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Even after competing factions in the General Assembly saved a teetering East Windsor casino plan, the deal was shaky right up to the night the session ended on Wednesday.

With pro-casino forces scrambling — led by two Democratic senators, Cathy Osten of Sprague and Timothy Larson of East Hartford — the glue was steadfast support from urban lawmakers. Their price: looser rules for mixed martial arts and an expansion of off-track betting locations.

And so we have a powerful irony. In the face of opposition to more gambling, Connecticut greased the way for its first commercial casino not by a balancing-act bet on financial services and manufacturing technology, sweeteners we might expect. Rather, lawmakers doubled down on the betting culture and violent entertainment.

That's a twisted plot that might have come from "The Producers" or "Seinfeld."

But it's also a perfect example of how laws come together in the insular, vote-trading world of the state Capitol. This battle had it all: gender issues, racial divisions and geographic alignments, along with the usual party politics and money wars.

A couple of hours before dawn's light on Wednesday, the morning of the last day of the session, Larson fetched a poster-sized calendar dated February 2015. On the back of the calendar was a flowchart he had written in blue ink back then, detailing the steps to victory.

The idea was to open a "satellite" casino in northern Connecticut before 2017 or 2018, when the $950 million MGM Springfield resort would start sucking betting dollars by the tens of millions up I-91 and across the Massachusetts line. The Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribes would run the place.

Larson's chart, created with two ranking staffers, showed a joint company formed by the tribes; hurdles in picking a host town and gaining state and federal approvals; even a set-aside for "problem gambling."

It did not map out the legal battle pitting the state and the tribes on one side, and MGM on the other — a battle that will continue even after Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signs the casino bill into law.

Larson, a former East Hartford mayor, along with Osten, who also is the Sprague first selectman, and other co-sponsors, focused on winning over lawmakers fearful that another casino was not the sort of economic development Connecticut needed.

Their main leverage, from 2015 until the horse-trading grew intense over the last couple of weeks, was the tribes' argument that as many as 9,300 jobs could disappear if Connecticut did nothing. That number was based on a study of competition throughout the Northeast, not just from MGM Springfield — but it served as a powerful weapon.

Signs Of A Deal

A new casino was a tough sell in 2017 after two chaotic years in which the tribes settled on an abandoned former Showcase Cinemas hulk in East Windsor, 13 miles south of the MGM resort. Connecticut's main problem was a deep budget hole. The casino didn't promise much immediate relief.

Nor did Malloy show the slightest enthusiasm for it; he favored boosting urban vibrancy.

MGM fought hard for an alternate, "open" plan in which any casino developer could bid for the right to build a large gambling resort not in the Hartford area but in Fairfield County. Some lawmakers in and around Bridgeport backed that idea, but urban legislators had other desires that would come in handy later in the bargaining.

They coveted mixed martial arts, a fast-growing sport in which muscular combatants, male and female, pummel each other with kicks, punches and wrestling moves in packed arenas.

MMA, as it's known, is legal in Connecticut but strict insurance and safety rules have kept it out. Urban lawmakers, especially members of the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus, have fought to have those rules eased.

Many lawmakers from in and around cities also agreed with Sportech, operator of 18 Off-Track Betting locations around the state, which claimed it would lose $50 million in revenue. Sportech wanted a piece of the action if there was going to be more gambling.

Signs of a possible deal emerged as early as January of this year, when Bridgeport Democrats approached Larson, co-chairman of the public safety committee. "They said, 'We need some help on MMA,'" he recalled on Wednesday.

Among the roadblocks: Female legislators, especially Democrats in the senate, tended to oppose MMA as a barbaric form of entertainment. To them, it should have no place in Connecticut cities trying to rid themselves of street violence.

Sen. Marilyn Moore, D-Bridgeport, said other Bridgeport Democrats, all of them male, excluded her from the discussions about support for the East Windsor plan.

"I was not invited into any of those talks," Moore said. "I think it's a very brutal sport. ... I had a concussion bill that I was trying to get through."

The Bridgeport-area group was slow to offer Larson its support for the tribal casino in exchange for MMA votes as long the MGM open-bid bill had a shot. They held out hope as the East Windsor plan failed to muster enough votes, with MGM fighting hard and with many people in both parties opposed to expanded gambling.

But the pro-MGM groups were outnumbered by delegations from the Hartford area and southeastern Connecticut, near the tribes' existing casinos.

"They worked together in order to hurt the chances for the open process," said Rep. Ezequiel Santiago, D-Bridgeport. "We didn't fight as hard."

Forces Come Together

Then, in April and May, several things came together to change the picture. Income tax receipts fell $400 million short, leaving the state with a $2.3 billion hole in the budget. The East Windsor plan gained favor because it promised revenue sooner than the MGM plan, or so it appeared.

The U.S. Department of the Interior also issued a letter of guidance saying the tribes' commercial casino probably would not void the existing tribal compact under which Connecticut receives 25 percent of slot revenues — a threat MGM still maintains is real.

Malloy announced that he might sign an East Windsor casino bill, but not the MGM bill, though he did not offer support for the tribes' casino. Osten pushed the idea that MGM had abandoned Connecticut when the company and Foxwoods ended their license agreement for the name of a tower at Foxwoods Resort Casino.

Amid all of this, the smell of money for votes filled the Capitol air. Osten, as co-chair of the appropriations committee, whose district includes the Foxwoods Resort an Mohegan Sun casinos, wielded power. "This has always been about jobs for me," she later said.

"Legislators tried to do what they could do to enhance their districts," said Sen. Paul Formica, R-East Lyme, a strong supporter of the East Windsor plan who was not part of the bargaining.

In a bill known as the "sweetener," there was $750,000 a year for towns surrounding East Windsor. There was money for distressed municipalities, some of it still undecided. There was help for Sportech and the OTB parlors, including an expansion from 18 to 24 locations and a measure to prepare the state for sports betting in the event the federal government allows it.

The sweetener originally included slot machines for OTB parlors and even a mini-casino in Hartford — a sort of satellite to the satellite. But those measures, not favored by the tribes, fell away amid opposition led by House Republican Leader Themis Klarides.

Larson, whose district includes East Windsor, said supporters tried to use money the casino would generate to compensate other towns as a way to win votes without expanding gambling elsewhere.

"People all of a sudden saw there was some leverage," Larson said, "and they lost the forest for the trees."

"The sweetener kind of got out of hand for a while there," said Formica, the senator from East Lyme.

The final sweetener created a council of tribal and state officials to help bring entertainment, including MMA and concerts, to arenas in Hartford and Bridgeport.

'Cure ...The Women'

By the end of May, Larson and the MMA forces were talking for votes. "I said, 'I'll help you, but you've got to cure what's happening with the women in there,'" Larson recalled.

By that, he meant some of the senators who opposed MMA. Sen. Mae Flexer, D-Killingly was among them, and she didn't favor gambling expansion, either. "Most gambling is a way to take money away from poor people," Flexer said on Wednesday, after the votes, which she opposed.

Santiago, the Bridgeport state house member, said he spoke with Flexer and Moore. "What I tried to do was keep them from filibustering the bill," he said. "They agreed to not get in the way."

A separate MMA bill became part of the package. Santiago chafed at the idea that the sport could incite violence in his city. "It's two different things, in my opinion," he said.

Regardless, the three linked bills now on Malloy's desk deliver a broad expansion of municipal payoffs, violent entertainment and gambling in ways that few could imagine back when Larson drew those notes on the calendar.

To say it's a flawed process is to state the obvious. "They never identified the policy objectives they were trying to solve for," said Uri Clinton, vice president and deputy general counsel of MGM Resorts International.

As he sees it, if the goal was jobs, a large urban resort in the Bridgeport area would have brought far more work than a parasite casino along I-91. If the goal was revenue for the state, Connecticut could have charged the tribes as much as $250 million for the exclusive right — as some house Democrats tried but failed to do.

Instead, for better or worse, we saw the unwieldy result of a chaotic vote bazaar. Malloy indicated he'd sign the main casino bill, but has not said whether he will sign the sweetener or the mixed martial arts bill. A veto of either would bring angry turmoil to the chaos.

And if the Mohegans and Mashantucket Pequots pull it off, Larson intends to frame that calendar page.