OCR Text |
Show Weekly Special tlTrson Indians see profit in Ohio bingo Washington An Indian tribe in Oklahoma wants to move back to its ancestral home and set up a small reservation in Ohio. The modest size of the proposed reservation 77 acres has led to a well-grounded suspicion that the Indians are mainly interested in tapping into the latest source of wealth for some native Americans: bingo. We're not talking about church-basement church-basement bingo parlors here, but multi-million-dollar bingo palaces with prizes rivaling state lotteries and casinos. Big-time bingo operated operat-ed for profit on Indian reservations is exempt from regulation of states and local communities. Ever since an Oneida tribe in Wisconsin tested the commercial bingo waters nine years ago, tribes all over the country have been quick to take up the idea and no wonder. Unlike the strictly regulated casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, which make a measly 4 percent profit, bingo operations on Indian reservations return 20 cents on the dollar. Venture capitalists are happy to put up the $3 million or so needed to finance a first-class bingo palace, in return for up to a 49-percent share of the enterprise. In fact, the Oklahoma-based Miami Indians, who want to move to Ohio, already have investors lined up, checkbooks ready, to finance the bingo operation. All the Miamis need is approval from the Interior Department to have the 77 acres set aside in trust as an Indian reservation. There's a precedent for creating a reservation where none existed before, hi-early 1981, land outside Tampa, Fla., which contained an old Seminole burial mound, was declared de-clared a reservation. To no one's surprise, a bingo palace was set up on the Indial land soon after. The Miamis' claim to their chosen site is a bit shakier. The 77 acres is near Cleveland. Lacking a burial ground or other direct link to ancestral settlement (the baseball team doesn't count), the Miamis justify their choice on "original aboriginal titles" to the general area of the Great Lakes. But an Indian expert in Cleveland, David S. Brose, said the Miamis never settled in northeastern Ohio. The closest they ever came, he told our reporter Jim Zians, was the Cincinnati area at the other end of the state The Miamis have their sights on Cleveland, though. They have devised plans for a school, clinic, museum and hotel on the proposed reservation. Needless to say, this hasn't disspelled the suspicions of parish priests and other bingo operators, who realize that their modest charitable games couldn't withstand the competition of the Indian bingo businesses. Why don't the Miamis just start their bingo enterprise in Oklahoma, where they're already located? Apparently, there would be too much competition from other Indian tribes in the area. EXECUTIVE MEMO: Which federal fed-eral agencies are most responsive to requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act? According to a recent poll of reporters, historians, authors and others who use the law, the most cooperative agencies are the Army, Air Force and the Pentagon in general, and the Economic Development Develop-ment Administration and Occupational Occupa-tional Safety and Health Administration. Administra-tion. The most uncooperative agencies agen-cies are the CIA, State Department, nternal Revenue Service and Department Depart-ment of Housing and Urban Development. The poll was con ducted by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. A high-level Customs Service official recently spent $100 to have a telephone extension installed in his office bathroom because he spends so much time there. The official explained that he suffers from intestinal problems and felt that it was "embarassing for the girls (secretaries) to knock on the door." Some of our Pentagon sources . are concerned about an internal manual titled "Total Army Readiness," Readi-ness," distributed to soldiers and civilians and signed by Gen. John Wickham, the Army chief of staff. The problem is that it reads too much like a political speech or a piece of wartime propaganda. The Soviet Union is described as "a state dedicated to the attainment of world supremacy." The Army's controversial controver-sial role in Honduras is characterized as "training friends." The Army's job, the manual states, is "not only to defeat terrorism and subversion, but also to prevent it as well." Syria has been supplied with chemical agents, delivery systems and training by Czechoslavia and the Soviet Union. In Isreal, the existence of chemical-weapons test areas has been known to the CIA since the early 1970s, and possible tests were detected there in January 1976. In late 1982, a suspected nerve gas production plant and a storage facility were identified in the Negev desert. Burma has been acquiring the capability to produce mustard gas since at least 1981. Burma is aligned to neither East nor West, and it is thought possible that it may follow the lead of neighboring Laos and use its poision gas against internal insurgents. Copyright, 1984, United Feature Syndicate, Inc. |