lim‘s involvement with the Pequots had its genesis in September 1990 when the U.S. court of appeals had upheld federal judge Peter Dorsey‘s order that Connecticut negotiate a casino-gambling compact with the Pequots in good faith.

At this point, Barry Margolin had decided it was finally time

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