Word: bia
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...soon as the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) formally recognized the Mohegans as a tribe, Kerzner and several partners reached an agreement to develop and manage the tribe's proposed casino. Their fee: more than the legally allowed 40% of net revenues. The deal with the NIGC was negotiated in private, and then chairman Harold Monteau rubber-stamped it. The other two commissioners and several staff members objected, complaining that Monteau had worked out the generous package in secret. Monteau is now a lobbyist on casino issues for more than a dozen tribes...
...year gaming palaces. One unabashed appeal took Linda Amelia of the Chinook Indian tribe by surprise in January. Amelia saw an opportunity to advance her group's long fight for recognition as a tribe at a California G.O.P. meeting attended by Wayne Smith, the No. 2 man at the BIA. Amelia gave Smith her business card and said she would like to discuss Chinook issues with him. Two weeks later, she got a phone call from a man named Phil Bersinger. Identifying himself as a close friend and former business partner of Smith's, he said that...
Bersinger also wrote the Chinooks a letter on "Bersinger & Smith" stationery, from his consulting-partnership days with Smith in Sacramento, Calif. Bersinger boasted of his "tremendous access and influence" at the BIA, saying he vacations with Smith and opens his home to his old friend when Smith returns to the Sacramento area. For $1,000 a month, the letter said, he could be "extremely helpful" on the tribal-recognition issue. Bersinger's influence peddling was so barefaced, Amelia thought it might be an FBI sting. Her tribe ultimately declined the services. "It was improper to pay for what should...
...part, Smith acknowledges his close ties to Bersinger but says he did not know his friend was pursuing tribal business. He denies referring Bersinger to Amelia, and says Bersinger was at the Buena Vista meeting only by chance. Though he has never discussed official BIA business with Bersinger, Smith says, he has recused himself from the Chinook case and plans to do the same for the Buena Vistas. "I want to be above the appearance of impropriety," Smith says. --By Michael Weisskopf
...Across the street from the village chief's wood-frame house, however, in a little bar where two Vietnamese men sit drinking bottled Bia Lao beer, smoking A-daeng cigarettes and spitting onto the concrete floor, there is plenty of opium. Several foreigners are already in the back-room den, crashed out on dank mattresses having puffed their way through half a dozen pipes each. Sophie, a blond English girl in her 20s, insists the black-trousered O-man, as she calls the Vietnamese boy loading pipes, give her and her friends the best possible dope. "Make sure...