Synopses & Reviews
A Native American tribe that was all but extinguished 350 years ago has been re-born in the last decade with 600 new membersand an annual gross of $1.2 billion.
The fascinating story of Foxwoods Casino, its Pequot Tribe proprietors and the 30-year legal and political battle that spawned it are captured in Hitting the Jackpot: The Inside Story of the Richest Indian Tribe in History by investigative journalist Brett D. Fromson. The former staff writer at Fortune, the Washington Post, and TheStreet.com, Fromson has spent the last three years researching and investigating this story. This is the first book that looks inside the tribe via interviews with tribal members and access to confidential documents.
"Hitting the Jackpot is a tale of achieving the American dream by becoming an American Indian tribe," says Fromson. "Nearly three quarters of the current Pequots did not join the tribe until after 1994."
In 1635, the first Puritans migrated from Massachusetts Bay to the Colony of Connecticut. By 1637, Puritan settlers in Connecticut were at war with the Pequot Indian tribe. In retaliation for a Pequot raid, Captain John Mason led an assembled militia of English and Indian allies in a pre-dawn attack on a Pequot fort that left over four hundred Pequots dead. Within two years, the Pequot tribe was all but extinguished, and would remain that way for the next three hundred and fifty years.
Then, in 1973, the last remaining descendent of the Pequots to live on the tribal reservation, Elizabeth George Plouffe, passed away, but not before imparting advice to her grandson Richard "Skip" Haywood: "Hold onto the land." These words would manifest themselves into an almost thirty year legal and political drama that would lead Hayward and his relatives to recreate the Pequot tribe and become the richest Indians in history.
Precisely how it happened is uncovered in Hitting the Jackpot, a labyrinthine tale of legal maneuverings, back room political dealings, and ethnic reinvention. Fromson details the step-by-step process by which todays Pequots gained tribal recognition, hired top lawyers to claim thousands of acres of land, exploited a state law meant for church fundraisers to gain the right to open Foxwoods, now the worlds biggest casino grossing nearly 1.3 billion dollar a year, and distilled the barest traces of Pequot lineage into a full-fledged tribe with over 800 new tribal members, a yearly pow-wow that offers the biggest cash prizes in America and a $250 million museum, one of the costliest in recent American history.
Review
"HItting the Jackpot is fascinating, an extraordinary look into America,
both our troubled past and our equally troubled present, one in which money,
law and identity interact bizarrely. Astonishing reading." Scott Turow,
author of Presumed Innocent
Review
"An engaging exploration of the tangled politics surrounding Native American affairs." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. [227]-242).
About the Author
Brett D. Fromson was chief markets writer for TheStreet.com. Previously, he covered Wall Street and finance for the Washington Post and Fortune magazine. His work has also appeared in the Economist, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Monthly.