The Rise and Fall of Chief Jim Billie

You might spot Chief Jim Billie anywhere from Naples to Dania today-a short, stocky man of 60, sweating through a colorful patchwork shirt and barking commands to a ragtag group of workmen. He's strong as an ox, bowlegged, and the ring finger from his right hand-lost in a long-ago battle with an alligator-floats in a little jar he keeps in a pocket. Perched high atop a peeled-cypress hut frame, he furiously nails fronds tossed up to him, deftly interweaving the leaves to prevent leaking and wind damage, just as he was taught by his uncles and elders in the Seminole tribe.

"A lot of people try, but only a Seminole Indian can build chickees correctly," he yells down, in a voice deep and husky. Cocksure, he rears back, Schwarzeneggers his chest and gorilla-pounds his pecs with both fists. "And the Chief's chickees are best of them all!"

For 22 years, Jim Billie served as chairman of the Seminole Tribe of Florida's governing council, the longest tenure of any elected leader in the Western Hemisphere, except for Castro. Though he's no longer leader of the 2,600-member tribe, everyone still calls him Chief. He lives in Moore Haven, near Lake Okeechobee, with his longtime girlfriend, Maria, and their two young children. Six other children, an estranged wife and an ex-wife live on Indian lands within an hour's drive. The house he built with his own hands at his Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation camp sits vacant, vandalized and condemned.

Once an avid pilot who used planes the way the rest of us use automobiles, Billie has not flown a helicopter or airplane since he was booted off the council and banned from the Big Cypress hangar more than three years ago. Still popular among his people-more than 400 signed a petition for his return after his ouster-he sees very few other Indians. Secret sources within the tribe risk their personal standing by informing him of tribal news. The police department he founded has orders to arrest him if he enters the gleaming, five-story tribal administration building he built on a pig farm near the Florida Turnpike.

Once Florida's highest-paid elected official ($330,000 per year), he struggles now to make his payroll. His cattle and horses are gone, his alligator pit empty, the strings rusted on his guitar. Billie swears there's no bag of pilfered money buried in the back yard, as some outsiders suspect. No friends in high places are doling out the bucks. Burt Reynolds doesn't call anymore. Neither does James Brown, who once begged Billie to bail him out of jail. Nor does Donald Trump, who dined on rattlesnake, possum, garfish and alligator with Billie while pitching his offer for a Seminole casino contract.

History will credit Billie as the Indian chief who finally outsmarted the white man, using white law and white courts to introduce the great new buffalo-casino gambling-to American Indian country. Yet he no longer has contact with other Indian leaders, some of whose tribes enjoy enormous wealth because of his legendary legal battles to protect American Indian sovereignty-and thus the right to run casinos on their land. Billie says other Indians are "paranoid to be around me. They think it might get them in trouble."

He turns the conversation back to the chickees (Seminole for "house") he constructs for $16 to $20 a square foot. "Every time in my life I've gotten down financially, I went back to building chickees and it brought me back up," he says about his Jim Billie Seminole Indian Chiki Huts business. "Long as there are wooden poles and leaves, I won't starve."

Since the end of the Indian wars, no American Indian has been more investigated by the U.S. government than James Edward Billie. The FBI has hounded him for decades, looking for everything from Mafia ties to Enron-style corporate fraud. Yet to this day, no agency has brought a single criminal charge against him. Even the IRS couldn't bring him down-his longtime secretary told me he faithfully paid his taxes on time each year.

The considerable efforts of a major Florida newspaper also failed to convict Billie. The St. Petersburg Times went after the chief, publishing a series of articles detailing fiscal mismanagement of the billions in revenues the tribe's gaming casinos raked in. But the Florida publishing giant could not implicate Billie in any of the misfeasance it alleged. The investigation turned family against family; and the newspaper became a psychological sounding board for snitches, inside sources and Billie's growing legion of political enemies.

"The reporters were after me, and I don't know why," says Billie. "I think the feds or the state were feeding them information, using the reporters to do the investigating they couldn't."

After Times reporters mailed letters to tribal staff members asking them to remove classified documents and mail them to reporters "in an envelope that has no return address on it," the tribe sued the newspaper, accusing it of racist reporting, interfering with its business operations and failing to properly supervise its reporters. The case lingered in court for years before it was thrown out.

An affair that boiled into a feud with a member of his inner staff, her charge of harassment, an abortion, the resignation of a 17-year employee and a payoff in illegal sick pay are officially what took Billie down.

The other four tribal council members suspended the chief without pay when his sexual misconduct became public-a departure from the private way the tribe dealt with such situations in the past.

Christine O'Donnell, who made the charge, now says she was coerced into filing suit against Billie by other Seminole leaders who "implied they would help me out" in a new administration. She remains a friend and confidante to Billie to this day.

"Yes, I was mad at the time. I was a woman scorned after 17 years. But I never thought it would lead to this," says O'Donnell.

"Affairs? My God, there are numerous families out there with multiple fathers. It's a different society. Everyone loved Jim Billie, but he was a dog with women just like all the rest of them. None of the tribal members seemed to care. And now, all of a sudden it was embarrassing?

"I don't buy that. They used me to get at him, and how it worked, I'll never know."

O'Donnell says she spent more than $10,000 on an attorney to assist her in more than 25 hours of interrogation by the FBI. "They said getting Jim Billie was their number-one objective. They had me look at and explain every single American Ex-press charge he ever made. They were desperate for something, anything, to put him away. I didn't have anything to give them. When I mentioned some of the questionable deals involving other leaders, conflicts of interest, reckless spending, misuse of funds, they didn't care."

Despite the astounding IRS problems of tribal councilmen detailed in a Miami Herald investigation, no other tribal official has been officially charged or indicted. "The government has the Seminoles where they want them," says ousted tribal administrator Tim Cox, who has survived his own legal hassles. "As long as they keep ol' uncooperative Jim Billie out of office, they can control the tribe. Or the IRS will drop in for a visit."

The Seminoles are the only American Indian tribe never to have signed a formal peace treaty ending their conflict with the United States. Most modern historians believe the tribe is descended from aboriginal Florida Indians, who merged, socially and culturally, with disenfranchised Indians chased down here from Georgia and Alabama by the U.S. Calvary during the mid-1800s. Along the way, the tribe also picked up runaway slaves and all manner of outlaws and ne'er-do-wells.

On Dec. 28, 1828, a band of Seminoles destroyed the entire regiment of U.S. Maj. Francis Dade. On a seek-and-destroy-Indians mission, Dade came marching into Wahoo Swamp (near Dade City) with his natty formation of 108 men. Ambushing Seminoles dropped out of the trees and annihilated all but four, losing only three warriors. The regiment's bodies were left for weeks to rot in the sun.

Dade's Massacre began the most expensive conflict ever fought by the United States up to that time: the Second Seminole War. Thousands of Seminoles were captured and sent to Indian land in Oklahoma, where the 12,400-strong Oklahoma Seminole Nation remains to this day. Medicine man Abiaka (Sam Jones) led the rest deep into the thick wilds of Big Cypress. Hundreds of Seminoles hid there, and farther south in the Everglades, until well into the 20th century, decades after the Indian wars had ended.

In any modern gathering of Indians, the unconquered Florida Seminoles rarely miss a chance to lord it over their conquered peers. Navajos, Apaches, Sioux, Commanche must all back down. "You gave up," my friend Joe Don Billie once yelled at a Choctaw who was criticizing the Seminoles. "We never did."