On May 13 of 2008, sheriff’s deputies responded to a “shot’s fired” call at a guard shack on the Soboba reservation in San Jacinto less than a mile from the casino. For the last two years, Salgado has been engaged in a feud with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department that is every bit as strange and violent as anything you might find in the pages of a history of the Old West.

But if he had a target on his back, it’s because he put it there. Soboba has experienced more than its fair share of trouble over the years and Salgado has been at the heart of it. A casino with the funny-sounding name of “Soboba” kept popping up in my searches and even though it’s a long ways from Thunderclap, I set up a Google alert for the tribe. (Indian casinos, if nothing else, are repositories of money and they are selective about who they let through the doors.) This is not the place to speculate why it took me so long to get my license, but I spent weeks reading everything I could find on the Internet about Indian casinos. After I was hired at Thunderclap Casino (not its real name), I had to wait for the Gaming Commission to perform a background check before they would issue me a gaming license. It’s easy to imagine Salgado presiding over his tribe the way an outspoken sheriff might run a small rural town in a hardboiled crime novel.Įven by today’s standards of commonplace corruption and governors gone wild, it’s a stunning fall from grace but I can’t say I’m surprised. His penchant for wearing tinted eyeglasses indoors makes him look more like a comic book gangster than a tribal politician. He wears flashy suits, slicked-back hair and weighs in excess of three hundred pounds. A former football player, Salgado is a rough-looking and even tougher-talking customer who enjoys throwing his considerable weight around. In the insular world of Indian gaming, Salgado is something of a throwback. If convicted, Salgado could be sentenced up to 363 years in prison. His crime? Pocketing a quarter of a million dollars in kickbacks from contractors who sought to do business with the tribe.

On October 23, Robert Salgado, Chairman of the Soboba Band of Luiseno Indians in Riverside County, California, was indicted on 36 counts, including bribery, conspiracy, and filing false tax returns.

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