“It’s called Foxwoods, and at one point it was the largest Indian Casino in the country. “
The single largest casino in the WORLD at the time. The WORLD.
Mohegan Sun is just down the street and at the time it was the third largest in the world...
I used to be in the gaming business (the company I worked for invented the multi-game touchscreen gaming terminal). Connecticut was one of my territory’s. At shift change there were 4,000 staff leaving Foxwoods and 4,000 coming to work, the local PD had to do traffic control.
How the license was approved: Indian Gaming, as it’s called, is regulated by the Dept. of the Interior (DoI).
The Mashantucket Pequot’s compacted with the DoI and the state of Connecticut — promising a 10% (IIRC) take of the slot revenue GUARANTEED at a minimum of $10,000,000 per month! It was a deal too good to pass up for the governments involved. They actually lost money for a short time until the casino was running at 100%. The rake is still 10% but ONLY ON SLOTS! There is NO taxation on table games and that is where the BIG money is.
NY ‘Whales” stopped going to Atlantic City and went north.
I recall being escorted through the high rollers room - Black Jack tables - at one table a man was playing five hands at a $100,000 minimum per bet (and he had a few bets with large stacks of chips)...
In closing it didn’t really have to do with the number of applicants, it was the $10,000,000 monthly guarantee.
As an aside I had to be fingerprinted 14 times a year to hold licenses to ‘touch’ the internals of gaming machines in multiple jurisdictions...
“Have you ever been fingerprinted, buster?”
“Yes.”
“How many times???”
“Lost count after 50...”
“(silence)”
I had been an IT contractor at Foxwoods. I didn’t last too long because I asked too many questions. We got paid more than the IT staff that had gaming licenses, and we contractors didn’t have gaming licenses. There was friction. The only gaming equipment we could touch were the Keno machines (probably because the numbers themselves are determined elsewhere). It was easily the most disorganized IT operation I had ever seen for an organization of that size. Especially one built recently (late 1990s) and hadn’t bought out other companies. Foxwoods had three completely different systems operating. Some was Microsoft, I think some was IBM AS/400, and some was Borland (!) based. They were also just starting to try using ISDN just as it was going out of style (I could never get it to work).
Our group was headed by a 5’4” ex-Navy guy with an attitude (a lot of Navy guys in IT). When he announced they were implementing thin clients, and locking down all the user configurable settings, I raised my hand and asked if they could at least allow users to adjust the mouse speed, as it is very frustrating if it is too slow. That day I was told it was my last week.
On my last day, I turned in my badge, put $5 on Keno, won $5, and left. I beat the House, and I will never gamble in a casino again.
When I hear stories about Indians wanted to be respected, and have their traditions and customs preserved, I just think of the leggy blonde cocktail waitresses (or whatever they were called, I worked mostly in office areas), wearing clingy little teal and turquoise minidresses, matching high heel pumps, and one feather.
Between that and the giant glass warrior Indian glass sculpture with a loud recording bellowing something every fifteen minutes (and then the sprinklers came on [Rain chants, I guess]), I realized the Indians were plenty good at exploiting themselves, as long as THEY get the wampum.