It would be easy to look at what has occurred at Foxwoods and think, Here are people who fell into money and didn’t know how to handle it. Which happens to be true. But how the casino reached this point, and the challenges its owners and operators now confront, is part of a much larger story — one involving the gradual relaxation of moral prohibitions against gambling, a desperate search for new revenue by state governments and the proliferation of new casinos across America. Casino gambling has become a commodity, available within a day’s drive to the vast majority of U.S. residents. Some in the industry talk of there being an oversupply, as if their product were lumber or soybeans.

Foxwoods has had its own in-state competition since 1996 from the Mohegan Sun, which lies just west, across the Thames River. Owned by the Mohegan Tribe, it is a more modest property, though only by comparison — Mohegan is the second-largest casino in the hemisphere. In October, a casino opened at the Aqueduct racetrack in Queens with 4,500 slot machines, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo is pushing an expansion plan for the site that includes a hotel and what would be the nation’s largest convention center. And lawmakers in Massachusetts recently voted to issue licenses for a slots parlor and three full resort casinos — an especially ominous development for the Connecticut casinos, which draw about 30 percent of their clientele from Massachusetts, because many gamblers are ruled by what is known in the business as the law of gravity. They stop where the pull is the strongest, which is usually the nearest casino.

Scott Butera is Foxwoods’s chief executive, its seventh since 2007. Some of the Pequots call him Eagle, for Eagle Eyes, because he notices everything, whether it’s an error in a financial document or a slight stain in a carpet. Some also refer to the tall, gaunt Butera as Woody, after the character in the “Toy Story” movies. Butera, who is 45, has managed troubled casino operations for Donald Trump and Carl Icahn, so he is accustomed to difficult bosses and jobs. In the industry, he is known as a turnaround artist. “My wife keeps telling me to get out of the restructuring business,” he said recently as we sat in his spacious office across from the Grand Pequot Tower, one of several high-rises in the Foxwoods complex. “It just sucks you dry.”

This job is Butera’s most complex yet. The initial lender to Foxwoods was Genting, a Malaysian conglomerate, but the tribe is now indebted to an enormous tangle of banks and bondholders. The fact that Foxwoods is on sovereign tribal land complicates everything. It means the lenders cannot foreclose and take control of the gambling operation but also that Foxwoods probably doesn’t qualify for Chapter 11 — a conundrum that Butera described as “sort of like being stuck in no man’s land” and one that financial backers of Indian casinos apparently did not foresee until Foxwoods tanked. “We have six layers of creditors and, within each layer, 20 to 40 institutions,” Butera told me.“It’s unbelievable. What you have to do is convince them that $2.3 billion of debt is not worth $2.3 billion. And it’s not. Our junior debt was trading at 5 cents on the dollar. So you want to come to a place where even though the lenders are getting a haircut on the face value, they know they’re getting an incredible lift on what it’s actually worth. That’s the magic.”

Butera’s interactions with the Pequots, his bosses, involve a different kind of magic — something more like family therapy. The tribe built new housing, a child-development center, ballfields and tennis courts, a spacious community building with a health club and an indoor-outdoor pool; just about everything on the reservation, which lies “across the swamp” from the casino, as tribal members put it, is faced in exquisitely crafted stone. The pièce de résistance was a $225 million museum to commemorate the Pequots’ tragic history and stunning resurrection.