SIEGEL: And we should say, this was long before entire cable channels were sustained by the World Series of Poker. And that became the case that went to the U.S. And we immediately went to the court and spent three years litigating that case and eventually wound up with a ruling that the card room wasn't actually in the city of Indio.Īnd immediately thereafter, the card room reopened, and the county of Riverside then came in with a SWAT team, arrested about a hundred people, shut them down and said, well, you may not be within the city of Indio, but you're certainly within Riverside County and we have similar anti-poker laws. And the Indio police went in with a SWAT team and arrested about a hundred people and shut the operation down. And at that time, the city of Indio claimed that it had jurisdiction and that it prohibited card rooms within its boundaries.

Welmas): Well, the case actually began three years earlier in 1980, when the Cabazons opened the first Indian owned, tribally owned poker room in California.

Welmas's lawyer in that case, Glenn Feldman, who is at his office in Phoenix, Arizona. Justice Byron White's decision in California versus Cabazon Band of Mission Indians established the right to run gambling operations on Indian reservations.Īnd joining us now is Mr. Welmas's band that went to the United States Supreme Court and beat the state of California six to three. In 1983, the Cabazons, like a lot of Indian tribes, started running a high stakes bingo game on the reservation and they started running into trouble with local law enforcement. Welmas was chairman of the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians in Riverside County, California. Welmas did, it seemed to us that he had helped change the face of America. The name meant little to us, but when we read about what Mr. In the pages of The Los Angeles Times, we read today of the death a couple of weeks ago of Arthur James Welmas, age 77.

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