Jim Allen has been up since 3 a.m., left a voicemail for himself in his office, and is now on the floor of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida, weaving between the flashing slot machines and blackjack tables. With a reporter in tow, he recounts how a Native American tribe, under his leadership, took over a rock ‘n’ roll restaurant, hotel, and casino company 10 years ago, beating out 72 bidders, including private equity giants and multinational hospitality companies. Says Allen, “At first the tribe thought I had lost my mind and gone crazy.”
Crazy as a fox. As chairman of Hard Rock International and chief executive of the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s gambling operations, the 56-year-old helped create unimaginable wealth for the Seminole Tribe of Florida (4,100 people). When you meet Allen, what is immediately apparent is that he is unconditionally honest. As we walked through the hotel, one employee pointed to a large black octopus chair in the lobby bar and joked that he couldn’t believe Jim wanted it. Allen brushed it off and boasted that he had been involved in every detail of the design, down to the “Admix One” ticket on the new roll of toilet paper in the guest room. He explained that his late arrival that morning was due to an unannounced check of the men’s bathroom, after which he was asked to go out to the parking lot to check on employee hassles.
I’m serious enough to have a heart attack,’ Allen says. He’s had two heart attacks and a bypass surgery in the past three years, and yet 16-hour workdays are a daily occurrence. Some people talk about it; others make excuses. ‘I prefer the latter,’ he adds with a wry grin, as if his heart’s resilience is just another task on his to-do list. ‘But hey, if you want to stick around and witness my daily battle with mortality, feel free to stay with me.
Although he has not a drop of Seminole blood in his veins, Allen may be the best advocate for indigenous peoples to protect and develop tribal lands and cultures since Franklin Delano Roosevelt enacted the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934. Unlike federally mandated social programs, however, Allen’s improvements are the result of purely profit-driven efforts. At the behest of the Seminole Nation, he directs an ever-expanding, privately owned global business that spans 71 countries and includes 168 Hard Rock Cafes, 23 hotels, and 11 casinos. Including franchisee sales, system-wide revenues are just over $5 billion. Twenty-five more Hard Rock hotels are in the planning stages, from Dallas to Dubai to Shenzhen, and the company just acquired the rights to its flagship Hard Rock Las Vegas. New Jersey voters will decide in November whether a Hard Rock casino with 4,000 slot machines, 2,000 table games, and a giant guitar can be built next to MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands, a few miles from Manhattan.
While the Seminole Tribe is cautious about the information it shares with outsiders, it is clear that under Allen’s stewardship the hospitality and gambling industry has expanded rapidly, creating a money machine that generates an estimated $1.5 billion in annual operating profits. It has allowed the tribe to send more than $1 billion in revenue-sharing checks to the state of Florida over the past five years.
And for the Seminole Tribe. Today, every man, woman, and child in the tribe receives a bi-weekly dividend totaling approximately $128,000 per year. In fact, by the time today’s Seminole children turn 18, they are already millionaires. Thanks to the tribal trust, the children and their parents do not touch the funds until adulthood. The list includes 81,000 pieces of pop music memorabilia valued at more than $100 million, including the red leather jacket from Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” video and the handwritten lyrics to John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
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Tribal member Tina Osceola, 49, recalls a time when she fed many tribal members by selling tribal souvenirs to tourists, but now uses her gambling wealth at casinofavoriter.com to pay for her undergraduate and graduate education. Says she, “Allen never quits.”
CEO Jim Allen is the man who has created billionaires from the entire Seminole Tribe of Florida, but the tribe’s longtime controversial alligator-wrestling chief, James Billy, deserves more credit for igniting the entire $33 billion Indian gambling industry in the first place. The man.
Billy greeted the air-conditioned lobby of the four-story Seminole tribal headquarters, built on an old hog farm in Hollywood, with a fist bump. In a few weeks, the 72-year-old Billy will be ousted as tribal chief for the second time in 40 years. But it’s a warm August day, and he has just arrived from his home on the nearby Brighton Reservation in the tribe’s red, yellow, and white helicopter. Dressed in a short-sleeved polo shirt, Under Armour sweatpants, and his favorite penny loafers, he stopped to meet with tribal members in their offices before sitting down at a table in a dimly lit, windowless conference room.
He is a country singer, alligator wrestler, and chief of the Seminole Tribe of Florida. [Jim Billy has been called the father of Indian gambling. (Photo credit: Jamel Toppin for Forbes)
Country singer, alligator wrestler, and chief of the Seminole Tribe of Florida.
When his cell phone rings (the ringtone is the ding-dong of a slot machine jackpot), he ignores it and says it’s a call asking for a $30,000 loan. So no more visiting people on the Seminole Tribe’s six reservations in Florida. All they want is money, he says. ‘Maybe that will be my political undoing,’ he says. In late September, the tribesmen filed a recall petition, vaguely alleging various problems with Billy’s policies and procedures. The other four leaders of the tribal council voted unanimously to remove Billy.
This is not the first time Chairman Billy has been removed from office. He led the tribe from 1979 to 2001, when he was removed amid allegations of sexual harassment (charges were later dropped) and accusations of financial irregularities. (Billy later said that his dismissal was due to ill feelings about the council members’ increased scrutiny of his spending.) He then spent 10 years in exile before being elected chief again in 2011 and re-elected in 2015. Billy has vowed to run again in the next election.
After all, he is a bona fide folk hero: born in 1944 as a “half-breed” on a chimpanzee farm in Dania Beach, Florida, where tourists paid to see both monkeys and Indians. After his mother died, Billy learned to wrestle alligators for tourist tips at age 9. In his early 20s, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served twice in Vietnam. He eventually became a touring country singer and had hits such as “Big Alligator,” which was interspersed with lyrics in his native Miccosukee language.
Billy’s Rambo With a Heart reputation helped him get elected chief in 1979. On his first day in office, someone handed him a stack of papers describing what he called high-stakes bingo. It said that by gambling, the tribe could make $3 million in six months. It was a lot of money for the time, so I figured I should give it a try,” he explains, noting that according to a 1992 Pennsylvania Crime Commission report, the tribe got money from a group with ties to organized crime’s Meyer Lansky to fund the venture.
Eventually, the Seminole tribe’s 1,200-seat Hollywood Bingo Hall began to draw crowds of locals and snowbirds. Gambling was illegal in Florida, and the county sheriff soon threatened to nip Billy in the bud. Billy would not back down and led the tribe into court, winning a landmark victory in 1981. Congress endorsed tribal casinos with the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. According to the Indian Gaming Industry Report, 234 Native American tribes currently earn $33 billion annually from gambling.
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