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Article Excerpt
The most powerful American Indian leader of the past century is a manual laborer building palmetto-thatched chickees in the unforgiving heat and thunderstorms of South Florida.
You might spot Chief Jim Billie anywhere from Naples to Dania today--a short, stocky man of 60, sweating through a colorful patchwork shirt and barking commands to a ragtag group of workmen. He's strong as an ox, bowlegged, and the ring finger from his right hand--lost in a long-ago battle with an alligator--floats in a little jar he keeps in a pocket. Perched high atop a peeled-cypress hut frame, he furiously nails fronds tossed up to him, deftly interweaving the leaves to prevent leaking and wind damage, just as he was taught by his uncles and elders in the Seminole tribe.
"A lot of people try, but only a Seminole Indian can build chickees correctly," he yells down, in a voice deep and husky. Cocksure, he rears back, schwarzeneggers his chest and gorilla-pounds his pecs with both fists. "And the Chief's chickees are best of them all!"
For 22 years, Jim Billie served as chairman of the Seminole Tribe of Florida's governing council, the longest tenure of any elected leader in the Western Hemisphere, except for Castro. Though he's no longer leader of the 2,600-member tribe, everyone still calls him Chief. He lives in Moore Haven, near Lake Okeechobee, with his longtime girlfriend, Maria, and their two young children. Six other children, an estranged wife and an ex-wife live on Indian lands within an hour's drive. The house he built with his own hands at his Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation camp sits vacant, vandalized and condemned.
Once an avid pilot who used planes the way the rest of us use automobiles, Billie has not flown a helicopter or airplane since he was booted off the council and banned from the Big Cypress hangar more than three years ago. Still popular among his people--more than 400 signed a petition for his return after his ouster--he sees very few other Indians, except at funerals where his heartfelt eulogies are almost tradition. Secret sources within the tribe risk their personal standing by informing him of tribal news. The police department he founded has orders to arrest him if he enters the gleaming, five-story tribal administration building he built on a pig farm near the Florida Turnpike.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
"I understand they are going to charge me with treason," he sighs, "just to keep me off the ballot and out of the tribe for good." (A Seminole convicted of treason cannot serve on the tribal council.)
Once Florida's highest-paid elected official ($330,000 per year), he struggles now to make his payroll. His cattle and horses are gone, his alligator pit empty, the strings rusted on his guitar. Billie swears there's no bag of pilfered money buried in the back yard, as some outsiders suspect. No friends in high places are doling out the bucks. Burt Reynolds doesn't call anymore. Neither does James Brown, who once begged Billie to bail him out of jail. Nor does Donald Trump, who dined on rattlesnake, possum, garfish and alligator with Billie while pitching his offer for a Seminole casino contract.
History will credit Billie as the Indian chief who finally outsmarted the white man, using white law and white courts to introduce the great new buffalo--casino gambling--to American Indian country. Yet he no longer has contact with other Indian leaders, some of whose tribes enjoy enormous wealth because of his legendary legal battles to protect American Indian sovereignty--and thus the right to run casinos on their land. Billie says other Indians are "paranoid to be around me. They think it might get them in trouble."
He turns the conversation back to the chickees (Seminole for "house") he constructs for $16 to $20 a square foot. "Every time in my life I've gotten down financially, I went back to building chickees and it brought me back up," he says about his Jim Billie Seminole Indian Chiki Huts business. "Long as there are wooden poles and leaves, I won't starve."
Since the end of the Indian wars, no American Indian has been more investigated by the U.S. government than James Edward Billie. The FBI has hounded him for decades, looking for everything from Mafia ties to Enron-style corporate fraud. Yet to this day, no agency has brought a single criminal charge against him. Even the IRS couldn't bring him down--his longtime secretary told me he faithfully paid his taxes on time each year.
The considerable efforts of a major Florida newspaper also failed to convict Billie. The St. Petersburg Times went after the chief, publishing a series of articles detailing fiscal mismanagement of the billions in revenues the tribe's gaming casinos raked in. But the Florida publishing giant could not implicate Billie in any of the malfeasance it alleged. The investigation turned family against family; and the newspaper became a psychological sounding board for snitches, inside sources and Billie's growing legion of political enemies.
"The reporters were after me, and I don't know why," says Billie. "I think the feds or the state were feeding them information, using the reporters to do the investigating they couldn't."
After Times reporters mailed letters to tribal staff members asking them to remove classified documents and mail them to reporters "in an envelope that has no return address on it," the tribe sued the newspaper, accusing it of racist reporting, interfering with its business operations and failing to properly supervise its reporters. The case lingered in court for years before it was thrown out.
Charges of financial mismanagement, along with an affair that boiled into a feud with a member of his inner staff, her charge of harassment, an abortion, the resignation of a 17-year employee and a payoff in illegal sick pay are officially what took Billie down. The other four tribal council members suspended the chief in disgrace and without pay when his sexual misconduct became public--a departure from the private way the tribe dealt with such situations in the past.
Christine O'Donnell, who made the charge, now says she was coerced into filing suit against Billie by other Seminole leaders who "implied they would help me out" in a new administration. She remains a friend and confidante to Billie to this day.
"Yes, I was mad at the time. I was a woman scorned after 17 years. But I never thought it would lead to this," says O'Donnell. "Affairs? My God, there are numerous families out there with multiple fathers. It's a different society. Everyone in the tribe knew what was...
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