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 The series Day one: Half a billion dollars a year is pouring into the Seminoles' casinos, but some people are profiting much more than others. Day two: While every Seminole now is getting handsome dividends from gambling revenues, millions in federal aid continue to go to the tribe. |
Billie and his wife, Bobbie, separated in the early 1990s after he started a relationship with another woman. Bobbie moved to a town outside Phoenix, Ariz., where she lives in a condominium. Her husband supports their three children. She said recently she is "in the middle" of seeking a divorce. Billie had met the other woman, Leslie Garcia, when she was just 16. Today he lives with her and their two children in a two-story house in a fenced-in compound on the Big Cypress reservation. Billie's business life, too, has changed. The growing gambling fortune of the Seminoles has given Billie considerable clout with Las Vegas and Atlantic City casino owners, including a noted opponent of Indian gambling -- Donald Trump. For years, Trump was persona non grata among the Seminoles after he appeared before a congressional subcommittee and blasted the Indian gambling industry for its apparent lack of oversight. It was a different Donald Trump who traveled to the Big Cypress reservation in 1996 to meet Billie and other Seminole officials. Now Trump was hoping to line up a deal where he would manage the Seminoles' gambling operations if full-scale casinos come to Florida.
"I got people coming to me everyday, not everyday, but everyday," Billie told the Times about Trump and other business suitors. "As a matter of fact, today, I've got smokeless gunpowder's man gonna talk to us." Billie says several casino executives have offered to manage the tribe's bingo halls if full-scale gambling is approved. Among them: Steve Wynn, chief executive of the Mirage in Las Vegas; Bill Bennett, the former head of Circus Circus; and Gary Fears, whose family made millions in an Illinois riverboat gambling venture. Billie said Fears got his attention by loaning him a Turbocharger Commander aircraft. "We're going to give it to you, chief," Billie recalled Fears telling him. "You can't give me a . . . gift like that," Billie recalls saying. "That's kinda like jail bait, isn't it?" (Under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, a person seeking a gambling contract with an Indian tribe may not "unduly interfere or influence for its gain or advantage" the decisionmaking. It's unclear whether a plane would fall under such a broad rule.) Billie kept the plane anyway -- "I weren't gonna let it go" -- and says he and the tribe use it for business. Fears got nothing in return, Billie said. "Gary's still not with us one way or another." The loan of the plane is "solely related to aviation," Fears said. Over the years, Billie has had an eye for deals. Robb Tiller, a fast-talking Virginian, was at the center of many of them. For a while, Tiller served as a "screener" for the Seminoles' purchases of surplus military equipment, which Indians can buy at a discount. A screener reviews the equipment and buys it. Records detail some of the equipment Tiller purchased. Camouflage netting, for example, was purchased for an "Outward Bound" program for Seminoles who were recovering alcoholics. Other purchases seemed odd. Tiller spent $59,258 to buy 456 Air Force flak jackets. According to a letter signed by Billie, the vests were for the Seminole Department of Law Enforcement, but the agency has never had more than 60 officers. In a deposition taken for a Broward County lawsuit in 1996, Tiller described several other deals with Billie and the Seminoles. One involved the importing of Chinese-made jeeps, an undertaking that foundered when it was discovered that the vehicles did not meet federal emission rules and other standards. Tiller listed the jeep's shortcomings: "Catalytic converter for one. DOT, EPA, windows, tires, seats. You want more? Doors, trunk, hood, transmission . . . Every part on the jeep." But there was one market to fall back on -- Indians, who are not subject to the same standards because of their sovereign nation status. "We ended up selling the jeeps to the Indians because nobody else could buy them," Tiller said in the deposition. Tiller and Billie have since parted ways. Billie now calls Tiller a "leech" and says that nearly every deal with him was a failure. "We have a saying," Billie said. "He's the kind of guy who could fall in a barrel full of tits and come up sucking his thumb." The closed nature of the tribe's financial dealings have disturbed some tribal members. In Billie's first year as chairman, more than 100 Seminoles signed a recall petition, claiming among other things that he refused to release financial information. Billie responded with a two-page memo addressed to members of the tribal council and tribal comptroller Ted Boyd, challenging them all to take polygraph tests. "You may ask questions on any accusation that you may have," he wrote. "I will also ask specific questions as to your integrity." His critics backed down and the recall petition failed. Tribal members who challenge Billie risk severe consequences: ridicule, rumor, even ostracism.
That's what has befallen the family of O.B. Osceola Sr. of Naples. When a bingo hall was first proposed for the Immokalee reservation, Osceola obtained a contract from Billie and the tribe to build and manage it. The hall's construction fell behind schedule, and Billie and the tribal council turned the project over to Pan American & Associates, the non-Seminole managers of the Tampa casino. When the Osceolas sued the tribe for breach of contract, they were forbidden from picking up their monthly gambling dividend checks at a tribal office. Instead, the checks are sent by courier to their home. (The Osceolas could sue the Seminoles because the tribe had waived its sovereign immunity. An arbitrator and federal judge has awarded the Osceolas $2.4-million in the hall dispute; the Seminoles are appealing.) The Times interviewed Seminoles who were critical of Billie, but none would speak for the record. They raised several concerns, the foremost being the chairman's absolute power. The Seminole Tribune played a role, too. "Newspaper invades Indian Country," the headline read, and the accompanying story said the Times was "harassing tribal members and employees in a manner not seen in this part of Indian Country since the U.S. Cavalry rode horses and swatted the Indians to walk faster on the trail of tears." Billie got his bodyguard, Sandy Arrendondo, to call a Times reporter on more than a half-dozen occasions, posing first as a student in need of contacts on the reservation, and later as a disenchanted employee who had been fired. It was all a setup, Billie eventually acknowledged to the Times reporter: "We were trying to figure out how to get you somewhere and do something kind of funny to you and I was going to laugh my ass off."
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