1.27.08
Casino fight turns fierce, ugly
Officials, lawyers deny conflicts of interest in battle
By MIKE CONNELL
Times Herald
In 10 days, a congressional committee is expected to vote on legislation meant to clear the path for a tribal casino in Port Huron.
The hearing, scheduled for Feb. 6 before the House Natural Resources Committee, is the latest battleground in a prolonged fight where the stakes - potentially hundreds of millions of dollars - are incredibly high, and where the behind-the-scenes brawling can seem incredibly vicious.
As an illustration of the metaphorical knife fighting, the case of Aurene Martin is instructive.
A member of the Wisconsin Oneida tribe, she majored in history, culture and Italian at universities in Madison, Wis., and Bologna, Italy. She returned home, earned a law degree in Madison in 1993 and then went to work in the public sector for a decade.
Friends and colleagues describe her as a soft-spoken intellectual, a person of the highest ethics and integrity. Last year, her peers voted her to a list of the nation's leading experts on Indian law.
“She’s a genuinely nice person, too,” added Wilson Pipestem, a co-founder of Ietan Consulting, the lobbying firm where Martin now works.
Feeling blindsided
Compare this person to the one described by an ex-mayor of Port Huron and a local labor leader, who remember feeling ambushed by Martin at a 2004 congressional hearing on the proposed casino.
“We were under the impression that she was going to speak in favor of the Port Huron casino. Definitely,” said B. Mark Neal, the former mayor.
Richard Cummings, president of the Michigan Machinists and a founding member of the Thomas Edison Casino Advisory Committee, said he also expected an Interior Department endorsement.
“I just thought it was a foregone conclusion, dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s,” he recalled.
Martin, then the principal deputy assistant secretary for Indian affairs, thanked the Natural Resources Committee for inviting her to testify and then said, “As discussed in our written testimony, the department is not currently able to support the bills as they are written.”
Neal and Cummings remember listening with astonishment as Martin offered a litany of objections to proposed casinos in Port Huron and Romulus.
“I remember walking out of there wondering, ‘Where did that come from?’” Neal said.
Staying consistent
A central question is whether Cummings and Neal, who had been invited to the 2004 hearing to testify in support of the casino, had been misled by lobbyists on their side of the battlelines.
Larry Rosenthal, the other co-founder of Ietan Consulting, said the Interior Department has been consistent in its objections to the Port Huron proposal. He said it’s preposterous to think the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an agency within the Interior Department, was ready to endorse the casino.
“Who told them Interior would support it?” he asked. “Who is this unnamed person?”
In fact, Martin’s testimony in 2004 echoed many of the comments she had made two years earlier while testifying at a similar hearing before a Senate committee.
In a telephone interview, Martin said she does not question the Port Huron men’s memories or sincerity, but she also said they were wrong. Interior Department officials did not support the casino, she said, and her testimony merely reflected the position of her colleagues at the agency.
“I understand they felt blindsided,” she said of Cummings and Neal. “People can take things from conversations that they want to take. That’s one thing. Or they can be spun by their own people. … I don’t know what happened there. I’m not sure why they thought they were going to get a positive report.”
Inside information
Jeff Parker, the leader of the Bay Mills Indian Community, also testified at the 2004 hearing. His tribe and its 1,300 members would own the Port Huron casino if Congress approves its agreement with the state of Michigan.
Martin now works as a registered lobbyist for the Saginaw Chippewa, a rival tribe that has spent freely, including $14 million to disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, on political efforts such as its quest to block a Port Huron casino.
“She had access to all the inside information that we shared with the (Bureau of Indian Affairs),” Parker said of Martin.
That might appear to pose an ethical dilemma, but Interior Department officials who reviewed the matter last week at the Times Herald’s request said Martin did nothing wrong.
“What I can tell you is there is an exemption from any post-employment restrictions for anyone who is working for a federally recognized tribe,” said Tina Kreisher, director of communications for the Interior Department. “No recusal was needed. … There was no need for any kind of waiver since she is working for a federally recognized tribe.”
In short, Martin violated no agency rules. She broke no federal laws.
Inquiry clears staff
Three months after the 2004 hearing, Martin resigned from the agency amid another controversy.
Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell and Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., sharply criticized her decision to acknowledge the Schaghticoke band as a federally recognized tribe.
According to Indianz.com, a Web site that covers Indian-related issues, Connecticut officials feared that Frederick DeLuca, co-founder of the Subway restaurant chain, and other wealthy investors seeking a casino had asked Martin to bend the rules.
Earl Devaney, the Interior Department’s inspector general and a Bush administration appointee, investigated the matter. He found no evidence of wrongdoing by Martin or anyone else at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“Although the Schaghticoke recognition decision was highly controversial, we found that (Martin and her colleagues) conducted themselves in keeping with the requirements of the administrative process," he concluded.
Memo gets leaked
A year later, Martin found herself back in the headlines as the result of an internal memorandum sent to the Saginaw tribe on Sept. 27, 2005.
At the time, Martin worked as an Indian law specialist for Holland & Knight, one of the world's 15 largest law firms. She co-wrote the memo with Rosenthal, the Ietan lobbyist. They detailed plans for the tribe to distribute more than $300,000 in political donations in the upcoming year.
While such memos are not unusual in Washington, they rarely become public. This one did. Supporters of a maverick Saginaw Chippewa leader posted the memo on a Web site, where it was picked up by The Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress.
The long list of recommended contributions included $5,000 to Rep. Charles Taylor, R-N.C., who Martin and Rosenthal described as "helpful" on blocking casinos in Romulus and Port Huron, and $2,000 to Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Brighton, who "has been very helpful" on the same front.
Martin later would leave Holland & Knight to join Rosenthal at Ietan.
Bar rules are strict
Parker's concern about Martin having access to confidential information that he said Bay Mills shared with the Bureau of Indian Affairs raises another ethical question: Is it proper for her to lobby for the Saginaw Chippewa, a tribe that is implacably opposed to Bay Mills' casino plans?
Martin is a member of the D.C. and Wisconsin bar associations. In a telephone interview, a legal ethics adviser for the District of Columbia Bar made it clear he would not comment on any particular person or situation.
The adviser, Saul Singer, did offer a general overview of the bar association's rules. "The confidentiality rule is very broad," he said. "The obligation to keep client's secrets is very broad."
If the rules are strict, they also may be moot in this matter.
"I was never acting as their attorney," Martin said of Bay Mills, "or as an attorney for the United States."
'This is so unfair'
Rosenthal, a Flint native, worked as an aide to U.S. Rep. Dale Kildee, D-Flint, for more than 11 years. During that time, he helped create the influential Congressional Native American Caucus, a bipartisan group that now includes 99 of the House's 435 members.
Rosenthal said he's well aware that casino infighting gets ugly, but he also said a newspaper article about Martin's role in the Port Huron casino effort is unjustified and unfair.
"She hasn't done one thing wrong," he said. "You talked to ethics experts (at the Interior Department). They told you she hasn't done anything. This is so unfair."
Career springboards
If Martin used a government job as a springboard to better-paying positions in the private sector, so have members of Port Huron's lobbying team.
For example, lawyer Lance Boldrey drafted the original Bay Mills land-settlement agreement as a legal adviser to Gov. John Engler. After Engler left office, Boldrey took a job with Dykema-Gossett, a prominent Detroit law firm.
In his new role, Boldrey is advising casino developer Mike Malik, who's positioned to make tens of millions of dollars in management fees if Bay Mills opens a Port Huron casino.
Under the Michigan Bar's code of ethics, Boldrey would be allowed to advise Malik only if he first obtained a waiver from Engler's successor, Gov. Jennifer Granholm.
Liz Boyd, the governor's press secretary, confirmed that Boldrey indeed has obtained such a waiver.
Note: apparently there was more to this article, including assertions made about TVT, in print format but the staff at the Port Huron Times Herald has failed to translate the entire article when posting on the Web.
