Liar's poker

The day that the Mashpee Wampanoag's grand billion-dollar-plus casino opens in Middleborough, no one will be able to take more credit than Glenn Marshall, convicted rapist and admitted serial liar. It seems only appropriate.

You can smell the money as the frenzy over casino gambling builds in anticipation of Governor Deval Patrick's pivotal and likely endorsement shortly after Labor Day. As he does his final research, required reading for the governor - for the House speaker, for all of us - should be the new issue of Boston magazine, which is just hitting the streets. Irony drips off the page.

To quote Marshall, "The Gambling Man" who served as tribal chairman for the last seven years: "If the Creator were to say, 'What did you do?' I could say, 'I helped right a wrong.' That was all it ever was."

Not quite all. There was the time he served for the time he raped a young woman in a secluded spot one night on the Cape. There were the outlandish lies about his military record, the lies about being a cop. And who knows what else?

Now that Marshall has been unmasked for what he is and stepped down as chairman, it is to nearly everyone's benefit - the gambling industry, the tribe, the Commonwealth, Middleborough - to sweep him under the rug and move on as quickly as possible. But if Marshall - who sold himself, among other things, as an alleged survivor of the bloody siege of Khe Sanh in Vietnam - was a symbol of the tribe's long, hard battle for sovereignty, then he remains a symbol today of why we don't need to go down this road.

He was the face of Indian gambling in Massachusetts, the man in the driver's seat with tribal recognition in hand. As he told Boston magazine in an interview before the fall: "You're either going to be the king or the goat. I've never been a goat in my life. I don't want to start now. I want to accomplish things in my life that make an impact."

Added Marshall: "I used the Legislature, the congressmen, the senators. I sought support from anybody who would listen to our story. I sued in federal court. I begged, groveled, did everything within the boundaries of the law to make sure my people got exactly what they deserve."

(When I called Marshall yesterday, he hung up with a simple "goodbye." At least he didn't lie, which is a start to recovery.)

This has always been less about sovereignty than about the rush by the tribe and its deep-pocketed financial backers, just as elsewhere around the country, to cash in on the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, one of the worst pieces of legislation ever to come out of Congress.

As Michael Leighton, a Marshall classmate at Lawrence High School in 1968, told the Cape Cod Times: "When I first saw his photo as tribe chairman, I said, 'When the hell did he become Wampanoag? He always talked about being Portuguese.' "

The attraction is obvious for the tiny tribe, all 1,460 members. But for the rest of us, the question is this: Does Massachusetts, which already extracts $700 a year from every man, woman, and child in the Commonwealth through our very efficient lottery, double what any other state does, really need even more gambling? Should the Commonwealth be in the business of encouraging its citizens to gamble ever more to support basic services? How much is enough?

If the state's take on gambling were 5 percent, the same as the sales tax, or even 9.5 percent, the corporate rate that few companies actually pay, casino gambling would be a nonstarter at the State House. At what level are we willing to trade our values and go into business with the gambling industry?

Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902.

News Added: 31 August, 2007

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