PREACHER AT THE ORGY

Richard Milanovich, who doesn’t like to gamble because he doesn’t like losing money, grins broadly from the podium at the Spa Hotel and Casino in downtown Palm Springs as he gives away a million dollars of the casino’s gambling profits. “Oh, this is so much fun,” he says, announcing a $150,000 donation to the Palm Springs Fire Department.

Sitting expectantly in the audience are representatives of 53 other local organizations, including the Palm Springs Boys and Girls Clubs, a seniors center, the Palm Springs Public Library and various VFW posts. They have come to share in the fruits of the thriving casino operated by the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians, and no one is enjoying this event more than Milanovich, the tribal chairman and today’s master of ceremonies.

The giveaway has been an annual event since the tribe launched its casino 5 1/2 years ago, and it might be easy to dismiss it as the tribe’s attempt to buy goodwill in the community. There may be some truth to that; politically, Milanovich is nobody’s fool.

But reflecting the values instilled in him as a boy by his father, a steelworker of ugoslavian descent, Milanovich also feels it’s the right thing to do. “We live in this community. We benefit by this community. And we give back to the community,” Milanovich says, sounding almost maudlin.

Milanovich’s effort to extend his personal ethic to the entire Agua Caliente tribe has been no less dramatic. During his 17 years as tribal chairman, he has challenged his followers to look beyond the comfortable lifestyle afforded by a reservation that includes, by pure serendipity, some of the choicest real estate in the one of the world’s choicest desert resorts, and to take control of their future.

By following Milanovich’s conservative lead, the Agua Caliente Indians today are perhaps the most financially sophisticated of the state’s 107 federally recognized tribes. While other tribes have used their casino success to launch non-gambling businesses, the Agua Caliente are building a future that’s not just economically diverse, but stresses self-reliance and a strong work ethic. In the process, Milanovich has emerged as perhaps the most influential tribal leader in California.

Sitting to Milanovich’s right during the giveaway are California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and then-state Assemblyman Jim Battin, who are participating in the ritual mating dance between money and politicians--a dance that’s become more intense since last March, when voters passed Proposition 1A, a state constitutional amendment that gives Indian tribes the exclusive right to operate Nevada-style slot machines and card games in California. Unlike those polished politicians, Milanovich stumbles over his script, mispronounces and forgets names, talks in incomplete sentences and generally performs so poorly that everyone in the room aches for him.

But no one doubts the sincerity of his words, the spontaneity of his laugh, the warmth of his smile. Even Tom Tucker, executive director of the California Council on Problem Gambling, accepts an oversized $25,000 check without any hint of irony. Tucker still worries about social consequences as California gambling spreads through Indian casinos, and says only 10 of the state’s 42 casinos have contributed to his organization. But he says none has given more money, or with greater sincerity, than the Agua Caliente.

“Richard has told me he’s sensitive to the fact that certain people are vulnerable [to gambling], and he said he’d never want to get wealthy from someone else’s vulnerability or sickness,” says Tucker. “I thought that was real decent of him. Maybe other people in the gaming business feel that way, but they haven’t said that. Just Richard.”

a reservation casino does not reflect a tribe’s heart and soul, and in the case of Agua Caliente, that’s a good thing. There are finer Indian casinos in California, ones with more neon, more glitz, greater aesthetics. The Agua Caliente casino, the state’s only Indian casino in a downtown resort area, is functional at best.

The tribe built the casino on the grounds of the Spa Hotel--it renamed the complex the Spa Resort Casino last month--after it and a Las Vegas casino giant dropped a partnership plan. Poker, blackjack and pai gow are available, but video gambling and new slot machines are the real moneymakers. Hundreds fill the meeting rooms of the hotel’s former convention center, as well as the tent the tribe erected to accommodate more.

Today the casino boasts 1,150 machines, including about 800 Vegas-style slots that clatter relentlessly as coins drop into the metal hoppers. As in Nevada casinos, this one is smoky (tribal reservations are exempt from California’s no-smoking laws). Like Nevada casinos, there’s booze, and complimentary sodas and fruit drinks are also offered. But the place is exciting only if you’ve never been to Vegas.

Yet with the passage of 1A, Las Vegas has come to California. Tribes up and down the state are upgrading their casinos. Some tribes are building their first-ever casinos. Some will turn the operations over to management companies, sit back and wait for their share of the profits to pour in.

The Agua Caliente tribe, too, is expanding. It will rebuild its casino in downtown Palm Springs, and its new $80-million casino adjacent to Interstate 10 near Rancho Mirage will open in April. But unlike others, the tribe intends to finance and manage its casinos without outside help. It will continue to develop the land it controls in the heart of a desert resort region green with golf courses and tourist dollars. And thanks in large part to the will and infectious work ethic of its tribal chairman, the Agua Caliente will be the California tribe best prepared to handle the onrushing future.

And yet prosperity may pose the greatest challenge for Milanovich. As his tribe anticipates the huge profits that Nevada-style gambling will generate, he’s under pressure to open the financial tap for tribal members who don’t share his resolve to pay off a projected $210 million in tribal debts and invest in other tribal businesses. The chairman finds himself in the uncomfortable position of a preacher at an orgy, and you have to wonder how long he’ll be welcome.

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Richard Milanovich holds to three truths: there is little in life more satisfying than earning a paycheck for an honest job; it’s important to take time to walk; and being an Indian brings privileges and responsibilities, as well as an obligation to cherish the past and protect the future.

“Chairman Milanovich is insightful and quick-witted, and brings to the table a long view of tribal politics in California,” says Mark A. Macarro, chairman of the Pechanga band of Luiseno Indians in Temecula and television spokesman for the state tribes’ campaigns to legalize Indian casinos in California. “He’s characteristic of a dwindling group of tribal leaders steeped with a sense of legacy, of what needs to be protected.”

Milanovich’s mother, LaVerne, was an Agua Caliente Indian who, as a teenager in the 1930s, went to visit her mother in Los Angeles and met 20-year-old Steve Milanovich, in town from Indiana looking for work. The couple married--no state in the nation has more Native Americans than California, but very few are full-blooded--and had a daughter. Their second child, Richard, was born shortly after his father was shipped overseas with the Army in World War II. The couple’s relationship suffered in the separation, and they divorced.

Without a stable male influence in his life, young Milanovich strayed. One night he was with a bunch of older boys who beat up a Marine and took his money. At 14, he spent 2 1/2 months in juvenile hall and another 10 1/2 months at an honor camp near Idyllwild, in the mountains above Palm Springs. “I was not happy, but I learned the discipline that had been so lacking in my life.”

After his release, Milanovich bounced between his dad’s place in Cleveland and his sister’s home in Banning, where he learned how to operate heavy equipment. He joined the Army at 17, knowing he could shine as an infantryman because he enjoyed long, hard hikes. He served 2 1/2 years in Germany and was a tracker on long-range reconnaissance patrols. Discharged at age 20, he returned to Los Angeles, where, among other things, he sold vacuum cleaners and encyclopedias door to door.

Still adrift, Milanovich had a child by one relationship, enrolled in college courses, and at 26 got married to another woman. That relationship lasted five years, producing two children. A political conservative, Milanovich almost reenlisted in the Army to serve in Vietnam, and he came close to joining the John Birch Society.

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At the time, the Agua Caliente band was at an enviable crossroads, the result of the bizarre configuration of its desert reservation.

When the federal government drew the boundaries of the tribe’s 32,000-acre reservation in 1876, it got a lucky break, although no one could have imagined it at the time. The land designated for tribal use included four canyons, two cemeteries and the eight-acre site of its historic hot springs--a site that later became downtown Palm Springs, where the Spa Resort Casino is situated today.

In addition to that common-use land, the bulk of the reservation was laid out checkerboard-style in mile-wide squares across what was then a barren desert swath alongside the eastern slopes of the San Jacinto Mountains. Alternating squares of land went to the Southern Pacific Railroad, because the government believed that a fractured reservation would weaken tribal unity over time and hasten Indian assimilation into American culture. In 1959, after years of court battles, the unassigned checkerboard squares were individually allotted to the 106 members of the tribe at the time--including Milanovich and his mother.

By the time Milanovich got actively involved with the tribe, the tribal members who received personal allotments were landlords over much of the growing cities of Palm Springs and neighboring Cathedral City. For many of them, life was good as they leased their land to business, retail and residential tenants.

Today some 40,000 people in Palm Springs, Cathedral City and a bit of Rancho Mirage live on land leased from the tribe and from individual Agua Caliente Indians. Also, some of the most prominent businesses are on Indian land, including Palm Springs’ convention center, the Wyndham, Marquis and Hilton hotels, the Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, and the Cathedral Canyon Country Club and Doral Palm Springs Resort in Cathedral City. The city bought an Indian’s land to build its airport.

Milanovich admits he was living the good life with money from his leased land: skydiving, scuba-diving, partying, drinking, even living for a while in Malibu. But he saw firsthand the risk of the tribe’s growing sense of entitlement. He recalls that his late mother was content to cash her rent checks and not to work beyond that. “When my mom went to pick up her tenant’s lease payment, I was embarrassed that she hadn’t toiled for it,” he says. “I still don’t understand it. But that mentality, of just sitting back and collecting our lease checks, permeated our people. It was creating a society of individuals who didn’t see a need to improve their lives, and their children didn’t have an impetus to improve their lives. And it was fostering the idea that we as Indian people couldn’t do anything on our own.”

Some Indians’ allotments were sold in the 1960s by their non-Indian conservators in what would later be exposed as a scandalous rip-off of tribal members. The city of Palm Springs was no more generous toward the tribe, instituting land-use decisions that blocked development of tribal land within the city limits so money could be steered to non-Indians. But in 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a federal court ruling that the reservation was free of city government zoning control, and tribal members were finally able to develop the land as they saw fit.

Meanwhile, Milanovich had been hiking the canyons of his ancestors near Palm Springs, thinking about both the past and future. “He wasn’t particularly doing anything at that time in his life,” says his wife of 23 years, Melissa, whom he married in 1977 and with whom he has three children. “But hiking in the canyons put a spark in him. He said he wanted to find out more about his people.”

The year Milanovich married Melissa he was appointed a proxy member of the tribal council to fill a vacant seat. The next year, at age 35, he was elected to the council. He quickly won over skeptics who questioned how a man of split heritage and married to a blue-eyed blond could claim such devotion to Indian culture. Says Milanovich: “They saw that what was in my heart was stronger than the color of my skin and the sound of my name.”

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The tribe’s first significant step toward a more secure future came in 1993. A developer had built the Spa Hotel on leased reservation land in 1962 and later sold it to new owners. By 1990, the hotel had deteriorated badly, reflecting poorly on the tribe’s public image. Milanovich argued that the tribe should buy the hotel outright from the bank that had repossessed it and restore its original sparkle.

“There was concern that we would be biting off too much, that we would fail,” recalls Milanovich, whose dark and menacing eyes are tempered by his explosive laugh. “But I said we’ve got to try. We had to show that we were capable, and intelligent, and willing to take the risk of managing our own business--and our destiny.”

The tribal council finally agreed, and in 1993 purchased the hotel from the bank that held its mortgage.

Around the same time, a growing number of tribes in California-- including some just a few miles from Palm Springs--were opening casinos without state or federal permission, and profiting handsomely from them. The Agua Caliente tribe refrained from such boldness. Some members didn’t think the tribe should rely on gambling as a source of revenue. It would invite problems, they argued. Others hesitated because it was against the law. Milanovich, still the conservative Republican, was hesitant too, but ultimately he felt that the tribe should exercise its sovereignty and open a casino before its ability to do so got mired in politics.

“We knew that if we didn’t stick our foot in the door, it would become more and more difficult to get into gaming,” he says. “By then we knew we could operate a casino because we’d been running the Spa Hotel.”

In 1995, the tribe launched its casino, and Southern California had its closest approximation of a Vegas-style resort: a hotel with gambling, a health and beauty spa, pools and dining. The tribe has since bought a second hotel, begun building another casino, helped launch a local bank and now runs a business development office that’s packaging developable land in the heart of Palm Springs.

In 1996, Milanovich returned to college and earned a bachelor’s degree in business management from the University of Redlands. The new challenge to the tribe, says Milanovich, is to ensure the financial security of its 368 members. For all the wealth that some individual tribal members have amassed through their land leases, the tribe’s 262 younger members, born since 1959, have no allotted lands to call their own. Their retirements need to be funded.

To that end, Milanovich won’t allow tribe members to engorge on casino profits, as other tribes in California have allowed. Members of the Table Mountain Rancheria near Fresno, for instance, were receiving checks of about $15,000 every month, and each family was given $250,000 to build a custom home. Other tribes won’t reveal how much they pay their members, but the evidence is in their mansions and fancy automobiles. By contrast, Agua Caliente Indians receive about $2,000 a month, Milanovich says--enough to add to the comfort of their lives, but not enough to allow them to not work at all. An annual $400,000 education budget allows the tribe to send every young person to a private college, and to pay for such other school-related costs as band and sports uniforms and fees associated with extracurricular activities, he says.

“Gaming allows us to take our rightful place on the political stage, to make known our hopes and dreams, but it’s not our end goal,” Milanovich says. “We know gaming won’t last. The laws will change at some point. But it’s a means to an end. It has brought us sorely needed revenue which has allowed us to diversify even more, so the future of the tribe is secure.

“But that doesn’t mean that tribal members should simply get more money” as casino profits rise. “They will still have to become viable, working members of society.”

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Despite his hard-line approach, Milanovich has a remarkable number of admirers and very few critics. The Palm Springs mayor once suggested that Milanovich run for public office, but he says he has already found his place in politics, as chairman of the Agua Caliente Indians.

“A tribal chairman must not only be responsive and faithful to those who elect him,” says Macarro, the Pechanga Indian tribal chairman, “but he has to be able to operate in other environments where the ground rules are different, the values are different. You sometimes have to be a negotiator, other times a visionary. You’re part executive, part diplomat.”

Milanovich does well in Sacramento, Macarro says, because of the experience he developed working with local government agencies in Palm Springs, striking compromises where appropriate but not undermining the tribe’s autonomy.

“He’s one of the finest examples of leadership that I’ve encountered in my six years of government involvement,” says Palm Springs Mayor Will Kleindienst. “He’s patient and respectful. He doesn’t deal from emotions. I’ve never seen him lose his temper . . . but he’ll articulate why his position is important.”

The head of the local office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Don Magee, says Milanovich “has a gift of exercising neutrality. He doesn’t offend. He walks the fence very carefully [and] on any reservation, that’s hard to do.”

Milanovich has won support from rank-and-file tribal members “because he’s fair in his reasoning and thinking. He doesn’t strong-arm anyone,” says Barbara Gonzales-Lyons, the tribal council’s vice chair. His strengths, she says, “are in his charisma, his ability to empathize with others.”

Milanovich can be tough, though. Among his first tasks as a tribal council member was to implement a pact with the Palm Springs City Council that was unique at the time in the United States: The tribe agreed to generally abide by the city’s land use and planning decisions, even over sovereign Indian land that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled was exempt from such conditions. The tribe, Milanovich says, understood the benefits of a Palm Springs that was aesthetically cohesive.

The tribe, however, reserved the ultimate right to do with its land what it wanted in case of a conflict. Over the years, the tribe has ignored only a handful of city wishes. Prime among them: allowing billboards on Indian land, despite a Palm Springs billboard ban.

Similarly, when Milanovich and other tribal leaders met with the Gov. Gray Davis’ staff last year to discuss new state guidelines for Indian casinos, he walked out during comments by Davis’ chief negotiator, William A. Norris, a retired federal appellate judge. Norris was explaining how the state would disburse casino revenue to non-gambling tribes, rather than leave such decisions to the tribes themselves. “He was saying it was the state’s responsibility to take care of the tribes,” Milanovich says, “and I thought to myself, ‘Since when has California been concerned about Indian tribes?’ It was very patronizing.”

On occasion, Milanovich has advocated for the greater tribal good at the expense of individual Indian land owners. In a 1984 address to the Palm Springs City Council, for example, he began speaking in support of individual tribal members wanting to lease their land in picturesque Andreas Canyon to a resort developer. Abruptly, Milanovich stopped and announced that he personally could not support the development plans because they would irreparably harm the canyon beauty and tribal heritage.

“We were inclined to support the development, because we thought the tribe was all for it,” says Frank Bogert, the mayor at the time. But then Milanovich “gave the damnedest speech you ever heard, about how his ancestors lived there and how they loved the canyons, and all the artifacts that were there. To hear Richard talk so deeply from his heart, it almost made you cry.”

The City Council rejected the development.

Milanovich’s few critics within the tribe choose their words carefully, and their message is almost lost in the nuances. Tribal matriarch Vyola Ortner, who disagrees with Milanovich on various issues, struggles in composing her remarks, and finally writes them down: “He always wants to be liked, and wants to please everyone.” He leads by consensus, she says, “and has a hard time making decisions without a lot of agonizing.”

The reason Milanovich has been reelected tribal chairman for eight consecutive two-year terms, some tribal members say, is that no other strong personalities have risen from within the tribe to seriously challenge him.

Money may complicate that. Listen hard enough and you’ll hear a drumbeat for change, especially among younger tribal members without land who want a bigger share of casino profits if, as expected, gambling revenues skyrocket in the years ahead.

“There is a certain amount of pressure to increase the per-capita [stipends],” Milanovich concedes. “We’ve explained to them that we first want to get our second casino up and running, and get the downtown one up and running, and then work to retire our tribal debt associated with the two casinos and the hotel. I think our people understand that. They know that, as a tribe, we have to build for our future, and it may not always be in gaming.”

There even has been resentment, he says, that the tribe gives away so much money to community organizations while not disbursing more to its own members. “We’ve explained that we as a tribe are helping pay for community programs because they have their own funding shortfalls--and we as tribal members benefit from those community programs as well. It’s just the right thing to do,” Milanovich says.

Tribal member Jeannette Dodd acknowledges some tension within the ranks about the amount of casino profits disbursed to the Agua Caliente Indians. “We’ve been told we won’t be getting an increase [in per-capita revenue sharing] until 2001--and that it’ll be a minimal increase,” says Dodd, 33. “And some people are upset by that. A lot of us see what members of other tribes are making. It’s a lot more than us.”

The internal debate is not so critical that Milanovich’s leadership is in jeopardy, Dodd says. “Some people say he should retire because he’s been doing it for so long. But on the other hand, nobody else wants the job, and he’s so well-known in California, he can walk through doors where anyone else would have a hard time. He’s turned into a good politician.”

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If there’s tension among the Agua Calientes over Milanovich’s leadership, it’s not apparent this day as he hands out $1 million. The chairman introduces Ortner, who is on the committee that makes the donation decisions, and they smile generously at each other, because today all is good.

Casino bucks rain over the audience--$5,000 here, $25,000 there-- and everyone is ecstatic. Milanovich clearly delights in rewarding organizations that are working hard in the community. That’s just the way it should work, he says.

The respect is mutual. “We love you, Richard!” yells Cathedral City Council member Sarah DiGrandi, and Milanovich’s embarrassed laugh fills the room full of beneficiaries. Everyone laughs with him, all the way to the bank.