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Trust benefits ex-BIA official
Shoshones set aside $50k for legal team
By Sean P. Murphy, Globe Staff, 8/13/2001
 ALLON, Nev. -- Five months after overruling staff genealogists to grant the Chinook Indians status as a gambling tribe, Kevin Gover, former head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, became the co-beneficiary of a $50,000 trust with the help of the husband of one of the Chinook's earliest casino advocates.
The exact purpose of the trust, established by a different tribe, the Fallon Paiute Shoshone of Nevada, was unclear. Gover said he was unaware of it, but his legal associates said it was a reserve for future work they and Gover may do.
Gover is a subject of congressional inquiries into decisions in the last weeks of the Clinton administration that expanded the number of tribes with the power to open casinos. Now a lawyer-lobbyist for tribes, Gover has steadfastly maintained that he received nothing from tribes that benefitted from his official decisions. Indeed, Gover has received no legal fees or other payments from the Chinooks.
But he and Dennis G. Chappabitty, a longtime friend and law school classmate, are listed in Nevada as co-beneficiaries of the $50,000 Paiute trust. Chappabitty's wife, Linda C. Amelia, is a Chinook who was a leader in the tribe's fight for federal recognition.
The fund, according to Chappabitty, is tied to work he and Gover are doing on behalf of the Fallon Paiute Shoshone.
Gover, in an interview, said he knew nothing about it. "I have not asked for a $50,000 fee and would not accept one," said Gover. "My bill is not close to that."
Chappabitty said in an interview that he arranged to have Gover hired by the Fallon tribe. He said that he assumed the trust account, which was established by the tribe's lawyer, is intended to cover his and Gover's future fees, but that he did not know any more details.
The lawyer, Todd Plimpton, said the trust account he controls is "primarily" for Gover and Chappabitty, but he later added that his own fees could also be paid with those funds. The $50,000 was turned over to Plimpton to hold in trust for Gover and Chappabitty by vote of the Fallon tribe's council, he said.
"This $50,000 is nothing more than a retainer, and it will be drawn down only upon work performed," Plimpton said. "We will review the bills and make sure everything is copacetic."
The roughly 2,000 Chinooks of Washington state have long contemplated construction of a casino near their ancestral lands along the Columbia River, but investigators for the Bureau of Indian Affairs determined that they ceased to function as an organized tribe in the 1880s, and therefore did not merit federal recognition.
Gover, on Jan. 3, his last day as head of the bureau, personally rewrote the findings of his research staff to grant the Chinooks the recognition they sought.
The Boston Globe first raised questions about that decision in March, noting that Gover's top deputy, Michael J. Anderson, then waited until his last day in office, Jan. 19, to give preliminary recognition to two other tribes whose authenticity had been firmly rejected by the Bureau of Indian Affairs' staff historians, anthropologists, and genealogists.
One of those tribes is the Nipmucs, who are based in Central Massachusetts and who have plans to open a casino and resort similar to the behemoth Indian-owned Mohegan Sun and Foxwood casinos in Connecticut. The other is the Duwarmish of Washington state.
In the Chinook case, the chief of research took the extraordinary step of filing an angry memo after learning Gover intended to recognize the tribe despite the staff's repeated and strenuous opposition.
Gover's "edits to [our] recommendation made changes in the evaluation of the evidence," wrote Lee Fleming. "In our view, the finding is not consistent with the requirements of the acknowledgment regulations."
At a Senate hearing on the rapidly growing $10 billion Indian gaming industry on July 25, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, angrily denounced the last-minute Gover and Anderson recognition decisions.
"A lot of interesting things happened in the last days of the Clinton administration," said McCain, apparently also referring to Clinton's controversial pardons to financier Marc Rich and others. "And we intend to get some answers on this."
The inspector general's office of the Department of Interior, which oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs, is also investigating Gover, a Pawnee Indian, and Anderson, a Muskogee (Creek).
Since leaving the agency, Gover has been a lawyer and lobbyist on Indian issues for the firm of Steptoe & Johnson.
The Fallon Paiute Shoshone is a small and poor tribe, situated on a dusty reservation in the desert about 60 miles east of Reno. What little money the tribe has comes from interest on a $43 million settlement fund established for the tribe by Congress in 1991 as payment for diverting water away from the tribe by damming the Truckee River.
Chappabitty, a Comanche Indian, became involved with the tribe in 1997, first as a board member and later as chief officer of the tribal economic development corporation. He sought and gained Gover's official help when the tribe had a dispute with the Fallon city government.
Recently, two rival factions of the tribe have fought bitterly over control of the governing council and its treasury.
Chappabitty, based in Sacramento, allied himself with the faction that took control of the Fallon tribal government in August 2000.
Both factions, however, continued to proclaim themselves to be the rightful government.
Gover said he was hired when the Bureau of Indian Affairs, worried that the dispute might turn violent, moved to take over the heavily armed police force on the reservation.
Gover declined to detail his fee arrangement, but Plimpton said he asked for and received $10,000. A check for that amount was written to Plimpton and marked for Gover on June 6, according to records. Chappabitty received a check for $3,400 on that same day. Chappabitty had also received $5,000 on May 31.
But an additional $50,000 check was dated June 8 and used to set up the trust account. Plimpton said he asked the tribal council to vote that amount in anticipation of additional fees that might be owed to Gover and Chappabitty. He said he told Gover about the trust account only after it was authorized.
Plimpton himself received $42,757 in legal fees from the tribe for May and June. In all, the tribe spent $111,157 for Plimpton, Gover, and Chappabitty in May and June.
Gover, who appeared in Reno for a three-day hearing on the Bureau of Indian Affairs' takeover of the police, said he did not expect to do any further work for the tribe.
Plimpton was unable to supply minutes from the council meeting detailing the reason for the $50,000 trust account for Gover and Chappabitty. One council member also declined to provide minutes but said the money was intended as a legal retainer.
In recent years, Chappabitty and Amelia, a paralegal, have attempted to broker deals between tribes and non-Indian casino investors, according to court documents. In 1996, they took steps to bring a casino investor to the Chinook, according to documents.
Amelia is one of about 2,000 Chinook members, each of whom would stand to reap considerable profits were a sizable casino to be built on tribal land near the large population center of Portland, Ore.
Publicly, tribal members have said little about their casino plans. But in a 1997 letter, Amelia confided to investor Al Salazar of Spirit Gaming Inc. that "we are definitely looking at Oregon for gaming."
Sean P. Murphy's email address is [email protected].
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 8/13/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
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