BOSTON

THE ATTENTION is now right where Middleboro casino supporters want it: on former Mashpee Wampanoag tribal leader Glenn Marshall, whose rape conviction and false claims of military heroism were exposed last week. After all, the tribal council has voted to oust Marshall as its chairman. So further revelations of Marshall’s personal shortcomings don’t really matter.

But the public’s attention will soon be moving beyond Marshall.

I did enjoy The Cape Cod Times’s reference to Marshall’s protean ethnicity (“He always talked about being Portuguese,” a high-school classmate told reporter George Brennan). But that’s tame stuff compared with a post written recently in Cape Cod Today, Walter Brooks’s online newspaper, by the “Great Gadfly,” Peter Kenney, who spoke with Amelia Bingham, an 84-year-old elder in the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe.

Kenney, who says Marshall had an earlier incarnation as “a Cape Verdean activist,” wrote: “Bingham says she remembers Marshall when he was in school with her children, ‘He wasn’t an Indian then. He used to tease my kids and bully them because they were Wampanoags. He was a mean kid and he is a mean adult.’ ”

Given that Marshall is no longer the issue, what’s next?

In the Boston Herald, reporter Scott Van Voorhis got at a key point last weekend that needs to be explored in the days ahead: Marshall’s role as a mere tool of the monied interests that are calling the shots. Van Voorhis only scratched a bit at the surface, but he’s picked the right place to scratch.

And here’s the best part: This is all tied up with Jack Abramoff, the super-lobbyist now in prison, who dealt with Indian tribes on gaming matters across the country. Kenney wrote about it in January 2006, but his article was pretty much ignored at the time. It won’t be now. Indeed, Boston Magazine devotes some space to the Marshall-Abramoff connection in its forthcoming issue. Even if the tie-in proves to be tenuous, it would behoove state officials to look very, very carefully at this.

A final observation: In reading the coverage, up to last weekend I hadn’t found one reference in the mainstream media to Peter Kenney’s work on Cape Cod Today. Is it really that difficult to credit a blogger? He had a good chunk of the story out there on Aug. 20, well before others.

Yes, the media had to do their own reporting and verify everything. But it seems to me that Kenney, who has been writing about Marshall’s dubious record for some time now, is a crucial part of this story, and he should at least have gotten a mention.

Right now, casino supporters are insisting that Marshall’s implosion doesn’t matter, and opponents are hoping they’re wrong.

I realize that predictions are cheap, but I think the casino plans are now going to crumble very quickly. We are going to learn more — much more — in the days and weeks to come.

Dan Kennedy, who grew up in Middleboro, is a visiting assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University and a media critic at medianation.blogspot.com. He may be e-mailed at da.kennedy@neu.edu.