Operation Royal Flush
The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 let tribes run casino games in states that allowed them, with a compact; Arizona’s governor refused to negotiate, and by 1992 several tribes were running slot machines anyway. The Fort McDowell Yavapai — the 600-member nation on the Verde, northeast of Scottsdale, that had beaten the Orme Dam eleven years before — had opened Arizona’s first bingo hall in 1984 and added the machines after. U.S. Attorney Linda Akers decided to end it. At about six in the morning on Tuesday, May 12, 1992, FBI agents and marshals hit five reservations at once and seized some 750 machines statewide.
At Fort McDowell the agents backed eight moving vans up to the casino and loaded 349 slot machines while a SWAT team covered them from the roof of the bingo hall. Then they found they could not leave. Tribal members had parked cars and pickups across the reservation’s single access road, and behind the cars they had put the tribe’s sand-and-gravel trucks and earth-movers from the Verde River bottom, and behind the trucks they had put themselves. President Clinton Pattea told the government the machines were staying.
The helicopter
Governor Fife Symington flew in by helicopter about five hours into the standoff and struck a truce: the vans would stay in the parking lot, machines locked inside, while the two sides talked. They talked for three weeks — Symington met the council on May 21 and agreed to work toward an interim compact within two weeks and a permanent one within thirty days — and the blockade came down in early June with the machines still on the reservation. May 12 is now a tribal holiday.
What it built on Scottsdale’s border
On November 25, 1992 Symington signed Arizona’s first gaming compacts with sixteen tribes; Fort McDowell’s own ten-year compact was recorded in 1993. By 1996 the casino was grossing about $100 million a year from 10,000 visitors a day, and each of the tribe’s 850 members received some $36,000 a year plus health coverage. The framework reached Scottsdale’s own eastern line within six years: the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community opened Casino Arizona in a tent at McKellips and the future Loop 101 in August 1998, a second casino at Indian Bend in 1999, and Talking Stick Resort on April 15, 2010. Voters wrote the compacts into state law with Prop 202 on November 5, 2002, and Scottsdale receives tribal gaming grants from both neighbors under it. Fort McDowell replaced the 1984-era casino with We-Ko-Pa in October 2020. The Salt River community guide covers the neighbor the compacts remade; the 1990s chapter covers the decade around it.