05.28.2025/New Mass. casino rising

Plymouth leaders open to nuke revival | Hollywood mix-up on Gardner heist | Power struggle breaks out in Market Basket executive suite | Another Mass. casino may be on the way | Quick hits |

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Ready or not, here comes another casino: Backed by a multibillion-dollar investor, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe is forging ahead with plans for a gambling palace in Southeastern Massachusetts

In betting-crazed New England, just how much more casino gambling can we handle?

Well, we are about to find out.

The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe is gearing up to unveil plans for a scaled-down version of the $1 billion casino resort it first proposed well more than a decade ago in the old mill city of Taunton.

Last year, the tribe won a key legal victory when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by opponents and neighbors of its proposed Taunton casino.

Now, tribal leaders have hooked up again with Genting, the multibillion-dollar casino giant that had been the Mashpees’ main backer until 2019, when it yanked most of its financial support.

The Malaysian company pulled back following a series of legal and federal regulatory setbacks for the tribe’s jackpot dreams, having burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in support of the plan.

Now Genting, which operates the Resorts World casino in New York, is back.

Genting has stepped in to cover $2.4 million in back payments the tribe owed to Taunton under a casino development agreement struck years ago, the Taunton Daily Gazette reported.

In a first step, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe has opened a “welcome center” on its federally approved reservation land in Taunton, complete with 50 Las Vegas-style slot machines, the tribe announced earlier this month.

Now, all eyes are on what comes next, with tribal leaders tight-lipped on the details of the casino they hope to build, other than that it will be smaller than the three-hotel, 3,000-slot machine behemoth proposed years ago.

Still, the tribe’s planned gambling complex will have the same name as the earlier proposal - First Light Casino - and will feature a mix of slot machines and table games, according to the project’s website.

Tribal officials say their planned casino won’t be as big as their massive proposal of a decade ago

Still, how much room there is in the local gambling market for another casino, especially in Southern New England, remains to be seen.

Sports betting has proven to be a hit, and New Englanders spend more per capita on lottery games than anyone else in the country, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Massachusetts leads the way in that category, spending an astounding $839 per person each year on lottery tickets.

Yet, the Bay State already has the Encore and MGM casinos and the Plainridge slot complex; Connecticut has Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods; and Rhode Island has both Twin River Casino and a smaller casino hotel in Tiverton.

The Bay State’s three major gambling operations have never met their initial revenue projections, with MGM’s Springfield casino having fallen far short of expectations while driving its Las Vegas-based owner to seek potential buyers.

Rev. Richard McGowan - the BC economist is also a top expert on the gambling industry.

“Can Genting build a facility that would rival Encore? I doubt it very much,” Rev. Richard McGowan, a Boston College economist and gaming industry expert, told Contrarian Boston.

“As for revenue to the tribe, again, the casino would need to steal customers from Connecticut, so that might spark a war between the states as well,” McGowan added.

Krasinski should know better: Newton-born actor stars in new art heist movie with a big goof about the epic Gardner Museum robbery

Art heist movies are a thing now, and John Krasinski teams up with Natalie Portman in one of the latest in the genre, “Fountain of Youth.”

John Krasinski

But the movie, now streaming on AppleTV+, gets “points off” for its errant reference to the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, writes Anthony Amore, the museum’s security chief, in his Big Security newsletter.