The Golden Moon Hotel and Casino in Neshoba County was raided by FBI agents on Tuesday. A search warrant was also issued for the Silver Star Hotel and Casino on resort grounds. (Courtesy of The Clarion-Ledger)
No one is quite sure why but federal authorities raided the Mississippi Choctaws’ Pearl River Resort and one other tribal casino on Tuesday.
The FBI apparently took hard drives when it raided the resort, the Clarion Ledger reports.
The incident comes on the heels of a Tribal Council vote that threw out the election results for the tribe’s new chief.
Casino officials confirmed a search warrant had been executed at the Neshoba County casinos by the U.S. Department of Justice but gave no further details.
“The resort is monitoring the situation closely and will continue to cooperate fully with law enforcement authorities in their investigation,” CEO Maj. Gen. Paul Harvey said in a statement. “There will be no interruption in the operation of business at the resort.”
The raid reportedly involved the seizing of computer hard drives at the Silver Star and Golden Moon hotel-casinos in Neshoba County.
The close race come down to two candidates: incumbent Beasley Denson and Phyllis Anderson.
During the hotly contested election, Anderson publicly called for an audit on the casinos and transparency in the tribe’s spending. Choctaw tribe members each receive $500 every six months.
Jenna Cederberg
Tags: clarion ledger, FBI, gambling, gaming, golden moon, mississippi, Native American, neshoba county, pearl river resort, U.S. Department of Justice
Connie Giroux (Courtesy of Native Sun News)
LEAD — On Saturday, July 9, Rosebud Sioux tribal member Connie Giroux donned a miner’s hardhat and lamp, safety glasses, battery belt, steel-toed boots, and a reflective vest. Then she took an elevator ride down a shaft through granite rock to a cavern 4,850 feet below the earth’s surface.
It was not strange to her. She does it practically every day in her job as a supervisor at the Sanford Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL).
What made July 9 noteworthy is that her work was different because of Neutrino Day. She was conducting the first high-definition video conferencing from the depths with visitors up top who attended the fourth annual free science fair.
Giroux could explain to them that her usual work is part of a pretty small crew of a privileged few who are conducting some pretty big world class experiments down there – most conspicuously in the Majorana Demonstrator Project and the Large Underground Xenon Detector (LUX).
As a chapter closed in the international race for space last week with the scheduling of NASA’s last shuttle launch, a chapter opened in the comparatively new global race for the underground, in which Sanford lab is conducting the two experiments. One is to characterize neutrinos and the other is to prove the existence of so-called dark matter.
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Tags: connie giroux, mining, neutrino day, Rosebud Sioux, sanford deep underground science and engineering laboratory
