The man who would be chief

He was a Seminole Indian who grew up in the Everglades. He slept in the swamp under a blanket of pine needles and killed gators with his bare hands. He fought for his coun­try in Vietnam. Back in the Everglades he killed a panther in the Big Cypress In­dian Reservation, then skinned and ate it. When he was ar­rested and tried for killing an endan­gered species, he was asked what panther meat tasted like. "It was a cross between bald eagle and Flor­ida manatee," Chief James E. Billie sup­posedly said. He was acquitted.

Billie invented gambling on Indian reservations. Under his leadership the Seminoles became the first American

tribe to operate a high-stakes gambling casino on a reservation. From 1979 to 2001 he was chairman of the Seminole Tribal Coun­cil for the six reservations of Florida. Before he became a council member the Seminoles had an annual budget of $11,000. Today their budget exceeds $1.5 billion, which enabled them to buy the Hard Rock International chain in 2006 from the Rank Group PLC for $965 million. The Seminoles now control Hard Rock franchises in 47 countries on six continents. Every member of the 3,200-person Seminole tribe—adult and child alike—receives $120,000 a year from gambling profits. With their $10,000-a-month stipend, even the poorest Seminoles are so wealthy the tribe can no longer find a single member to wrestle alligators for tourists; it had to hold a gator-wrestling audition—and only a few white men showed up. I

In 2003 the Semi-nole Tribal Council |voted Billie off the council and banished him from the Holly­wood, Florida reser­vation and Seminole public life. Today there is no mention of Billie in the tribal newspaper, The Seminole Tribune, and no sign of him in the seven tribal casi­nos. At the age of 63 he has been written out of Seminole history.

After his banish­ment Billie retreated into exile to the small backwater reserva­tion of Brighton on the northwest bank of Lake Okeechobee, a flat, swampy land of scrub, turf farms, fishing camps, orange groves, sugar plan­tations and cattle ranches. He still lives there, in a double-wide trailer with his third wife and two small children, and makes his living build­ing ancestral Seminole homes called chickees. In Brighton Billie works and waits and plots his return to his

rightful place as chief of the Florida Seminoles, the only Indian tribe never to sign a treaty with the U.S. government, which is why they are called the Unconquered. .

Florida State Road 441 heads south from Fort Lauderdale to 1 the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood. It is a j typical state highway lined with strip malls of adult video stores 1 and pawnbrokers willing to buy guns, gold and diamonds from ; people with bad credit. Car dealers like Don's Deals on Wheels offer to buy cars from gamblers who have had a bad night at the tables. The casino itself is an anomaly off the highway, a big garish structure on beautifully landscaped grounds. Across the street is the First American Tobacco Shop, a salmon-colored building on the site where the original trailer first sold tobacco in the early

1970s. The reservation, which

is southwest of the casino, is also a '¦ contradiction. It has a new government building and police station, a senior cen­ter, baseball diamonds and parks with swings for children. But there are also run-down trail­ers on Josie Billie Ave­nue and depressing 1950s concrete HUD projects, which sit across the street from new Mediterranean-style houses. No matter

whether the homes are mansions or trailers, they all have the requisite luxury cars—Range Rovers, Mercede­ses and Lexuses—out front, as well as campers and fishing boats.

There is not much of the noble savage about Chief Billie. He's more a hip, caus­tic, cocky white guy than a stoic, defer­ential Indian. He's funny, profane, smart, bawdy. "PLAYBOY? I hope you don't expect me to pose naked. I got a little dick" were the first words he ever spoke to ^ me. White people in Florida like 4 Billie, maybe even more than the Seminoles do. Dan Wisher, a white businessman who advised Billie

on computers and invest­ments when Billie was still the coun­cil chairman, says, "James Billie has the biggest heart. He loves his people."

Charles

Helseth, a

white Okee-

^F~ chobce banker, is another Billie confi­dant. Rob Saunooke and his father, Osley, \ both lawyers, are ^almost worshipful toward him. A lot of Billie's white friends call him Chief as a , sign of respect, not I condescension. I Billie doesn't look like a Frederic Rem-

\ ington Indian chief. He

doesn't have the mahogany-color skin or the Mount Rush-more features. He looks like a migrant worker from the sugarcane fields. He looks more Latin or black than Indian. "They all look black to me," says a Cher­okee of his Seminole brothers. Which is understandable, since the Seminoles are not a homogeneous tribe. They are a mix of Indians and Spanish sailors driven south from the Carolinas and Georgia by European settlers. Unlike most other American Indians, the Seminoles had no intercourse with Ife the white man in Florida in the 18th W century. As a result, they retained * their ancestral ways longer than most

tribes. They spoke a Mic-

cosukee dialect and

D never learned Eng-

q lish. That changed

„„ in the early 1800s

* when a growing

number of black

slaves escaped from their plantations in the Carolinas and Georgia and fled south into ' the Everglades. The Seminoles welcomed the runaway slaves as brothers and incorporated* them into the tribe. In 1821, with Spain ceding Florida to the U.S., white Americans from the South staked their claim on Semi-nole land. Two more Seminole wars would now be fought, not only to capture runaway slaves but also to relocate the Indians to a reservation in Oklahoma. Eventually, by the late 1800s, a few thousand Seminoles were forcibly relocated. Only 300 or so remained in the Everglades, maintaining their ancestral way of life.

"Sure, we fought the white man," says Billie, "because we didn't want them steal­ing our black pussy." He laughs. "Wouldn't you?" Then he says seriously, "The word Seminole isn't even an Indian word. It comes from the Spanish word cimarrones, which means 'runaways.'"

Billie pulls his flatbed truck into the parking lot of a diner, where he is going to meet his four-man chickee crew for breakfast. "I didn't intend to kill the panther," he tells me. "I'd gone into the swamp to show some Spanish guys how to catch gators. We were in a truck, shining a light to catch a gator's red eyes. The light shone on these emerald-green eyes I thought were a deer's. Me, being macho, I went about 10 feet trom the panther. I shined the light on his eyes, and he looked like he was going to pounce on me. At the time, in 1983,1 had been living in the swamp, training under a medicine man. He told me panther hide was precious. It gave you strength in war. Its claws were good for acupuncture. (continued on page 125)

SEMINOLES

(continued from page 56) Its tail would give you an erection if you tickled your balls with it. I thought God had given me what I wanted, so I shot him between the eyes."

Billie took the carcass back to his chirkir. Word got out among the tribe that he had killed a panther, and 'M) Indians were waiting for him. He skinned and cooked the meat over a fire and shared it with his tribe. The Seminoles always shared what they had. It was a custom that would change as the tribe became wealthy. The Seminoles were socialists for their first 400 years and capitalists for the past 40. The next morning two Florida game wardens arrested Billie for killing an endangered species. The judge who presided over his trial told him, "Your grandfather hunted with my daddy in the Everglades." Then the judge said, "I heard you told reporters that panther meat tasted like a cross between bald eagle and manatee."

"That wasn't me, Your Honor," Jimmy said. "I never ate a bald eagle or a mana­tee." The judge said, "Thai doesn't mat­ter. The world's going to believe that's what you said anyway."

As Billie walks across the diner in the jaunty way of cocky little men who don't think of themselves as small, people look up, their faces breaking into smiles. He works the room until finally he sits down. While he eats, he says, "When the tribe banished me, they took away my land, sold my cattle and kept me from running for the council again. They wanted to eliminate anything I'd ever done, anything tied to me." Then with a smile he adds, "Listen. I wasn't the most innocent guy either. But I was the leader. The others weren't. I was expected to be the leader, and maybe the others were envious." Rob Saunooke, his lawyer, is a Cherokee from North Carolina. He told Billie what the council was doing was illegal and pressured him to lake his case to the federal courts. Billie said he didn't want to be a part of the while man's jus­tice; he would rely on Indian justice. In fact, he told one member of the council who was going to vote to retain him not to do so. "Don't vote for me," Billie said, "or you're going to lose. Protect yourself and vote against me."

Saunooke. at 43, is a big beefy man with jet-black hair. He played football for Brigham Young University and still looks like an offensive lineman. "I met James through my father when I was eight. God. he was the coolest guy in the world. He personified to me what an Indian was supposed to be. You can drop him off in the Everglades with nothing, and three days later he'll walk out falter than when he went in. "

James Billie was an orphan, although he bristles at the term. "What does

that mean, an orphan? I had a mother and a lather. When do you become an orphan? When your parents die? What if they die when you're 60—does that make you an orphan then?" Billie can't countenance a victim mentality. "Indi­ans are always complaining that the white man took their land," he says, "but they never reached down with their own bootstraps to do something. They're always looking for government handouts. I call them the hang-around-the-fort Indians. If I'm supposed to be such a proud Indian, why can't I use the resources I got and get on my feet?"

Billie plays down the fact that he never knew his English-Irish father, that his mother died when he was nine and that his grandparents died when he was 12. He went to live with Max Osceola, the boyhood friend he would later tell not to vote for him at that council meeting. But mostly Billie spent his boyhood in the swamps.

"I was a typical savage," he says. "It's from the French, sauvage. It doesn't mean 'brutal.' It means 'someone who excels in the woods.' I slept under trees and fanta­sized about girls I didn't know anything about. I was as traditional as you could get. I was like a bird. I got up in the morning and looked for something to eat. I hunted all the time. 1 killed deer, bear, fowl, wild hogs—with a blowgun, a bow and arrows, a slingshot, but not a gun."

His grandparents enrolled Billie in the white elementary school in Delray Beach. He often played hooky and went into the woods, which is why, he says, "I was the biggest kid in first grade. I failed first, sec­ond and third grades and couldn't read until I was 10. But I knew how to swing from a tree like a little jungle boy. I was a hero to the white kids because I lived and hunted in the swamp and they couldn't."

Billie joined the U.S. Army on April Fool's Day 1965. He was sent to Vietnam as a long-range reconnaissance scout. He went into the jungle, 40 miles from base camp, and scouted Viet Cong troop movements. .Alter his tour of duty was up and he was scheduled to return home, he reenlisted. "I couldn't leave my men," he says. "I saw what had happened when another patrol got a new leader and the whole patrol was wiped out. In the Army everyone looked up to me because I was an Indian. I never experienced white prejudice. My Indian blood gave me an advantage in life that my white blood never did. I was always accepted by whites because I worked and didn't get drunk. My grandparents always worked too and didn't drink. My grandfather carved spears for the tourists, and my grandmother made dolls out of palmetto fiber and sold them to white tourists."

When Billie was a teenager he depended on gator meat and hides for his livelihood. When he walked home with a gator carcass slung over his shoulder, along a two-lane blacktop

in the Everglades, cars would stop and pull over. White tourists would offer him a few dollars if they could take his picture with the gator.

"It dawned on me then that people were interested in the fascinating, the unique," Billie says. "So I thought I'd live up to those fantasies. If people were afraid to handle poisonous snakes, I'd grab the snakes and the cameras would click. If people would pay to hear Semi-nole stories, truth or lies, I'd tell them. If they'd pay to see me wrestling gators, I'd wrestle them."

When he got out of the service he started Billie's Swamp Safari, an excur­sion for whites to see authentic Semi-nole life. He would use the fascination

with all things Semi­nole to sell things to them. Tall tales. Gator wrestling. Tax-free cigarettes. Bingo parlors. Ca­sino gambling.

The reservation to which Billie re­turned after Vietnam was a dispiriting place, as it had been since the Seminoles first began migrat­ing to Florida reser­vations. His people subsisted on wel­fare checks, a few hundred dollars a month, and food stamps. There were no jobs except In­dian jobs: wrestling gators, selling trin­kets, looking for handouts. It was a place without hope.

In the early 1970s Seminole life would change for the bet­ter by a seemingly inconsequential act. Howard Tommie, the chairman of the Seminole Tribal Council, hired Osley Saunooke, Rob's fa-

ther, to establish the Florida Governor s Council on Indian Affairs. Oslcy's father, a huge bear of a man at six feet five inches and 369 pounds, was a professional wres­tler known as the Chief. He encouraged his son to go to college (Brigham Young) and law school (University of New Mex­ico). Osley was the first member of his family to get a college education. After law school he worked for the National Congress of American Indians until he got the ofler from Tommie to work for the Seminoles. "Howard was the most beautiful Indian I ever saw," says Osley, 66. "He wanted to explore ways the tribe could make some money." Osley scouted out other tribes to see how they were stir-

viving and came across Ray and Bertha Turnipseed. Bertha was the chairwoman of the Puyallup tribe in Tacoma, Wash­ington. She ran a smoke shop on the reservation and sold tax-free cigarettes, ll was one of the white man's sops to the Indians—the right to sell tobacco with­out paying taxes—because the Indians had introduced the white man to tobacco more than 400 years ago.

"Bertha was looking for a new market," says Osley, "and she had her eye on Flor­ida, which had one of the country's high­est cigarette taxes." When Osley broached this possibility to Tommie. Tommie told him to get in touch with his young pro­tege, James E. Billie, whom Tommie would choose to be his successor, in 1979.

At the time, Billie was operating a gift shop on the Hollywood reservation. Cig­arettes seemed a natural, but Billie told Osley he had promised his friend Mar-cellus Osceola he would "stay out of ciga­rettes and let him have them." So Osley arranged a meeting between Marcellus and Bertha, and the first Seminole smoke shop was set up in a trailer on the side of Route 441. Marcellus sold a carton of"ciga­rettes $2.50 cheaper tban taxed cigarettes. In bis first month he made $60,000. So many cars lined up that local police had to direct traffic. Those cigarettes increased the tribal budget from less than $20,000 a year to $4.5 million almost overnight. It was a lesson in economics not lost on the

Seminoles. They realized they had certain rights on the reservation that could be turned to their advantage. Those rights were solidified in 197") when Congress passed the Indian Sell-Determination Act, which essentially made all Indian reser­vations sovereign nations. Indians could have their own police forces, governments and businesses so long as those businesses did not violate state and federal law.

It occurred to Osley that the Indian Self-Determination Ail could be the perfect loophole for Seminoles to open a dog track. But he realized these laws were too ambiguous for the tribe to con­vince the state. Besides, the costs of starting up a dog track would be pro­hibitive. Osley began looking for another

gambling venue. It would have lo be one the state al­ready approved in some form for, say. churches and VFWs. In other words, the gambling venue couldn't violate state laws, but it could stretch them.

" I personally selected the Hard Rock iden­tification for our ca­sino," Billie tells me as we drive to a job. "It was a choice be­tween Hard Rock and Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville. I felt people were fasci­nated by rock and roll. Gaming was the savior of my people. They no longer had to live in chickees or HUD homes. They had nice houses now. The downside? There were prob­lems. This windfall gave them false con­fidence. Guys were cocky to me now: 'Chief Billie, you still

stealing money?' Yesterday he had noth­ing; now he's got a false sense of ego that he's successful."

Rob Saunooke is not so sanguine about the effects ol gambling money on the Seminoles. "For 200 years Indians subsisted on government handouts," he says. "Gambling is still a handout, only a lot bigger, $10,000 a month lor every Seminole. An armored truck pulls up to the tribal offices at the end of every month with millions in cash. No Indian wants a check or a bank account. They don't trust institutions. They spend it. They're a paycheck-to-paycheck society. They pay cash for boats, cars, clothes, jewelry, trips." The Seminoles don't

have a history of domestic living like, for example, the Cherokees in the moun­tains of North Carolina, who lived in log cabins. Besides, their land is held in trust by the government; the Seminoles can't sell it. Why build an expensive home on the reservation that you can never sell except to another Seminole?

"These are people with no training, no abilities, no requirements to get a job, a college degree, to do anything but spend their money," says Rob. "At 18 kids get checks, buy a car, get high and kill themselves in a crash. It's a cycle. We've become a dependent independent nation." Rob pauses, then says slowly, "You go ask James Billie, if he could start gaming again lor the Seminoles, would he? 1 don't think so."

When Osley was researching the feasibil­ity of a dog track on the Seminole reser­vation, he discussed his idea with Jack Cooper, an investor in the West Flagler Dog Track. One night on TV Cooper's wife saw a documentary about starv­ing children in Asia. She asked her hus­band if he could help start a charity for those children. Cooper said he would take it up with his associate, Meyer Lan-sky, with whom he had breakfast almost every morning at Wolfie's, a Jewish deli in Miami Beach. When Cooper broached the idea of a charity for Asian children, Lansky asked, "Why bother going all the way to Asia? The Seminoles are right here. They're poor, they need help." Cooper asked how. Lansky said the magic word: bingo. Cooper went back to Osley and repeated that word.

"When I brought it up to Howard," says Osley, "he was afraid bingo would jeopar­dize the tribe's cigarette business with the state." Then Tommie did what he often did when a venture disturbed him but still sounded interesting: He suggested Osley take up the idea with Billie. That's how most of the leaders of the council dealt with the impetuous and risk-taking James Billie. If there was a risky venture the state might sue over, they let Billie take it on. If he was successful, the tribe approved his venture. If he failed, they washed their hands of it. "'Let |ames Billie take the blame'—that's how the tribe operated for 27 years," says Rob Saunooke.

Someone put a folder on Billie's desk one day in the late 1970s. He opened it and saw the word bingo. He took that proposal lo Tommie. "I told him, 'We can make §.'< million the first year.' Bui How-aid had no interest in it, says Billie. "To protect him I never mentioned his name again in relation to bingo. In fact, when I put the bingo proposal in front of the tribe in 1979, they tried to impeach me. They were afraid we'd step on the toes of the Miami archbishop or the state."

Jessica Cattelino, a University of Chi­cago cultural anthropologist, spent a year studying the Seminoles for her book

High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming, Sm'-ereignty, and the Social Meanings of Casino Wealth. "Most Seminoles don't think in terms of the individual,' she says, "but of the tribe. If a Seminole wins a prize, he gets up quickly to accept it and sits down quickly so as not to be noticed. They hedge strong opinions because they don't want to be singled out. The tribe reflects the collective will, not the charismatic individual."

Billie is a charismatic individual, but the Seminoles didn't appreciate one of their leaders taking credit for things he'd done for the tribe. "The Seminoles would not be where they are today with­out James Billie's charisma," says Cat-telino. Another expert on the Seminoles says, "Billie cut some amazing deals for his people. He's smart, charismatic, a tal­ented politician. But everywhere he goes he leaves a trail that hurts him, and he outlives his usefulness."

Florida state law differentiated between businesses that were regulatory versus prohibitory. Prostitution, for example, was prohibited. Bingo was allowed but regulated by the state at small-stakes venues like churches. If a business was regulatory, the Seminoles as an inde­pendent nation could step into the state's shoes and regulate themselves. "We were going to do bingo games that offered high-stakes prizes like $1,000, not coffeepots," says Billie.

Kim Eisler, a Washington, D.C. writer and expert on Indian gaming, says, "The state couldn't shut down Semi­nole bingo unless it shut down church bingo. Still, the state tried and lost in the U.S. Supreme Court." Kmboldened, the Seminoles opened their high-stakes bingo hall in an auditorium across the highway from their first smoke shop. It was such a success for the tribe that 12 years later, in 1991, Billie had the bright idea to bring in a kind of electronic bingo machine that resembled a Las Vegas slot machine, which was still prohibited on the Seminole reservation.

"In 1991 I was told bingo machines were illegal," says Billie, "I said, 'Fuck it! I'm going ahead anyway. I can only go to jail.' I thought they were challenge-able by the state but that we could win. So I snuck them in. Now, Jim Shore, the tribe's lawyer, was afraid of this. He said I'd have to do it without the council's permission. On my own I brought in the machines on boats, and they immediately produced more money for the tribe than we could dream of." Bringing in bingo slots on "go-fasters," he eluded the Coast Guard just like 1980s pot smugglers from Florida City. It's the kind of thing Billie likes and today's Seminoles abhor. Danger, risk taking, doing battle against the government as Billie's Seminole ancestors or Meyer Lansky had. "You know, I never met Meyer Lansky," says

Billie, "but he helped the Seminoles get on their feet, and he refused to take any financial stake in our bingo. I think that"s the neatest thing on earth."

Jim Shore was in his 20s when he was blinded in a car accident. When he grad­uated from law school, Billie was there. "I saw him, blind, sitting by himself. I thought, Where's he going to go? So I hired him and put him under the tribal wing. But he acted as if he were an advo­cate for the state, not for the Seminoles. I said, "Don't tell me I can't do this, I can't do that. You're supposed to be working for the Seminoles, not trying to impose state law on us.'" Then Billie says, "When I told him something, it would be all over the community the next day. I couldn't trust him. He was always using semantics to avoid things. I'd give him some papers, and when I asked about them, he'd say, '1 didn't see the papers.' Of course not, asshole. You're blind!"

In 2001 Shore led the tribal-council revolt against Billie. When Shore was shot three times inside his home, in 2002, a lot of Seminoles thought they knew who the shooter was. Osley Saunooke thinks they're wrong. "I never met a tougher

guy in my life than James Billie," says Osley. "I wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley if he was mad at me. If James Billie said he was going to shoot you, you might as well wait out in the middle of the street and let him. If he wanted to kill Jim Shore, he wouldn't have shot him three times and let him live. Jim Shore was the worst thing that ever happened to the Seminoles. He was against gaming; he was against everything. It was James who grew gaming through bingo. Now, James can be arrogant, but he's really a sweet­heart. After all the tribe did to him he never tried to get even."

"Why would I shoot Jim Shore?" asks Billie. "He was blind. If I had wanted to kill him, I would have hit him over the head with a bat. Whoever did shoot him put three .22-caliber bullets in his shoul­der. If 1 shot him, he'd be dead.'

Billie is more Natty Bumppo than Chin-gachgook. He is a man caught between two worlds. "I'm loyal to Seminoles," he says, "but I'm loyal to Uncle Sam, too." A fer­vent Seminole traditionalist, he says, "The most valuable thing for us is our native heritage and sovereignty." Then he adds, "But I was never tight with any Seminoles.

I'm tight with my six [white] buddies from Vietnam. It I need help. 1 call them."

From 1979. when Billie was elected chairman of the Seminole Tribal Coun­cil, until 2001, when that same council began proceedings to banish him. Billie ruled the council as a benevolent despot. Other members deferred to him because of his personal charisma, his white man's (i.e., business) expertise and his concern lor his people, and because it was in the other councilmen's nature to defer to someone willing to take all the risks.

Billie was the council. He was. in most people's eyes, the Seminole tribe. He was given credit for growing Semi­nole gaming from a bingo parlor to a Las Vegas-style casino alter the federal government passed the Indian Gam­ing Regulatory Act in 1988. At the time, the Seminoles ran only Class II gam­ing ventures, which means bingo slots and poker but not other table games or Vegas slots. Still, the Seminoles were so successful that other tribes, particularly the Pequots, visited their casinos to see how they were run. When the Pequots opened their own Connecticut casino, Foxwoods, which included Class III gaming, the Seminoles were criticized for being too cautious by not pushing

for Class III gaming too. Osley Saunooke says the Seminoles' problem was the "tribe didn't have adequate representa­tion," which is a reference to Jim Shore. Billie says the Seminoles' problem was that "the Pequots had the state on their side" and the Seminoles didn't.

The money from the Seminoles' Class 11 gaming and smoke shops produced monthly stipends for each of the tribe's members, beginning at $100 a year in 1979 and growing to 53,000 a month in 2001. By then each of the four other coun­cil members, at Billie's instigation, was pocketing around $6 million in discretion­ary income; Billie got $15 million a year. While the average Seminole was finally able to lead a decent middle-class life, the members of the council were living large. Billie himself was living very large.

The Seminole bingo casino in Holly­wood did not have a stellar reputation in the gaming community. "The feeling was that Foxwoods was a sophisticated casino," says Kim Eisler, "but the Semi­noles' was low-grade and crooked. Too many bingo jackpots were being won by tribal relatives." In fact, over a one-year period one Seminole woman won 22 jackpots totaling $532,000 and another hit 57 jackpots totaling $475,000. Billie defends those Seminole jackpots in his best Al Sharpton umbrage. "An Indian wins one jackpot and everybody notices," he says. "A bunch of white people win one and nobody notices. Go to the casino and you'll see Indian women eyeballing the white ladies playing the slots. They eyeball them for hours, and when they leave at midnight the Indians jump in

and pour money into their slots. You can't say Indians are stupid."

At the height of his powers Billie moved in a rarefied atmosphere. He negotiated deals with Donald Trump and Steve Wynn. "The only difference," he says, "was if I negotiated a $900 million deal with them, their money went to them. Mine went to the tribe." One day he flew into Vegas on a commercial flight to meet Wynn at the airport. Wynn flew in on his private jet. He said to Billie. "James, when you're successful you have to look suc­cessful, not like you're a poverty-stricken Indian. I fly people to Vegas from Hong Kong on that jet. They spend $5 million and $10 million at my casinos."

"I said to myself, Okay, I'm going to look successful," Billie says. He bought Ferdinand Marcos's private jet for the tribe. "I wanted the world to know the Seminoles had their own private jet," says Billie, "that we were setting the world on fire. The Seminoles needed to meet important people and learn to put their money in a bank and let it grow. We were wealthy enough to pay people to teach us the right things to do."

Beyond the reservation, however, peo­ple began to question the tribe's spend­ing: the $12.5 million paid to Howard Tommie, as well as his two Fort Lauder-dale homes, one for himself and the other for his ex-wife; and Billie's $9 million jet, his cars, his land in Oklahoma, his 47-foot yacht—which in south Florida is not really a yacht but a boat—the money he had sunk into a hotel and cattle ranch in Nicaragua and an offshore Internet gambling site in the Caribbean. Billie

defended his expenditures, saying it was mostly his money invested from his dis­cretionary fund. "I was always looking at a thousand things, and maybe one would work," he says.

But it wasn't only the millions he spent on tribal ventures that brought the tribe public criticism; it was also the personal greed of individual council members, in particular Max Osceola and brothers David and Mitchell Cypress. They acted, says Rob Saunooke, "like they'd won the lottery and could spend without discre­tion. I told them they had to justify their expenditures with receipts. I said there were tax issues. They couldn't just give tribal dollars to someone and not pay taxes. Max bought a $150,000 boat for his daughter. He said it was for the com­munity. I asked where it was kept. He said, 'My daughter drives it.'"

Billie describes his fellow councilmen as being "like kids in a candy store. They were putting their discretionary funds in their own pocket. They were taking bids on projects over budget and pocketing the extra money. These guys only knew what they could stick into their pockets for themselves. I demanded accountabil­ity, and that eventually got me kicked out of the tribe. They accused me of stealing $20 million. I stole nothing."

Billie's downfall began innocuously enough with a game of pool in 2001. David Cypress told Billie he wanted to fly the tribe's billiards team to a tournament in Las Vegas on the tribal jet. It would cost only $1 million. Billie said David had already spent his discretionary fund in the third month of the year. David threatened to bring up the team's trip money to the council for a vote; he would need only two of the five members to vote with him to get his million. Mitchell Cypress agreed to vote with him, and Osceola said he'd vote with him too if he could get a million dollars for himself. The three men didn't call a council meeting: They just phoned in their votes to the tribal offices.

"David got his million over James's objections," says Rob Saunooke. "This was the first time the council ever did any­thing over James's veto. Previously, James would bring business to the tribe and they'd approve it. Now, when James told them they had to keep down their spend­ing, they realized they had challenged him successfully for the first time."

In 2001 The Si. Petersburg Times ran a story about Seminole gaming. The paper asked Billie for an interview, and he put them in touch with his personal law­yer, Rob Saunooke, who spoke for him. Saunooke said, "Jim Shore can't read because he's blind, but the tribe has some­one translating everything into braille for him." The Times claimed he said, "You're talking about a blind man who can't read anything. (Saunooke says he was mis­quoted.) The council was furious and wanted to fire Saunooke on the spot, but Billie (and others) spoke up for him. The

council softened its stance and said as long as Shore agreed to retain Saunooke, the council would vote to retain him. Shore said, "1 make it a policy never to ask for forgiveness and never to forgive."

"So they fired me," says Rob Saunooke. "As James's personal attorney I had always intimidated Jim Shore. Now that they had gotten rid of me as James's law­yer, they realized they had three out of five votes against James and didn't need him anymore." But they still had to fig­ure out a way to get rid of him. Enter Christine O'Donnell.

O'Donnell had been Billie's executive assistant for years, as well as his lover. In 2001 she told him she was pregnant with his child. Billie said he didn't think the baby was his. "I don't know about that," he says. "I just know she took care of me. I always enjoyed life. You know, the downfall of all great leaders is sex."

The tribe fired O'Donnell, and Billie paid her SI69.000 in severance. But O'Donnell went to Shore and the Cypress brothers and demanded her job back. They advised her to file a sexual harass­ment suit against Billie, which, if success­ful, would get back her job. Rob Saunooke took up Billie's case "to save James's butt." he says. Billie says, "Jim Shore, Max, David and Mitchell saw this as an opportunity to gel rid of me because I was sick and tired of their spending more money than was accounted for."

Around the time O'Donnell's suit was playing out, first in federal court, where it was dismissed, and then in state court. Shore was shot. When the police talked to Billie he told the cops he was in church with two of his ex-wives the night of the murder.

By 2002 the O'Donnell suit had been settled out of court without Billie having to pay her. She did not get her job back. Frustrated, the tribal council looked around for another reason to fire Bil­lie and came up with the $20 million he had invested in Nicaragua and offshore gambling. They accused him of "illegal

expenditures of tribal funds." Billie sued to be put back on the ballot for future tribal-council elections. During deposi­tions in December 2002 Shore said the tribe had the right to rescind any con­tract or promise it had made for any reason because the tribe was an inde­pendent nation. This would become the Seminoles' rationale. Whenever ques­tioned about financial expenditures, contracts, accepted bids and so on, the tribe's response was always the same: As a sovereign nation, we can do whatever we want, and no one can stop us.

In 2003 the tribal council voted for­mally to remove Billie from the council and, informally, to remove him from all tribal affairs. The council prevented him from running for the office again because it claimed he no longer lived on the reser­vation. "James Billie was the main person responsible for bringing gaming to the Indians," says Rob Saunooke, "and then he was written out of Seminole gaming history. I think he believed his people would rise up to support him." But they didn't, primarily because members of the council had used their discretionary funds for years as "vote-for-me money," says Billie. They were like a benevolent charity, only they didn't provide soup kitchens. They bought Lexuses, trucks and vacations for their constituents. Why support Billie, who was preaching fiscal responsibility, when council members were lavishing them with gifts?

Before he was fired from the council Billie negotiated a deal to have the tribe's Hard Rock Hotel and Casino built in Hollywood. After his ouster the council scrapped his deal and made one of its own: The casino would be built in 2004, with fewer rooms than Billie's original deal proposed. Soon the tribe would have similar casinos on res­ervations in Hollywood, Tampa, Big Cypress, Immokalee and Brighton. Those casinos now produce more than SI..5 bil-

lion in revenue for the tribe. Florida gov­ernor Charlie Crist signed an executive order in 2006 granting Seminole casinos a number of Class 111 gaming enterprises. The Seminoles could offer blackjack, bac­carat and Vegas slots if they promised to pay the state at least SI00 million a year, which would be the first time since 1979 the tribe paid any of its gaming revenue to the slate. A lot of people questioned this deal. Who would hold the Seminoles to their contract when it had already been proved the tribe could not be sued for any­thing that happened in Indian country?

Today the Seminoles are so famous their leaders are treated like rock stars when they fly to Asia to discuss the possibil­ity of building a Hard Rock casino or to Times Square, where Seminoles in their ancestral clothes waved to the crowd and Max Osceola told the media the tribe was going to buy back Manhattan.

But all is not rosy in the Seminole nation. There is a perception in Florida, outside the reservation, that the Semi­noles have become greedy and arrogant, possibly corrupt, '['here are problems linked to how the tribe spends its gaming profits, the investments into which they have entered and the perception among non-Seminoles that tribal leaders have a serious image problem. One of Billie's greatest talents, which was underappreci­ated by his tribe, was his astute sense of public relations. Today's Seminole lead­ers are either indifferent to or ignorant of the ramifications their excessive spend­ing habits may have on the w-orld beyond the reservation—which is why that world no longer sees the tribe as a noble people of great moral courage. The leaders see the Seminoles' sovereignty as a right, not a gift, which is what it is: a gift from the federal government to atone for its sins against the Seminoles. But the white man's guilt is not limitless. It can be rescinded in a moment bv the scratch of a pen.

The chances are slim that the federal government will ever rescind Indian sovereignty, no matter how egregiously tribes behave, but the chances are much greater that the state of Florida could lose patience with the Seminoles and destroy their gaming empire by open­ing up non-Indian casinos in Miami, Orlando and Tampa.

Last fall the Sun-Srntinrl ran a series of articles about the Seminoles, which unearthed the following: Although the tribe pays no property taxes and despite the gaming revenue, it still regularly petitions the federal government for aid. Over a five-year period the tribe received $80 million for such items as laptop computers for its casinos, an airboat for its police and low-income housing for people already guaranteed $120,000 a year. It also revealed that Osceola owes the IRS $958,308 in back taxes. Since 2000 the council members have used their money to the tune of $280 million to buy luxury boats, cars and trucks, televisions, stereos, high-end homes, cosmetic surgery and gastric bypasses for its members. David Cypress bought so many Lexuses that he has called himself the world's greatest Lexus buyer. He says he can't remember how many Lexuses he has bought or for whom.

Neither David Cypress nor any other council member sees any conflict of interest in voting themselves huge sums of money during meetings; a lot of that money is funneled from council members to their constituents in the form of gifts. Council members increase such spend­ing around the time of tribal elections in May. That may be why Osceola and the Cypress brothers have been consistently reelected to their council positions for the past 20 years or so.

Although council members say they

can spend their gaming revenue any way they want because they are members of a sovereign nation, this may not be true. According to the Indian (laming Regu­latory Act of 1988, tribes with gaming profits can spend those profits only on tribal government, tribal welfare, tribal economic development, charitable dona­tions and the operation of local govern­ment agencies. The tribe is forbidden to spend gaming revenue on gifts, personal items, nonbusiness trips (e.g., trips to Vegas to shoot pool), club memberships and personal bills.

Phil Hogen is chairman of the National Indian Gaming Commission, which over­sees the spending habits of tribes with casi­nos. Hogen has the authority to punish the Seminoles in a number of ways if he determines the tribe has violated the act: He can fine it, close the casinos or seek criminal prosecutions. Although Hogen admits there are disturbing signs concern­ing the Seminoles' spending, he has yet to punish the tribe and doesn't want to do it "if it's going to disrupt progress."

"These guys have been raping the shit out of my people for years, like they claim I did," says Billie. He's driving his truck around the west side of Lake Okeechobee, heading home to the Brighton reserva­tion. "Now, I still love Max Osceola," he says. "I've got nothing against him. I respect Jim Shore, too. But there's a greed thing going on here." He glances at me with a grin. "You know. Max was the first Seminole to graduate from college. What was his degree? I don't know. How to screw his own people, I guess."

Billie says that until the gaming ven­tures he pursued became successful, Osceola, Shore and the Cypress brothers wanted nothing to do with gaming. They

had the altitude of reservation Indians: Don't piss oil the government that was giving handouts. Once they realized the government was on their side in gaming, their attitude changed. "They wanted the power they thought I had," Billie says. "But they didn't deserve it. 1 was the one who figured out how lo make money for the tribe."

Billie turns west oil Route 78 onto the two-lane blacktop leading to Brighton. It's a secluded reservation surrounded by palmetto, cypress and tall grass. There is nothing of the hardscrabble Indian reservation here. Brighton is beautifully landscaped, with a series of new double-wide trailers surrounded by the requisite cars, trucks and boats.

Billie, his wife, Maria, and their two children, four-year-old Aubee and five-year-old Santiago, are having din­ner at the Brighton casino. It is a small one-room building with a dining area up front, bingo slots in the middle and poker tables at the far end. On this night the diners around Billie and his family are mostly older while-haired couples and overweight Seminole families.

Jimmy has a glass of wine with dinner, but he is not a drinker. Maria ministers to their children, who are well behaved. I ask Billie what Rob Saunooke told me to ask him: Knowing what he knows about how gaming affected his tribe, would he do it all over again? "Hell, yes," Billie says, angrily. "Anything we got isn't because of James Billie. It's because of our ancestors before me." What about the Seminoles who stay home and don't do anything except collect their SI0,000 a month? "Don't do anything?" he asks. "You can't say that. They lost their land to the white man. They were taken advantage of Now his investment is this piece of land with gaming on it. He deserves it."

Just then Dan Wisher, Billie's techni­cal advisor, enters the dining room. He comes over and sits with us. He's a big florid-faced man with white hair and a Southern drawl. He tells how Billie is going to run lor the council in 15 months. "Then 24 months later," Wisher says, "he will run for council chairman." He smiles at Billie. "He's like this old gator in the Everglades marsh, his red eyes just above the water, watching and waiting."

James Billie is not some tragic figure, living on the post, building ancestral chichees and sweating in the south Flor­ida heat. He is a survivor, undaunted, like his Seminole ancestors, the Uncon-quered. Plus, he is still entitled to his $10,000 a month.

"Yeah, I'm going to run again," says Billie. "My heart is still in Hollywood. The more the tribe leaves us alone, the more it strengthens us when we take over again."

JAMES BILLIE INVENTED THE CONCEPT OF THE INDIAN

CASINO AND TURNED THE SEMINOLES FROM AN

IMPOVERISHED TRIBE TO ONE FLUSH WITH CASH.

FOR HIS EFFORTS HE WAS BOOTED OUT

"I DIDN'T INTEND

TO KILL THE PANTHER. I'D

GONE INTO THE SWAMP TO

SHOW SOME SPANISH GUYS

HOW TO CATCH GATORS."