Five years ago, a great gambling colossus swaggered into the droopy little New England town of Palmer, Massachusetts (population 12,140), bearing promises of jobs, tax relief, and infrastructure improvement. Mohegan Sun, an Indian casino in rural southeast Connecticut, nominally run by a long-extinct Indian tribe, is one of the largest casinos in the world, with 6,500 slot machines in a 364,000 sq. ft. gambling space. It proposed a project nearly as splendid in Palmer, fittingly called Mohegan Sun Massachusetts.
The slick marketers who concocted the casino plan started spreading money all around town, and the money made many friends in government. Palmer is a typical former mill town where industry has fled and the population skews 20 years older than average. It has few good financial prospects, and the casino appeared to many officials and citizens to be the ticket back to prosperity....