The Bravest Hunter

By Michael Newell

This book explains how Native American Casinos became the largest group of casinos in America as a result of the efforts of Congress, the National Indian Gaming Commission, and the creative management companies and game suppliers that served the tribes.

This book is the biography of Gordon Graves, whom many consider being the Father of Indian Gaming.
It tracks his early career in military electronics as the field matured from using large analog machines to inventing and utilizing digital computers.
Graves then transformed his career as an accomplished engineer involved with military systems to become an entrepreneur in numerous fields, concluding in Indian gaming while building a business (Multimedia Games) worth over a billion dollars.
Graves saw the future for Indian gaming and fought alongside the Indians through the courts to develop the industry into what it is today, a forty billion-dollar business.
It was a wild ride!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yorkshire Publishing
• Release date: May 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781952320231

Book preview

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ISBN 978-1-952320-07-1 (Paperback)

The Bravest Hunter

Copyright © 2020 Michael E. Newell

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.

Yorkshire Publishing

4613 E. 91st St,

Tulsa, OK 74137

www.YorkshirePublishing.com

918.394.2665

Printed in the USA

The first of all qualities (of a commander) is courage."

—Maurice de Saxe, Memoirs Concerning the Art of War

Foreword

by Jonathan Rhodes Regional Service Manager at Everi

When I was eighteen, I worked in a tribal casino in Alabama. I noticed each of the Class II gaming machines had computers in them. I was talented with the use of technology so, I instantly put in my application to the company and eventually joined that team. During my time at the casino, I took an interest in MGAM’s product and began thinking more about a career there rather than just having a job.

I worked with the MGAM techs and learned their product, then approached Multimedia Games for a technician position, and as I hoped, it led to my future career.

When MGAM offered the job, I researched the company and especially the founder, Gordon Graves. After seeing Mr. Graves’s portfolio and accomplishments, it was a no-brainer. I took the job. As I write this, I am thirty-six years of age and still with the company Mr. Graves founded and built from the ground up.

As a young man, I was always fascinated by Mr. Graves as it seemed everything he touched turned to gold. He is a brilliant leader and such a compassionate person, a combination I’ve rarely seen in the business world. During the years Mr. Graves was actively leading the company, he always seemed to put the right people in the right job, and so the company kept growing. Later, MGAM sold for more than a billion dollars.

I wish I could have been beside Mr. Graves seven days a week to have soaked up as much knowledge as possible from him. Mr. Graves has touched thousands of lives as a supplier of a superior product that made money for its clients and for the thousands more who Mr. Graves put on a career path. Mr. Graves solidified my future in this industry by starting the company. After all, I was just a teenage boy from a small town in Alabama who did not know what I was going to do with my life.

I often wonder what Mr. Graves thinks about his business ventures. In America today, things are usually about the mighty dollar, but I honestly believe Mr. Graves gets a thrill from creating these jobs and paving the road for many, many people like me.

In the gaming industry, there are so many bumpy roads, red tape, regulations, legal matters and tons more that go into starting a company like Multimedia Games. It just shows the sheer brilliance of Mr. Graves. For him to take an idea and turn it into what he has, takes more than I could ever imagine. In this industry, it’s not just get a product and go. There is so much more to it, and it blows my mind how Mr. Graves does things like this.

It is essential to note that Mr. Graves does not merely create minimum-wage jobs; he creates life-changing careers. As I have previously said, he has given me a career that I thank God for every day. I no longer need to check my bank balance or worry about finances. I honestly attribute everything I have to Mr. Graves, and I hope that one day he creates a new company that I can be a part of in order to further the skill sets that I have built over the years.

Incredibly, Mr. Graves armed the tribes with the weapons by way of high-earning Class II games they needed to force the states to negotiate compacts¹ with tribes allowing them to run Class III games, just like Las Vegas casinos.

Mr. Graves retired twice, first when he left MGAM, then again after he started an amusement games company called Aces Wired in Texas and settled his legal battle with Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott. He was seventy-four. A close associate of Mr. Graves, David Hatton, past president of Chickasaw Enterprises, said, Gordon was not just retiring, he was preparing to die. Then Mr. Graves met his wife, Linda, and regained a new zest for life.

Throughout my career at Multimedia, which is now known as Everi, I often brag to people when Mr. Graves’s name comes up. I am one of the lucky ones able to say I worked with him and continue to work for his legacy. To this day, I still follow Mr. Graves and imagine what might come next. Mr. Graves is a great man and very solid. I, and many others, would follow Mr. Graves on any business venture, as we know it will be a success.

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¹. Compacts are agreements, or treaties, with Indian Tribes

Preface

In the early 1800s, thirty million buffalo roamed the Great Plains. By the later 1800s, after serving as the primary source of food and supplies for the American Indians, most of the buffalo succumbed to U.S. government-mandated elimination that effectively destroyed the most important food and material resource of the Plains Indian people. As a result, the tribes had little choice but to move onto reservations, effectively ending their traditional way of life.

The American Indian’s plight was unique. Unlike that of other impoverished people, the Indian was a prisoner and forbidden from roaming freely and hunting as they had for millennia. Impoverished non-Indian people pinned their hopes on their hard labor lifting them out of poverty and offering them the promise of their children gaining a life-changing education. The Indians, conversely, were hopeless.

Opportunely, Native Americans later discovered that they could sustain themselves with gambling. First were the Seminoles in Florida, with self-regulated, high-stakes bingo games. The Seminoles fought an intense legal battle for their right to manage their affairs concerning gaming all the way to the Supreme Court.² The decision, in favor of the tribe, established that tribes could operate games that were legal according to state laws and self-regulate such games under their own rules, outside of state regulations. As a result, bingo became a very different game featuring high-stake prizes and was no longer reminiscent of small bingo games run in church basements.

With the Seminoles’ victory in 1984, other tribes soon followed their example. Consequently, local law enforcement in California challenged the rights of the Cabazon tribe to operate high-stakes bingo, citing California as a Public Law 280 state,³. In their view, gaming on the Indian reservation constituted an illegal activity.

The tribe hired Glen Feldman, an attorney who specialized in Indian law, whose defense helped secure the Supreme Court ruling in 1987,⁴ then dubbed the Cabazon Case. Today, the Cabazon decision represents the most significant piece of case law responsible for establishing the legal foundation for Indian gaming law, which transformed impoverished and scattered tribes into economic powerhouses.

Ultimately, the Indians had discovered what John James, Chairman of the Cabazon tribe in California, called the new buffalo. The new buffalo was gaming, and Gordon Graves was The Greatest Hunter. Graves led the pursuit of the new buffalo by first designing a platform to interlink many tribal bingo halls across a wide area network to operate a high-stakes, million-dollar bingo game in real-time. As a result, more and more tribal gaming operations joined the burgeoning network, and attendance at reservation gaming venues soared.

As technology improved, Graves next invented a bingo game called MegaMania.⁵ This completely electronic bingo game designed to display the results of a bingo game in an entertaining manner had the appearance of playing a slot machine. The US attorney in Tulsa challenged the legality of MegaMania, and Graves and his company, Multimedia Games⁶, (MGAM) financed the legal battle to prove that the game was lawful and in accord with the language in the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

Since Multimedia Games was a publicly owned company, many Wall Street analysts, including Jim Cramer, recommended that investors sell Multimedia Games short. As a result, the price of the stock plummeted. Accordingly, there were no Wall Street funds available to fight the legal battle to come. Consequently, Graves pledged all his assets, including his home, and borrowed millions of dollars to pay legal fees and fight the Justice Department. Graves hired a powerful legal team and ultimately won favorable decisions in two Federal Circuit Court jurisdictions (the Ninth and Tenth Circuits), both of which agreed that MegaMania was a legal bingo game. The Justice Department appealed, but the Supreme Court refused to hear the case because two circuit courts had already decided that MegaMania was a Class II⁷ game.

Some states, such as Minnesota, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, negotiated Class III⁸ compacts with tribes in their jurisdictions. However, some states refused this negotiating posture and cited that states-rights, and not the federal government, held sway over the matter of negotiating gaming compacts with tribes or not. The Supreme Court addressed the question in the early nineties, and they ruled in favor of the states-rights argument, thus striking the specific language from IGRA requiring states to negotiate tribal gaming compacts in good faith.

While the federal government could not force states to negotiate Class III compacts with tribes, the states eventually relented because the tribes could operate the Class II games in a casino-like environment without a compact or state interference. However, compacting for Class III games put the states in partnership position with the tribes as regulatory overseers for which they receive fees. Consequently, more states agreed to Class III tribal gaming compacts allowing tribal operations to offer a broader range of game types, which improved the entertainment value of tribal casinos and consequently drew more players. The fees collected by the state are applied to offset the states’ cost of regulatory oversight. Still, some states insisted on augmenting their coffers from the payments, which usually went into a general fund or rainy-day type account.

Mr. Graves would be delighted to declare that the challenge to MegaMania signified the end of litigation involving Indian gaming, but a more significant and enterprising story lies ahead. The transformation of bingo played on cards to bingo played with technological aids is at the heart of modern-day Indian gaming. With a nudge, a spark, and the intuition found in only a true entrepreneur’s heart and mind, Gordon Graves, the bravest new buffalo hunter, propelled Indian gaming into an innovative and profitable future.

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² Seminoles v State of Florida, circa 1984

³ A federal law enacted in 1953 allowing local criminal enforcement on tribal land

⁴ The Cabazon decision is the principle case law that impelled the proliferation of Indian gaming.

⁵ A bingo game played on an electronic player station linked to a shared server and linked to other players across a broad network.

⁶ MGAM – Multimedia Games, formerly Travis Enterprises, founded by Gordon Graves. MGAM focused on delivering gaming products to Indian Country gaming venues.

⁷. Class II is a reference to game types defined in the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (USC 2501) enacted in 1988. The law classified games as Class I: traditional Indian games that have existed in tribal culture over a long period, Class II: bingo games and games similar to bingo, and Class III: everything that is not Class I or Class II.

⁸ Gaming compacts with tribes in their jurisdiction defined in IGRA as anything not Class I or Class II, and are typically house-banked games where the house (casino-operator) has a stake in the outcome of the game.

Introduction

Manifest Destiny was an unofficial, unwritten doctrine supported by the U.S. government in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century that implied the government would secure and control all land between the two great oceans. This doctrine was likely the impetus for the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848, which pushed Mexican rule from California, Nevada, Utah, part of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to its current borders. The doctrine was also the likely incentive for reining in free-roaming Native American people, who lived their lives and raised their families on Great Plains lands teeming with herds of buffalo. Soon, between buffalo hunters and the U.S. military, the herds were decimated. Plains tribes, because of a lack of a food source, had their possessions declared contraband and confiscated, forcing the Indian people into a new, dependent way of life.

Targeting tribes in the southern and eastern areas of the U.S., the Indian Removal Act in 1830 passed during Andrew Jackson’s term as president. This act precipitated the U.S. military force-marching Indian people from southern and eastern lands to new lands the government dubbed Indian Territory known today as Oklahoma. The forced march is known as the Trail of Tears.

The U.S. government insisted that each displaced tribe sign a treaty agreeing to the displacement. However, a segment of defiant Seminoles, led by Osceola,⁹ and many of his followers escaped into the Florida Everglades, where the terrain and cover allowed them to fight off the soldiers pursuing them well into the 1850s. Those Seminoles remain in Florida to this day.

A few Cherokees were able to avoid apprehension by melding into a portion of what is now North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains; these groups survived.

A small portion of the Muscogee Creek Indians, known as the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, was able to keep a fraction of their lands in Alabama as a reward for aiding the U.S. against the Northern Creek Red Sticks in the Creek War of 1813–1814.

Many of the western tribes eventually defeated by U.S. troops were sequestered-in-place on reservations and became wholly dependent on the government for food, shelter and clothing. Many of these reservations still exist and have become tribal towns, at times referred to as agency towns.¹⁰

In Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, each head of household relocated there received a quarter-section of land or 160 acres, with the presumption that they would farm their land like non-Indian people. That didn’t happen. Small groups of tribal people banded around matriarchs or patriarchs and founded villages, which later became tribal towns, and they only farmed enough land to sustain their needs.

When the federal government realized that many of the original allotments were underutilized, the U.S. repurchased the unused land for ten cents an acre. Then, the government allotted those reacquired lands to non-Indian homesteaders, thereby ending the concept of Indian Territory and paving the way for non-Indian settlements and Oklahoma statehood.

As a result, Indian people, who could no longer exist the way they had for enumerable generations, lived in poverty until the 1980s. Unemployment and underemployment among Indian people were as high as 40 percent, with rampant alcoholism and drug abuse taking the lives of too many tribal youths

Then, something changed. The Indians discovered a new enterprise: bingo.

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