To shake his hand is to get pulled into a friendly shoulder bump.īutler grew up in Montville, where the Mohegans built their casino in the village of Uncasville on an industrial site by the Thames River. With a trim muscular build, Butler still looks like an athlete. converted him from a running back to a defensive back. He studied finance and played football as a walk-on at UConn, where Coach Skip Holtz Jr. “It correlated directly to the decline.”īutler, 42, the married father of two children, is what the tribe envisioned when the money started coming in: A young tribal member making a career on a reservation that had been all but abandoned in the 1960s, when the only inhabitants were two elderly women living in dire conditions.
“After that, there was just this explosion,” said Butler, the chairman of the Pequots’ tribal council.
