Federal grand jury subpoenas Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe to turn over financial records, sources say
Updated Jul 14, 2020; Posted Jul 14, 2020
By Tanner Stening | tstening@masslive.com
The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, embroiled for years in a complicated legal fight to save its reservation, has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury to hand over financial records, sources told MassLive.
The news was shared with tribe members during a Zoom call on June 23 by attorneys from Todd & Weld LLP, the sources said. The grand jury has requested all records and documents related to the tribe's finances, they said.
It is unclear if individual tribe members were subpoenaed as part of the federal probe. Federal prosecutors told tribe members at the meeting that the "tribe is not the target of the investigation," the sources said.
A copy of the letter from federal prosecutors to the tribe obtained by MassLive said: "Pursuant to an official investigation conducted by a federal Grand Jury in the District of Massachusetts of suspected violations of federal criminal law, you are directed to furnish to the Grand Jury the documents described in the attached subpoena." The letter, dated June 5, was signed by U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling and Assistant U.S. Attorney Christine Wichers.
Grand jury proceedings are largely secret. Roughly two dozen citizens serve as jurors on a grand jury, and are empowered to examine documents and hear testimony — usually presented only by government attorneys — to determine whether there is probable cause that someone committed a crime.
The news comes roughly a year after a federal grand jury issued subpoenas for the tribe's sitting treasurer, Gordon Harris, and his predecessor, Robert Hendricks. It is unclear whether the subpoenas, issued in 2019, are related to the request for financial information shared with tribe members on June 23.
When asked about a potential investigation last year, the U.S. Attorney's Office in the District of Massachusetts could "neither confirm nor deny investigations."
The tribe has been embroiled in a legal fight to secure its reservation since 2016, after the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts ordered that the tribe's Taunton casino be halted. The court order was the result of a legal challenge from neighbors of the proposed casino, who argued that the tribe didn't qualify for land-in-trust because it didn't satisfy a definition of "Indian" under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act.
Tribal Chairman Cedric Cromwell has more recently come under fire for his handling of the tribe's finances. Sources tell MassLive that the 2,600-member Mashpee tribe has accumulated a debt burden that has spiraled to more than $500 million — money that is owed chiefly to its financier, Genting Malaysia.
That scrutiny reached a boiling point last year when a group of tribe members attempted to oust Cromwell, his vice chairman and treasurer, through a recall process written into the tribe's constitution, citing, among other things, the out-of-control debt and the secrecy surrounding tribal finances. Ultimately, the effort was stymied after the tribe's Election Committee abruptly canceled the planned recall election in September.
The grand jury subpoena comes several months after the U.S. Department of the Interior told the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe that its reservation will be disestablished and the land taken out of trust in what felt like a death blow to a tribe locked in a prolonged legal battle over 321 acres of land in Taunton and a proposal to build a casino there.
In what seemed to be the only good news for the tribe in recent memory, a federal judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in a separate lawsuit in early June that the Interior's decision to take the land out of the trust was "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and contrary to law," and remanded the matter back to the federal agency.
Cromwell's predecessor Glenn Marshall spent several years in federal prison in connection with a wide-reaching corruption probe. He was sentenced to 3½ years in federal prison in 2009 for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the tribe to pay his own bills, making illegal campaign contributions, filing false tax returns and fraudulently receiving Social Security benefits while holding a full-time job.
Representatives from Cromwell's administration and attorneys for the tribe were not immediately available for comment.
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