In a 1985 visit to Tunica County, Miss., Jesse Jackson described the country's then-poorest county as "America's Ethiopia."

A squalid slum known as "Sugar Ditch" had an open sewer running through the middle of the community and was home to many of the impoverished farmhands who worked the flat cotton and soybean fields stretching for miles.

But the fortunes of this Mississippi Delta county - about 25 miles south of Memphis, Tenn. - shifted with the arrival of a cluster of casinos. The first casino opened in Tunica in 1992, and now Tunica County is the third-largest casino hot spot behind Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

A cluster of five Indian-run casinos - and what New York Gov. George Pataki projects will be 48,500 jobs - is being pitched by Gov. George Pataki for Sullivan County.

"If you grow up in Tunica County, you can actually have a job and career in Tunica County. That was not the case prior to the casinos," said Jeff Wallace, a senior research associate at the University of Memphis. Wallace did his doctoral dissertation on Tunica County.

The nine large-scale floating casinos on Tunica's Mississippi River levee are an economic powerhouse for the county, providing significant tax money for Tunica to improve its abysmal school districts and public infrastructure. But therein lies the difference: Tunica's casinos are privately owned, are legally permitted on the state's waterways, and are not located on sovereign land.

But the five proposed in Sullivan County would be built near one another.

"I'd say the experience of those kinds of casinos clustered out in a rural area tend to be successful," said Clyde Barrow, director of the Center for Policy Analysis at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. "They don't tend to be terribly large in their size. Their advantage is if leveraged with other tourism packages."

The proposed Catskills' gaming centers may be able to siphon off some of New York City's gamblers from the Mohegan Sun in Connecticut and the Foxwoods Casino in Rhode Island. Between 10 and 20 percent of these two casinos' guests come from New York City; the two Indian-owned casinos make over $2 billion a year.

"We've been studying the situation there," said Mitchell Etess, president and CEO of Mohegan Sun. "There's no doubt if gaming is in the Catskills, they will be vying for the New York market."

Research shows that casino-goers will travel to the closest gaming facility, provided they are full-scale facilities with dining, gaming and entertainment venues, Barrow said.

And that's where Connecticut casino officials believe they have the advantage. Etess knew that competition may eventually arrive, so they have invested $1.3 billion into their facility, including a 10,000-seat entertainment arena, 300 gaming tables, and 6,272 slot machines.

"In order to create a (competitive) facility in the Catskills, it would require heavy capital investments," Etess said.

But Sullivan County developers are betting on the Catskill Mountains to play a major factor.

"You still have a naturally beautiful area," said Cliff Ehrlich, senior vice president for Mighty M Gaming at Monticello Raceway, which is partnering with the Cayuga Nation of New York and the Seneca-Cayugas of Oklahoma to develop casinos in the town of Thompson. "To bring back tourists, we've got to have a place for people to stay."

Staff writer Amaris Elliott-Engel can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 282 or at amaris.elliot-engel@lee.net