Huge Game to Begin : Super-Bingo Joins Empire of Seminoles

The way to the guaranteed $250,000 jackpot is through the swamps. Alligator Alley, they call the road.

It slices 84 miles across Florida’s familiar paw, all the way from Fort Lauderdale to Naples, through the saw grass flats and lonesome tree islands.

Smack in the middle, a narrow lane cuts away to the north, deeper into the hardwood hammocks, piercing the hissing, steamy marsh that is home to gators, snakes and long-necked birds.

Finally, there is a bend to the left, and that is where the players will first see it--the biggest bingo hall in America. Set in an enormous clearing, it flashes in the sun, an aluminum hulk glaring against a backdrop of cypress forest and deep blue sky.

Big Jackpots

This colossus opens Saturday, and inside will not be just any bingo, but super-jackpot Seminole Indian bingo, up to $1 million in prizes. In the last decade, Indians and bingo have become one of America’s oddest cultural combinations, spread across 30 states. This strange combination began with the Seminoles, who were chased into these swamps by the bluecoats 150 years ago.

The new 2 1/2-acre bingo hall looks like a giant toolshed, as out of place in the green-brown wilderness as a refrigerator beside a campfire. But the building seats 5,600, and nearly every spot already is reserved for the first of what will become twice-monthly super-jackpot sessions.

With it, the Seminoles add a fourth bingo site to a Florida empire that includes cigarette shops, cattle ranches and a Sheraton hotel in Tampa. Tribal leaders place annual revenues at $8.5 million.

Admission Expensive

“It’s a lot better than selling trinkets by the side of the road, don’t you think?” said Max Osceola Jr., one of the five councilmen who govern the 1,700-member tribe.

Admission to the eight-hour event--bingo cards included--costs a minimum of $99, with other tickets that bring the biggest prizes going for $159 and $249. In the 47th and final game of the day, $250,000 is guaranteed to go.

“The biggest jackpot ever!” boasted Steve Blad, the non-Indian who is general manager, his smile as wide as the grille of a Cadillac. “This is it, the Super Bowl of bingo!”

That high-stakes bingo has found a home in these swamps is an odd accident of history. The Seminoles were pushed into Florida from Georgia and Alabama during the course of three wars. In the 1830s, many were herded to Ft. Brooke, near Tampa Bay, to await steamers and eventual resettlement in Oklahoma.

Those who resisted, led by warriors like Billy Bowlegs, hid in the virgin Everglades, exhausting the soldiers who trailed them into the mosquito-vexed bog. It was a time of ambushes and atrocities on both sides, of homesick men lying on damp ground lost in fevered dreams.

When the U.S. government finally gave up the chase, there were only about 200 Seminoles left in the swamps. No treaty was ever signed. For more than a century, that was how the Seminoles were best known, as the unconquered tribe that had faded into the marsh.

Tourists would sometimes visit their villages, where the shelters were no more than thatched roofs held up by stilts. Indian men wrestled alligators for tips, and the women peddled souvenirs.

“That’s how everyone liked us, wrestling alligators or quietly selling our beads by the railroad station,” said Jim Shore, a full-blooded Seminole and the tribe’s lawyer.

Three Land Parcels

The Seminoles were scattered over 120,000 acres of land given to them by the federal government in three parcels. Most of it was deep in the swamp.

But by the 1970s concrete was oozing across even some of the remote marsh. Each year, more homes and condos bloomed as the saw grass disappeared. The white man may have never conquered the Seminoles, but he began to overwhelm them. Urban sprawl encircled one of the three reservations.

Indian land then became an intriguing prospect to smart white men who kept the tax code on their desk tops. They came calling on the tribal leaders, and their favorite word was “partner.” To them, reservation lands were like a sovereign nation within the United States, where the Indians ought to be able to make their own rules to earn some fast money.

With such advice, the Seminoles in 1977 opened drive-in cigarette booths along the busiest road through the reservation. Because they did not charge the state tax of $2.10 a carton, their prices were the cheapest around.

First Bingo Hall

Two years later, with non-Indian backers, they opened their first bingo hall, right off busy Florida 7. They ignored the state jackpot limit of $100, instead offering payoffs of $10,000 and up.

All this infuriated Florida officials. The state was losing more than $10 million a year in cigarette taxes. Worse, Indian bingo was big-time gambling with no one from the state keeping an eye on the till.

Court fights lasted for years, but the eventual ruling said the tribe--within reasonable bounds--was exempt from state regulation on its own lands.

“We finally won one,” Shore said.

The victory changed Indian finances across the nation. More than 80 tribes have started bingo games. Usually, the Indians supply only use of their land. Outside investors pay construction costs and provide management in return for a share--often 49%--of the profits.

Open in Tampa

In such ventures, it is the Seminoles who remain the trailblazers, relentless pioneers of low-priced cigarettes and high-stakes bingo.

Five years ago, they connived a way to open in Tampa, where the tribe had no reservation land at all.

Construction workers excavating there happened upon some beads and bones. It turned out they were on the site of old Ft. Brooke, where so many Seminoles had suffered before being sent west.

In sober, if hasty, arrangements between the city and tribe, the Seminoles accepted their ancestors’ remains and purchased an 8 1/2-acre site near town with the announced intention of erecting a shrine. Tampa supported the Indians’ request to gain federal trust status for the land.

Just as promised, the old bones were indeed reburied. Medicine man Buffalo Jim put the spirits to rest with a ceremony of chanting and burning herbs.

Surprise Construction

But that ritual was quickly overshadowed when the Indians surprised the city by building a drive-in smoke shop and giant bingo hall on the land.

“I always had bingo in the back of my head,” tribal Chairman James Billie would acknowledge later.

The Tampa operations became the tribe’s most profitable, and yet another symbol of how the Seminoles were learning the crafty ways of the businessman.

To guard its interests, the tribe employed two full-time lobbyists in the state capital. Friendly politicians could count on the Seminoles for campaign contributions.

“Everything is politics, one hand washing the other, and we’re just starting to learn,” Shore said.

But, if there is high finance on the agenda of the tribal council, very little of the big money is evident among the people themselves.

“If the tribe is rich, the people don’t know it,” said Pepper Harris, an educational counselor who has worked with the Seminoles for 18 years.

Stucco Homes

The tribe is equally split among the three reservations. Most members live in modest stucco homes, some new and roomy but others well on the way toward ramshackle.

Two of the sites are a long drive from the city. Unemployment is many times the state average. Drugs and alcohol are an epidemic.

“A lot of Seminoles don’t have much inclination to look for a job, let alone hold on to it,” said David Jumper, 40, one of the tribe.

There is also a confusion of identity.

“My youngest told me, ‘I want to be an Indian when I grow up,’ ” recalled Scarlett Young, 34. “I said, ‘You are an Indian.’ No, he thinks an Indian is what they show on TV.”

There are a few Seminoles who still resist the white man’s ways, sleep beneath the stars and speak only the old tongue, but the vast majority have layered one culture upon the other and have gone, as they say, “out into the world.”

Animal Parts, Video

Some are better at that than others. Billie, 43, the tribal chairman, gathers animal parts for Seminole medicine. But he also flies a small plane between reservations and has taped a music video to go with his first album as a pop vocalist.

“We used to go out and fish and hunt, but now we go to the 7-Eleven and buy bologna just like everyone else,” he once told a reporter.

In many ways, the reservation is like a small town. Everyone knows everyone else. Secrets are difficult to keep, and rumors bob in the air. Tribal prosperity has not made people closer. There are complaints that the spoils--mostly jobs--are unevenly shared. Some hint at corruption.

In less than a decade, the tribe’s annual budget has increased from $10,000 to more than $8 million. Every Seminole gets a quarterly revenue-sharing check, usually $150 to $300, but that leaves a lot of cash to be spread elsewhere.

Effort to See Books

“Tell me where all the money goes!” Marcellus Osceola said. “If you ask to see the books, all you get are excuses. Or, if they let you look at them, they don’t let you go in with an outsider, like an accountant.”

Tribal leaders answer that they have the same expenses as any government--a police department, health clinics, meals for the elderly, matching funds for federal housing grants.

“The trouble is, everybody wants to be chief and nobody wants to be the Indians,” said Max Osceola, the tribal councilman.

These days, much of the profits are being used to diversify the tribe’s investments. In January, the Seminoles opened a 156-room Sheraton hotel in Tampa. There are plans for citrus farms, an office building and maybe an electronics assembly plant.

‘A Big Enough Noise’

“Bingo won’t be here forever,” Shore said. “You can bet sometime somebody will make a big enough noise. That will be the end.”

Until then, the name of the game is still high-stakes bingo.

Saturday, busloads of passengers from 28 states are expected to rumble along the narrow road into the reservation.

On the way, they will see the huge birds and the cypress groves and the wind making cat-licks across the saw grass.

Then they will stop amid the sprawl of 12 acres of parking and hustle into the aluminum hulk, hoping to take home the super-jackpot that is the new harvest of the swamp.