Source: http://thegetjusticecoalition.blogspot.com/2007/04/just-emailed.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 19:56:29+00:00

Document:
A group of retired State Police officers working for the Mohegan Tribal Gaming Commission, the department that is supposed to regulate Mohegan Sun, decided that they needed to be able to get damaging information about people who were criticizing their incompetence, corrupt tribal and casino management and questionable tribal government practices. Their problem was that Tribal Gaming Commissions only have authority on a reservation and they wanted to get dirt on people off the reservation, on state land. Even with that authority, it is still illegal for gaming commissions or anyone else to search through people’s property without a warrant or conduct surveillance that invades a person’s privacy. Thinking they would never get caught, one or more of them came up with a plan.
Ned Pickett was a retired trooper, formerly with the Casino Licensing and Operations Unit. He never achieved a rank higher than detective. You will soon learn why.
Pickett obtained a license to operate a private investigative company from the State of Connecticut State Police Special Licensing Unit using completely false information. He claimed to own the company and registered it under his own name. He listed the operating address as his home, even though all of the surveillance activity originated in tribal offices. All of the listed employees were actually Gaming Commission employees. One name on the list is particularly disturbing: Francis “Bud” Mullen, former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, at the time Director of the Mohegan Tribal Gaming Commission.
If anyone questioned an employee of the Gaming Commission while they were sifting through trash or using tribal police computers to access confidential information (which is illegal), all they had to do was whip out their fake private investigator ID that said “Pickett and Associates”, complete with their photo (taken from their Mohegan Tribal employee ID) and someone’s thumb print. The State Police never investigated any of the information given to them by Mr. Pickett on their official application forms and the surveillance went on for at least six years that we are aware of.
We have plenty of proof. Dates, times, names of people who were spied on and the people who did the spying, we have it all. Anyone from the press or state government could easily verify what we have claimed but no investigation has ever taken place.
By this point in the story people have usually asked if we told the press or law enforcement what my husband and I know. It is inconceivable to most that something like this could have taken place without someone doing something to stop it. Sadly, we told many people our story. We gave all of the details to people who should have done something about it, even the names of all of the so called private investigators and another person who was there and could corroborate everything we said. In spite of our efforts, no one has done anything except the tribe and casino management and they have been out for blood – ours. Not literally, but they have tried every legal and illegal trick their attorneys could dream up.
My husband knows all of this and much more because he was the Lieutenant Commander of the CT State Police Casino Licensing and Operations Unit for many years. He designed the Casino Unit, opened Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, supervised background checks on all of the important people and supervised all law enforcement personnel in both facilities. After retiring from the state police, he went to work for the Mohegan Tribe in the Tribal Gaming Commission, supposedly to continue the work he had started.
After a few years it became obvious that neither the Tribe or Casino Management wanted anything to do with law enforcement, federal or state regulations, decency or honesty. For every employee, except the most evil and corrupt, it was like working in a den of vipers. They didn’t even have to recognize federal labor laws.
While looking into the details of my husband possibly starting his own private investigative company, I came upon the name of a company on the state police website. Pickett and Associates was a supposed legitimate agency, registered to an Edward Pickett at 11 Marsha Drive in Uncasville, CT. I showed my husband and he didn’t know what to make of it. He had supervised Ned for many years in the Casino Unit and known him for most of his career. He had never even heard about Ned having a private investigative company.
Curious, I called the state police and spoke with someone named Jill. I asked her for a list of Pickett and Associate employees. It turned out that the “company” had been registered with the state almost as long as Pickett had been the Assistant Director of the Mohegan Tribal Gaming Commission. He retired before my husband so he started working at Mohegan Sun before my husband did.
Every single employee Jill listed was a known employee of the Gaming Commission. The strangest part was that my husband’s name was included on that list.
Both of us knew he had never worked for anyone except the state police and the Mohegan Tribe. He never applied to work at this company, never filled out any employee paperwork and never received a paycheck from Pickett and Associates. Why the hell was he listed as an employee.
Both my husband and I requested copies of any state or company paperwork with his name on it. After being told all sorts of stories, we were finally notified that it did exist but had been destroyed. How convenient. We were told to stop bothering the state police and they refused to investigate, even though my husband (a retired state police lieutenant remember) had requested an investigation on the phone as well as in writing more than once. He offered to bring in the evidence he had personally and be interviewed. No one ever took him up on the offer and to this day, the matter has never been investigated, even though authorities know that we are able to show that Pickett and Associates has never filed taxes, has no employee records and never operated out of 11 Uncas Drive. Even after the Mohegan Tribe admitted to owning the company in State Court nothing has been done.
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ignored our numerous written complaints and requests for an investigation. A state representative asked for the matter to be investigated twice in writing and she has been ignored. The only person who ever agreed to investigate, former Chief States Attorney Christopher Morano, was replaced under suspicious circumstances by a good friend of the Mohegan Tribe’s attorneys. The current Chief States Attorney is Kevin Kane, who my husband Brad already knew (and can prove) had covered up Indian criminal activity before. There is so much more I could say but I will save that for our book.
In May and June of 2001, we sent copies of our detailed complaint to the local and national press. No one expressed any interest. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that on every media website, ads for the casinos flash at the top? We also contacted a reporter from Time Magazine who had done a series of fantastic investigative articles of the corruption of Indian casinos and our government on a national level. He was interested but didn’t think he would be able to do another story.
We also sent a copy of our complaint to the National Indian Gaming Commission, the US government agency that is supposed to regulate gambling. Supposed to are the key words. Finally, we started our own website and put all of the information up for the world to see.
Tribal management was apparently paying attention. The tribe was attempting to purchase a property in the State of Pennsylvania for a new slots parlour. Pennsylvania had just passed a slots law and was giving out gambling contracts. In October 2001, a couple of days before announcing the purchase of the Pennsylvania property, the Mohegan Tribe sued us in State Court for extortion and took out a temporary restraining order preventing us from speaking out about the tribe.
Without getting into the gory details, they actually made up an email and claimed we sent it to their attorneys demanding money or we would report the criminal information about the tribe. Remember, we had already reported this information to the world on the internet months before. The tribe was just afraid that the State of Pennsylvania would hear about it and refuse to approve the purchase of the property for the slots parlor, which could have been a real possibility.
We had to hire lawyers to fight the restraining order, which we did because none of the information we talked about was confidential or proprietary, as they tried to claim. Criminal activity isn’t the same as trade secrets, I guess unless you are in the Indian gambling business. Our First Amendment rights were taken away for two months and our state courts allowed this to happen.
A few weeks after the court date, once the legal action served their purposes, the tribe dropped the lawsuit. Meanwhile, in the press and on the internet, my husband and I were accused extortionists. No one in the press or even in the state court ever asked the tribe for any proof. My husband was unable to get another job for two and a half years.
The stress at times was unbearable. We almost lost our home to foreclosure several times. Our response was to put our own signs up about casino and government corruption right next to the home auction sign on our lawn. People lined up in front of our house for weeks to read the signs and talk with us. Many of them had corruption stories of their own. Most people had no idea, however, that Indians and their management employees had more rights than other American citizens.
People are not surprised when I tell them that the tribe hacked on to our home computer and website for a long time, shutting down the site, intercepting emails we sent to our mailing list around the world and reading correspondence between us and our attorneys. We have proof because Yahoo sent us the tribe’s IP address after identifying it as an unauthorized host. They hacked our computer from a remote location and we found three separate kinds of seriously destructive hacker software. It was very different from typical spyware found on computers all the time. The state police actually eventually investigated our claims (what a surprise) but didn’t do so until Yahoo’s master files had already been deleted and our proof had disappeared.
I am now at the part of our story that blows most people away. Indian tribes have been declared sovereign nations by Congress, so we actually have to get permission (not at all guaranteed) from the Supreme Court to sue them back in the same state court they illegally sued us in. This is the same court our tax dollars pay to support.
Many states, including Connecticut, prohibit lawsuits based on false, libelous information, especially for financial or political gain. These are called SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) and they are a powerful weapon used by big business to silence their enemies, especially regular people who can’t afford huge legal bills. The ability to break state and federal laws without penalty is called tribal sovereign immunity. Tribal governments even use it against their own tribal members. Ironically, the people who benefit the most from this sanctioned ability to break the law are non-Indians. Non-indian management controls the vast majority of money made at Indian casinos and also is in charge of personnel, policies, outside investments and more.
Just trying to find an attorney who would take our case was difficult. Most have no clue about federal regulations or Indian law and because of sovereign immunity, they want no part of it. The attorney who represented us at the original court date screwed things up. The issue of the SLAPP suit should have been brought up at that time but she kept incorrectly telling us that this wasn’t a SLAPP suit scenario. We had to do our own research. The lawsuit was never even discussed in court or by the attorneys (actually the tribe’s attorney said in court that he “was inclined to drop the suit” eventually) but the legal powers that be consider our suit to be “settled”. That is total crap. All the judge did was laugh at the tribe’s so called confidentiality agreement they had Brad sign at the start of his employment and say that we could talk about anything we wanted, ending the restraining order.
We are blessed to have found an experienced civil rights attorney to take our new case. A state court denied our request to sue the tribe back for illegally suing us so we are now in the appeals process. The appeal has been heard by the Connecticut Supreme Court but they have yet to issue a ruling. It would not surprise anyone if we ended up in the US Supreme Court. We continue to wait for the slow wheels of justice and for the national press to finally grasp the scary notion that what happened to us could easily happen to anyone else.
UPDATE: April 16, 2007: The CT Supreme Court ruled that we cannot sue the tribe back in state court for illegally suing us. We are taking our fight to the federal court.
When in any criminal case in which a single offense is charged a verdict of guilty is set aside or reversed and a new trial granted, the effect is to annul the judgment below as effectually as if there had been no trial. United States v. Keen, 26 Fed. Cas. 686; 4 Blackstone, 336, 337; Lockwood v. Jones, 7 Connecticut, 436; Zaleski v. Clark, 45 Connecticut, 397; Rassmussen v. State, 63 Wisconsin, 1; Bailey v. State, 29 Georgia, 579; Regina v. Drury, 3 Cox Crim. Cas. 544.

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