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Truly, a wild-life documentary
‘Wrestling Alligators’ kicks off International Film Festival
The electronic jingle of slot machines, the spirited din of card games and the loud chattering of gamblers at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood would hardly have been possible without James E. Billie, the Seminole chief who brought Indian casinos to Florida.
But it was Billie’s larger-than-life personality, tireless self-promotion and confrontational reputation in the Seminole Tribe of Florida that attracted filmmaker Andrew Shea.
For his documentary “Wrestling Alligators,” Shea and a small film crew trailed the longtime Seminole Tribe of Florida chief as he candidly recalled the tribulations of the tribe he steered from poverty to redemption with high-stakes bingo gambling on the Hollywood reservation.
“He was the George Washington of Indian gaming,” Shea says, reached by phone from his Austin, Texas, office. “He inspired generations of his Seminole tribal members. And besides, he’s a complicated guy, a charming, funny, self-effacing, energetic guy with a remarkable history.”
“Wrestling Alligators,” screening Wednesday at Keiser University in West Palm Beach to kick off the 22nd annual Palm Beach International Film Festival (Wednesday through April 2), is as much an unflinching portrait of Billie as it is about his Seminole empire, which inspired res-
ervations across the country to build casinos on Indian land and follow Billie’s grab for gambling cash. (The film premiered in June 2016.) Starting with the Dec. 14, 1979, opening of the Big Cypress Bingo hall on the corner of State Road 7 and Stirling Road (now called Seminole Classic Casino), 486 tribal casinos have opened in 28 states, according to 2016 statistics from the National Indian Gaming Commission, a federal agency that regulates gaming operations.
Max Osceola Jr., a retired Seminole Tribal Council member who counts Billie as a “pioneer” and a “brother,” says gambling revenues weaned the tribe off government aid and helped build the tribe’s first hospital, senior center, police and fire stations.
“He was the right man at the right time to take Indian gaming as far as he could take it,” says Osceola Jr., who served on the Seminole council from 1985 until 2010. “We’re thankful for what he did to get us to where we are.” Born an outcast Billie was born into poverty on March 20, 1944, under a chickee hut on Federal Highway in Dania Beach, to a Seminole mother and white World War II sailor father.
Elderly Seminole medicine men labeled Billie a “half-breed” — meaning “half-white,” since white intermarriage was discouraged — and threatened to stuff mud in the baby’s mouth and abandon him in the Everglades. His mother, Agnes, and other Seminole women saved Billie. After Agnes died when he was 15, Billie lived with his grandparents in Delray Beach, then later with Osceola Jr.
“We would take care of him before he went to college,” Osceola Jr. recalls. “His late mother and my mother were friends. I knew right away he was flamboyant, and he loved to sing.”
And wrestle alligators. Billie, who started wrestling at age 5, jumped into canals to haul out baby alligators and sell them to tourists for a quarter. Eventually, he put on alligator wrestling shows for tourists on the reservation and recorded distinctly Florida country songs (titles: “Legend of Kissimmee River, “Saw Grass Flower”) as Chief Jim Billie, cutting an impressive figure in his multicolored jersey and snakeskin boots. (His song “Big Alligator,” from the album “Alligator Tears,” was nominated for a Grammy.)
“I wanted to be like Tonto, like the Lone Ranger,” Billie says in the documentary. “Tarzan was one of my heroes: a white man running through the forest with no clothes on.”
Big trouble with Big Cypress
After serving two Army tours in Vietnam, Billie returned to the reservation, eager to pull the Seminoles “out of the dark ages,” he says in the film. He ran for chairman and chief, and won election in 1979.
To the newly elected Chief Billie, rescuing his Seminole Tribe from poverty became synonymous with restoring the sovereign nation’s proud independence.
“I’m trying to figure out how to make this tribe money. My accountant comes up to me: ‘Chief, I want you to look at this,’ and hands me a manila envelope. It says, ‘Bingo,’ ” Billie recalls in the film. “What the hell do I want to mess around with bingo? I just couldn’t imagine it making money. With a lazy attitude, I flipped to the back to see how much money would be made. It says in six months, you can make $3 million. It sounded like what you’d call bull----. But I wanted to see what this new alligator does.”
Attorneys in Washington, D.C., he says in the film, suggested that building a bingo hall in South Florida constituted a legal “gray area.” For Billie, “gray area” meant “take the risk.”
His major backer was Jack Cooper, a Miami Beach investor friendly with wellconnected mobster Meyer Lansky. “They treated me real nice and didn’t try to break my legs or anything,” Billie explains in the film with a smirk.
“It is ironic to think that the initial money would come from such unsavory sources, but it’s not like Billie was going to receive a bank loan anytime soon,” says Shea, who also interviewed historians and casino employees for “Wrestling Alligators.” “No question, he’s a complicated character, even more than a 90-minute film is able to suggest.”
Bingo got underway with the opening of Big Cypress Bingo hall, although Billie faced pushback from his Southern Baptist tribal members, who considered gambling a sin. He eventually convinced them it wasn’t.
State lawmakers filed a lawsuit to shut down Big Cypress Bingo, but the chief hired a phalanx of lawyers, and in 1981 won the case to offer gambling on Indian reservations. The landmark court battle opened the door for other tribes to build casinos.
“James Billie had the chutzpah to stand up to the government, the white man, and spit in their eye and take what was theirs,” Jeff Testerman, a former Tampa Bay Times reporter, says in the film.
But another battle — Billie against the Seminole Tribe of Florida — was just starting. Wrestling the tribe Billie seemed unafraid to welcome controversy during the 1980s. He dared Broward County’s sheriff at the time, Bob Butterworth, to crack down on Seminole gaming when he installed 100 bingo slot machines inside Big Cypress. “I haven’t been arrested yet,” he said in the film, flashing another smirk. The sheriff, lacking jurisdiction on sovereign land, could not.
In another incident, Billie shot and killed a Florida panther on Dec. 1, 1983, and was charged with violating the federal Endangered Species Act. The panther case — a hung jury declared a mistrial in 1987, according to Sun Sentinel archives — caused tension within the tribe, and especially with Osceola Jr., then a Tribal Council member. (Attempts to reach Billie for this article were unsuccessful.)
The sometimes contentious relationship between Billie and Osceola Jr. parallels another recurring theme in the film: Billie’s relationship with tribal members. In 2000, he says in the film, he discovered council members funneling casino revenues to themselves. (The council controls the tribe’s money.) He confronted the council, but they denied any wrongdoing.
Shea recalls that when he asked Osceola Jr. to describe the turmoil within the tribe, he declined to comment on camera.
“Yes, there were certainly elements of a falling out, but [Osceola Jr.] doesn’t want to badmouth James Billie,” Shea says. “I want to be careful how I put this, but James had a strong case that the spending was spinning out of control by the tribe’s council members.”
After 22 years as chief, Billie was impeached by the tribe in 2001 over alleged mismanagement of gambling money and alleged sexual harassment of a Seminole council staffer. Billie was neither arrested nor charged with any crime. Billie left the reservation and settled in Moore Haven with his girlfriend, Maria, and two children, building palmettothatched chickee huts. While Billie was in exile, the empire expanded, and the tribe opened the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in 2004.
The tribe re-elected him in 2011, only to oust him again five years later, in September. (He ran again in a special election held in October, but lost by 24 votes.)
“He’s a private citizen now. He doesn’t work for the tribe,” Osceola Jr. says. But does he want him to run for chief again? “I want him to do whatever he wants to do.”
“I don’t think people today realize the impact the Seminoles have had on different tribes in the country, whether you like gambling or not,” Shea says. “And James Billie lit the fire.”