(8 of 8)
For the next several years, the families wrote more letters to the bureau--and to members of Congress--pleading their case. Finally, in 1961, after a congressional act paved the way for reservation land to be divided among individual members of tribes, they got their wish and the BIA signed the property over to them. Within two years the families had sold off every parcel.
Two decades later, when high-stakes bingo halls were sprouting up across the state, the Lytton descendants decided to re-form and secure federal recognition, which is needed to own a casino. They bypassed the traditional regulatory process and piggybacked on a lawsuit filed by a group of Northern California Indians who claimed the Federal Government had improperly terminated their tribes in the 1960s. When a judge ruled in the group's favor in 1991, the Lyttons were also formally recognized.
Obtaining reservation land on which to build the casino was even easier. Sam Katz, a Philadelphia financier who has arranged multimillion-dollar financing packages for sports stadiums from Denver to Miami, has become the Lyttons' guardian angel. Katz and his partners found and bought a 10-acre parcel of land for a casino amid the graying stores and modest homes of San Pablo on the East Bay, a 25-minute drive from San Francisco. You might call it a "gaming reservation" because the Lyttons do not intend to live there. Katz has acquired a second piece of property--near Windsor, 60 miles away--for the tribe's "residential" reservation. As Katz told TIME, "We've paid all the expenses of applying for and putting their applications into the Bureau of Indian Affairs for both pieces of property, which involved extensive environmental surveys and traffic surveys and archaeological surveys and historical surveys and you name it." Katz has done much more: he has also paid for tribal government staff, for the tribe's leases on property and equipment, and for its public affairs activities. He has paid its legal expenses and hired lobbyists, consultants and advisers.
So when it became clear that the petitions might languish at the BIA, the Lyttons and their backers had everything in place to take a new tack. They approached George Miller, longtime Congressman from the East Bay, whose district includes San Pablo. The ranking Democrat on the House Resources Committee, Miller did what only a senior member of Congress could: he plugged a three-sentence amendment into an unrelated bill that gave the Lyttons their reservation. Later, there would be outrage over the amendment. Frank Wolf, a Republican Congressman from Virginia, called it a disgrace. But for 200 Lyttons and their backers, it's an American success story. --With reporting by Laura Karmatz/New York and research by Joan Levinstein, Mitch Frank and Nadia Mustafa
This is the first of a two-part series. Next installment: Money & Politics