My first question is: Who gets in the Jacuzzi, with another person, in order to watch TV? Obviously a very very jaded gambler.

You can't reserve this particular suite at Mohegan for any amount of money. What you can do is call ahead and establish a million-dollar line of credit, and they'll probably offer it to you for free. They'll also send a Gulfstream jet, a helicopter, a hydroplane or a stretch limo--depending on where you live--and they'll make sure the chef is on duty 24 hours a day, in case you get the munchies at 4 a.m.

Connecticut gambling is the big leagues. People from elsewhere in the country don't understand this. When you say "Indian casino" in most places, it means a cheap slots joint where old ladies have lunch, or at best a glorified bingo hall and poker emporium that only starts bustling on weekends.

But the two largest casinos in the world--based on floor space devoted to gambling--are Indian casinos in the state of Connecticut. The first, and oldest, is Foxwoods. The second, and increasingly the more interesting, is Mohegan Sun, which looms up alongside the Thames River (pronounced "thaymes," not "tims") in a little patch of southeastern Connecticut--a 240-acre Indian reservation--that's been paved over, spruced up, glamorized and juiced for 30,000 gamblers a day.

Mohegan Sun has gone strictly for the glitz. Whereas Foxwoods is surrounded by forestland, Mohegan has a glimmering 35-story crystalline hotel tower and all kinds of easy-access cloverleafs, ramps and chutes to get those cars and buses in and out as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Once inside, you're THERE. You're not likely to leave, even for a stroll, and the sightseeing attractions are slim pickings anyway. You'd have to get in the car and drive a while to find anything worth stopping for. The most popular attractions in the area are Mystic Seaport--the theme-parky unbearably cute Old New England village that people either love or hate--and the first nuclear submarine at the naval base in Groton. The rest tends toward the antique-shop crowd, things like the Carousel Museum of New England and--actually this is a favorite of mine, but I'm weird--Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, which was the boyhood home of Eugene O'Neill.

Best to stay indoors, where Mohegan has thoughtfully provided not one but two enormous casinos, plus a shopping mall, a cabaret that ranks with the mid-sized showrooms of Vegas, and a wild place called the Wolf's Den that's right in the middle of one of the casino floors and would be called a lounge if it weren't so enormous. A-level casino acts that normally wouldn't play a lounge--Blondie, Maynard Ferguson, Glen Campbell, Joan Jett--perform in the Wolf's Den for FREE.

Then there's the convention center--if you call, they'll describe the "function rooms" and assign you to a "destination services team"--as well as the 29 restaurants (yes, that's what I said). And did I mention the arena?

The 10,000-seat sports arena has better sight lines and closer-to-the-action seating than Madison Square Garden and has been so successful that it now steals all the big touring acts from Hartford: Cher, Aerosmith, Janet Jackson, Gloria Estefan, Julio Iglesias. (Mohegan has an exclusive contract with Clear Channel, biggest concert promoter in the country.) They also have quite a few boxing nights, most of them televised on ESPN, as well as indoor lacrosse, the occasional college basketball game, and their own arena football team, the Mohegan Wolves.

But the biggest coup of all came last week when Mohegan Sun became the first casino to get its own professional basketball team. The Orlando Miracle of the WNBA will be moving to Uncasville this year, where the team will be renamed the Connecticut Sun. In any other state, this would be news but not THAT enormous. In Connecticut, where the women's basketball program at the University of Connecticut is a religion, this is manna from heaven. Nykesha Sales, the all-time leading scorer at UCONN and a three-time all-star in the WNBA, will be playing for the Sun, but almost every game will be a homecoming of sorts, since 11 UCONN players are scattered through the WNBA on nine different teams.

Mohegan Sun obviously wants to be a destination resort. I would say it's not quite there yet but it's close. I visited recently on a press tour, the kind where they provide you with all kinds of things to do, and after 48 hours I was maxed out on the place. A true destination resort would sustain you for at least three days.

Like most Indian casinos, they overwhelm you with Native American atmosphere, but in this case it has a touch of Disney as well as a dollop of Soho chic. The lobby is a fake cedar forest, complete with a reflecting pond. In the original gaming area, the Casino of the Earth, there are animatronic wolves leering at you from above--an almost too painfully honest representation of the relationship between casinos and their customers. "The Mohegans are known as the wolf people," said a casino spokesperson. Nice to know, but a little unsettling nonetheless.

Casino of the Earth is dark, brown, grotto-like, which is actually the kind of gambling atmosphere I like. But for those accustomed to the bright open spaces of Foxwoods, Mohegan also offers the new Casino of the Sky--you have to walk down the Trail of Life, otherwise known as the shopping mall, to get there-- which features a roof that's an actual planetarium dome, with changing astronomical fiber-optic effects, as well as a strange onyx mountain that functions as a bar, lounge, disco and high- limit gambling area.

The design is all cockeyed and circuitous, so you tend to get lost among the 3600 slots and 295 tables, but that's okay because if you keep walking you'll eventually end up back on the Trail of Life, where you can stop at Brookstone and buy a high- tech Global Positioning System device with a decorative metallic belt clip.

Of the 29 restaurants, I would say seven are in the gourmet class: two Italian, two steakhouses, one Asian, and two atmospheric "all cuisine" places called The Cove and Rain. The food at Pompeii & Caesar, the upscale Italian place, was good but not outstanding. The 24-hour menu at Fidelia's, the all-purpose coffee shop with full meals, was excellent.

In the casual dining category, they have one other 24-hour place, Mohegan Territory, as well as Big Bubba's BBQ, Jasper White's Summer Shack (for New England seafood), and Michael Jordan's 23 Sportcafe. Then they have a whole slew of food-court type places, Ben & Jerry's, Starbucks, Imus Brothers, a buffet (actually two of them), a brew pub and a sports bar.

Also worth mentioning is the Elemis Spa, run by the British company best known for its girlie spa-product line. They offer all the usual facials, massages and herbal wraps, as well as a "couples massage" in something called the Strawberry Moon Room. (I won't speculate.)

Most people arrive at Mohegan by car--40 percent from Connecticut, followed by Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island--but they also have what they proudly call "the world's nicest bus terminal" (plush comfy chairs and weather-proof parking bays) and a shuttle service that takes 20 minutes to bring you from the Amtrak station in New London. (It's a scenic two-hour trip from Pennsylvania Station in New York, about the same from South Station in Boston.) They're especially proud of their Players Club, which allows you to spend points on anything sold within the casino, even stuff at the shopping mall.

For most of the nineties Mohegan Sun was known as the "second" casino in Connecticut, the one you tried after you had exhausted all the possibilities at Foxwoods. But since then there's been a 1.1 BILLION dollar expansion, and the only reason word has spread slowly is that, unfortunately, the big grand opening of the new casino space came in September of 2001, when people had other things on their minds.

Mohegan now has all the amenities that Foxwoods has--maybe more, since Foxwoods can't really compete with the arena and the exclusive entertainment contracts--but it's also retained a sort of gritty down-and-dirty gambling savvy that Foxwoods lacks. What I mean is that the gaming floors, especially on weekends, are crowded, noisy and full of action, the way most people like it. The craps tables are boisterous. The blackjack tables are crowded three deep. They have real baccarat rooms and all the progressives you could want. (Two years ago a visitor from Yonkers, New York, hit a Megabucks payout for $6,355,858.) And if you have kids, you can dump them in a video-game paradise called Kids Quest, with plenty of trained Mohegan attendants to watch them for you. They'll accept responsibility up to age 12.

Nirvana for me is the lush, comfortable Mohegan Race Book, where they have 300 TV screens, individual carrels, and all the best tracks--not only Belmont, Aqueduct and Saratoga (none of which are carried by Foxwoods) but also greyhound tracks and the Jai Alai fronton in Newport, Rhode Island. This is the only race book I've ever seen where you can bet on jai alai.

In the ongoing battle between Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun to see who can control New England gambling, I'm rooting a little bit more for the Mohegans. For one thing, the Mashantucket Pequots, owners of Foxwoods, are not real Indians. The tribe had died out by the time it got federal recognition in the eighties, and membership was parceled out to the friends and relatives of two old women who happened to be living on the reservation in the seventies. A few of them claim Pequot blood--although there's evidence that the tribe had long since ceased to exist--but most of them don't even keep up that pretense.

The Mohegans, by contrast, are the real deal. Of course, the tribe had no money prior to federal recognition in the nineties and the advent of gambling, but it had always maintained a tribal museum, held regular elections, and tried to maintain as many of the old traditions as possible. The last Mohegan speaker died in 1908, so there was no real tribal village, but the blood lines were more or less pure.

Mark Brown, chairman of the current tribal council, traces his Mohegan heritage on his mother's side but spent most of his life as a police officer in Norwich and Montville before 1995. (The casino opened in 1996.) Vice chairman Peter J. Schultz is the great-grandson of a chief (called Matagha) and the son of an elder known as Red Moon, although Red Moon's real-life working- world name was Lawrence Schultz. Vice chairman Schultz was also a police officer prior to joining the council, but had also worked 15 years for Aetna Life and Casualty and is a decorated Vietnam war hero as well as an author of children's plays.

Jayne Fawcett, the tribal "ambassador," grew up on the homesite of the Reverend Samson Occum, the first American Indian minister, and her mother's family operates the oldest Indian-run museum, the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum. Her aunt is Medicine Woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon, and her uncle was a chief. She worked many years as a teacher in Montville and Ledyard, and still lectures on Mohegan culture and plays the organ at the Mohegan Church.

The Mohegan management team is respected enough by Wall Street to have its bonds rated on a par with gambling megacorporations like Park Place Entertainment and MGM Mirage. William J. Velardo has been the CEO since 2000, although he's been with the company since before the casino opened. He was previously senior vice president at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, and before that helped run casinos in Vegas, Tahoe and New Orleans. Jeffrey E. Hartmann, the Chief Financial Officer, was hired away from Foxwoods in 1996. Michael W. Bloom, the marketing executive who takes care of those high rollers with the double-TV Jacuzzis, is another Atlantic City veteran (Tropicana and Resorts) who also worked at Casino Windsor and Northern Belle, both just across the bridge from Detroit, before joining Mohegan in 1996.

The most interesting management background belongs to Mitchell Grossinger Etess, of the legendary Grossinger family, owners of Grossinger's Hotel in the Catskills. Growing up at that resort, he held virtually every job including General Manager, then went on to work at Trump Plaza, the CCA/Holly Inn in Pinehurst, North Carolina, and Players Island in Nevada. As you might expect of a Catskills veteran, he's the entertainment impresario, wrangling all those contracts with Clear Channel and the WNBA and booking people like Tony Bennett, Nell Carter, Hal Linden and Mary Wilson into the cabaret. (What? No Catskills comedians?) "Basically the cabaret is for people who need a silent room, who can't compete with slot machines," he said. "When we first opened, we tried classic New York cabaret, but there wasn't a market for it. Now we put names in there."

There's one statistic that stands out when you look at Mohegan's operating numbers--besides the current 19 percent revenue growth, that is. Table games account for 28 of the casino's revenue. In Atlantic City, by contrast, slot machines account for 90 percent of revenue at many properties, and at most Indian casinos the slots figure is even higher. What this means, in lay terms, is that there's some real gambling going on at this place.