Strather and Tribe – the $25M spat

By , February 10, 2010 12:01 pm

Great article in the Cape Cod Times about an ugly sounding spat between Herb Strather and the Mashpee Wampanaog. Yet more bad news for the Middleboro casino. As an aside, the Cape Cod Times has rocked on this issue. The author of this article – Stephanie Vosk – was the very first reporter to call CFO. But I digress – back to the story:

Tribe leaders may be looking to cut ties with the people who financed their quest for federal recognition, but some of those investors don’t want to go quietly.
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Over the past decade, Detroit real estate developer Herb Strather formed a group of 300 investors to bankroll the tribe in exchange for a cut of future casino profits. Now that the deal has gone sour, some of the investors are considering taking legal action against the tribe if they’re left out of the potential windfall.

Legal action against the tribe? Come on dude, it’s not like they own millions of dollars worth of Cape Cod real estate. Oh wait …. they do.

Strather says he’s been told that his contributors will get back between 80 percent to 90 percent of the money they’ve doled out, but only if and when a casino opens.Ed – Guess what dude?.. you’re not getting your money back if it’s dependent on a casino opening in Middleboro
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Strather, who has contributed into the “seven figures” himself, said he’d have to pay his other investors first and wouldn’t see a penny. “This is not expressive of the tribe that met the Mayflower. This is not the same as the tribe that helped Harriet Tubman in the Underground Railroad, that helped the slaves,” he said last week. “This is completely a vindictive situation.”

I had to break it to you Herb, but this is not the tribe that met the Mayflower. There was no Mashpee Wampanoag tribe when the Mayflower landed. That whole “met the Mayflower” thing is a bunch of sentimental nonsense. And what’s up with this Harriet Tubman story? That’s news to me. Details anyone?

From 1999 to 2006, AtMashpee covered the tribe’s day-to-day costs.
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In total, the investor group has doled out more than $25 million over the past decade, said Strather, who headed up the group before stepping down a few years ago. “We supported the tribe with a very big budget, from Day 1,” Strather said. “I never ever, ever remember saying no.”
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Through an attorney yesterday, the tribal council rebuffed Strather’s claims. “Herbert Strather has no relationship with the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe,” attorney Howard Cooper said in a prepared statement. “His claims have no merit whatsoever, and as such the tribe will not respond further to them.”

If $25M won’t do it, what does it take to have a relationship with these guys?

But in 2008, Glenn Marshall, the tribal council chairman who signed the initial deal with Strather in 2000, admitted to federal prosecutors that he had funneled more than $4 million of Strather’s money through a state corporation to make campaign contributions and pay his own bills.
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Last year, Marshall pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 3½ years in federal prison.
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“I don’t know if they’re trying to blame me for that or not. I simply wrote checks,” Strather said in a recent interview. “No, I didn’t scrutinize really a lot because I love the tribe so much. I was so liberal with them, I gave them whatever they asked me.”

“Just wrote checks”? What sort of investor just writes checks? Hey Herb – would you like to invest in my new invention? It’s a car that runs on rainbows. Just write me some checks

But Strather says the break arose because the plan called for a $1.6 billion casino — a model deemed no longer feasible under tough economic conditions. Instead of trying to renegotiate — which Strather says he would have been willing to do — the tribe went looking for other financial backers.

If only someone had told the Middleboro board of selectmen that the deal was not financially feasible …. oh right … I did. But that was back in 2007. Maybe they forgot.
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Ay Carumba!

categories Middleboro

4 Responses to “Strather and Tribe – the $25M spat”

  1. When will they learn? says:
    February 10, 2010 at 3:40 pm

    Strather owns the land the tribe wants in Middleboro right? Well, I guess he has the trump card.

  2. bumpkin says:
    February 10, 2010 at 5:19 pm

    Does Strather own it as part of a LLC and if so does Kerzner own a pct?

  3. Al says:
    February 10, 2010 at 9:18 pm

    I guess that would explain why the land has not changed hands yet.
    It also explains why the Mashpee are now trying to get another piece of land, they don’t own, in Freetown.

  4. When will they learn? says:
    February 11, 2010 at 9:20 am

    No one knows for sure who TCAM LLC is. I know that Larry Deuitch (sp) signed some paperwork as a representative of TCAM LLC, and the corporation papers are filed in Michigan.

    I can’t think of a reason why Kerzner (or Wolman) would be interested in owning a pct of TCAM. Ownership would require a financial investment. They haven’t spent any money on this project, and per the agreement with the tribe, they don’t have to invest anything until the tribe is approved for Class III gaming.

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