Leech Lake likes casino mystery

Casino fraud, murder setting for Cass Lake author’s novel

People who read Jim Proebstle’s “In the Absence of Honor” won’t help but make comparisons to Cass Lake.

By Brad SwensonThe skinny—Jake Lorenz decides to winter at his family’s cabin in Sandy’s Cove on Arrowhead Point and finds a gruesome murder scene. The episode draws him into the shadowy struggle for land, wealth and power, which includes the corrupt tribal council that controls the nearby Ojibwe casino. It includes a land grab by a powerful Twin Cities brewery owner.

“The feedback I got was quite good,” Proebstle said of reaction from Leech Lake tribal members of his novel, including from members of the Leech Lake Tribal Council. “I met a couple of tribal council members … and I actually asked if I need to be concerned, and they said, no, not at all.”

In fact, there might be a sequel, he said. “I had no idea of a sequel when I wrote this book, but I do now as I got calls saying not only is this a problem, but this and this and this are problems too.”

The book, released last fall by small Texas publisher Emerald Book Co., while set in the 1990s is topical about corruption in gaming, not necessarily at Cass Lake but industry wide, he said. Longtime joblessness and substance abuse has rocked many reservations.

“This problem lends itself to corruption,” he said. “Just visually reach out in one of these reservations and drop a $30 million to a $50 million project right into the center of it, with a hundred years of lack of leadership. That project is a cash project—we call it a casino.

“With little oversight, little government controls, very little accounting controls until recently over the last 10 to 12 years,” he added, “so in my mind, just a prime opportunity for corruption and abuse.”Comment:  The Leech Lake tribal council is more openminded than I'd be. Proebstle wrote a mystery about a tribe just like theirs, perhaps based on theirs. And he showed it be a cesspool of crime and corruption. How is that a good thing?

Indian gaming has a lot of oversight and controls, not a "little." Most of the operations are clean and crime-free. When corruption happens, it tends to be outside the casino itself. For instance, a council member will embezzle the tribe's earnings, which is a government problem, not a gaming problem.

For more on the subject, see Absence of Honor in Indian Gaming and The Best Indian Books.