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By Root 707 0

and Scanlon were playing a tricky game. The pastors they enlisted in their anti-gambling campaign would have been furious if they had known their church bulletin inserts were being financed by casino money. That’s why Abramoff and Reed took great care to obscure the money’s origin. For the Choctaw account, the main money laundry was the tax-exempt Americans for Tax Reform, run by their old College Republicans friend Grover Norquist, the take-no-prisoners Republican power broker who once told the Denver Post, “Bipartisanship is another name for date-rape.”5 The Choctaw money went through Norquist to groups like the Alabama Christian Coalition, which has a policy of refusing money even indirectly connected to gambling. As the Senate Indian Affairs Committee would later find, this setup had the added benefit of allowing Abramoff and Scanlon to pad the accounts, ripping off millions of extra dollars from the “monkeys.” All in all, it was a great system.

So Reed was a natural for the Coushatta’s campaign to shut down the Tigua casino. They would work through the churches to whip up moral outrage against Indian gambling in Texas—at the behest of Indian gambling interests in Louisiana.

This time, instead of laundering the money through Norquist, they set up a not-for-profit “think tank” called the American International Center. The AIC’s sole reason for existing was to hide the source of Reed’s Indian money from his evangelical Christian pawns, but that’s not what they said on the website. Visitors to the AIC’s home on the Internet read that the organization’s mission was to “influence global paradigms in an increasingly complex world.”

As the Senate Indian Affairs Committee would later discover, the prestigious AIC was run by two uniquely qualified boyhood friends of Scanlon’s: yoga instructor Brian Mann and former lifeguard David Grosh. Grosh testified that Scanlon had asked him, “Do you want to be the head of an international corporation?” and he had responded, “Sure.” Then, Grosh told Committee Chairman John McCain, “I asked him what I had to do, and he said ‘Nothing,’ so that sounded pretty good to me.”

Grosh influenced global paradigms out of the basement of his house. For his trouble, he received $2500 and tickets to a Washington Capitals–Pittsburgh Penguins hockey game. The NHL later folded.

I’d like to take a moment to recount Grosh’s opening statement to McCain’s committee. In its entirety.

I’m embarrassed and disgusted to be a part of this whole thing. The Lakota Indians have a word, wasichu, which aptly describes all of us right now.

That was it. Wasichu, by the way, means “he who steals the fat.” Truer words had never been spoken by a former lifeguard who ran an international think tank.

Reed’s efforts to, as he wrote to Abramoff, “get our pastors riled up” gave Cornyn the political cover he needed to continue his anti-Tigua crusade. On February 11, 2002, Cornyn won his case, and a federal judge demanded that the Speaking Rock Casino shut its doors.

Perhaps if the Tigua had hired Casino Jack, things would have been different. As Abramoff ruefully wrote that day to Reed:

I wish those moronic Tiguas were smarter in their political contributions. I’d love us to get our mitts on that moolah!! Oh well, stupid folks get wiped out.

Oh, well.

Unbeknownst to Reed, Abramoff was working to get his mitts on that moolah. Anticipating that the court would close the casino, Abramoff had already approached the Tigua about working on their behalf to reopen it. The Tigua, you see, didn’t know that Casino Jack had just been working the other side—and Abramoff neglected to tell them. Five days before the court’s decision, everything was falling into place. Abramoff e-mailed Scanlon with his usual infectious enthusiasm:

I’m on the phone with Tigua. Fire up the jet baby, we’re going to El Paso!

Scanlon replied,

I want all their money!!!

Abramoff felt good,

Yawzah!!

That’s how he spelled it. “Yawzah.”

Four days later, the jet was indeed fired up. Abramoff arrived in El Paso and presented