The walls are riddled with graffiti, doors hang askew or are missing altogether, and weeds sprout up through cracks in the pavement. The old outlet mall off Interstate 95 in Santee once attracted shoppers to stores like Corning and Van Heusen, but as of late 2025 it was a husk of its former self. Bare plywood shows in areas where siding has been stripped off, windows have been broken out, and a portion of the roof has collapsed.
The entire place exudes dilapidation and neglect. But when Wallace Cheves sees it, he views opportunity.
“It’s our time to take advantage of a ripe market with the I-95 traffic,” Cheves said. “You have so many out-of-state passersby, that you could create kind of a toll booth-type casino, meaning it would be a stopover between New York and Miami. That’s why Walt Disney looked at Santee and thought it was the perfect location to build the original Disney World.”
While the Disney story may be apocryphal — writer Paul Bowers struggled to find any real evidence of a Santee Magic Kingdom when he delved into the topic in 2023 — that section of I-95 in Orangeburg County did see an average of nearly 40,000 cars per day in 2024, according to SCDOT. Cheves, a Greenville entrepreneur, bought the old Santee outlet mall with an eye toward transforming the property into a $1 billion casino and resort complex that would create 3,000 direct jobs, attract over 4 million annual visitors, and generate $75 million in annual tax revenue.
Of course, there’s one rather heavy lift that has to happen first — South Carolina law would have to change to allow casino gaming, this in one of the most virulent anti-gambling states in the nation. But then again, Cheves has always seen opportunity where others see challenge. This is, after all, the same businessman who cleared the way for the Catawba Nation of Rock Hill to develop a tribal casino across the state line in North Carolina. It’s the same mover and shaker who brought a one-named world soccer superstar into the Greenville Triumph ownership group, before becoming chairman of the franchise’s parent company himself.
“He’s smart enough to take what he’s doing and see the next steps, always moving forward and upward,” said Phil Hughes, founder of the Greenville-based development company Hughes Investments, which donated the land on which the Triumph is building its new 6,000-seat stadium in Mauldin. “He continues to see the opportunities, and continues to maximize them.”
Cheves has been doing that for a long time, since his days selling bubble gum and cinnamon sticks on the playground as a youth. The son of an elementary school teacher and a project manager at Fluor Daniel, “I was a kid who was always hustling,” Cheves recalled. “I just always had a strong work ethic, always had some irons in the fire.” To earn money for a bicycle he coveted, Cheves as a third-grader swept floors and cleaned parts at a machine shop down the road from his house, earning 70 cents an hour.
“My parents allowed me to explore, allowed me to work, allowed me to fail,” he said. “They weren’t overly burdensome on me, and they let me do a lot of things on my own. Looking back, I think that created a great foundation.”
While Cheves’ family moved around with his father’s job at Fluor, they ultimately resettled in Greenville in the mid-1980s — just as the textile industry in the Upstate was beginning to collapse, and before downtown had been transformed into the thriving retail and nightlife hub it would become. “Downtown, when I was in high school, it was a place you would never go,” Cheves recalled. “I didn’t know that Greenville would be a place that I wanted to move back to and raise a family one day.”
And yet that’s exactly what it became — and just what Cheves did. While his gaming endeavors have taken him around the country and around the world, Cheves has always maintained a strong bond with his hometown, where he and his wife Sloan have raised their four children. He became active in philanthropic circles and business ventures, and took on more public roles like the chairmanship of the Triumph, which will enter a new era with its first matches at GE Verona Park in 2026.
Before all of that, though, Cheves went to college at Wofford in nearby Spartanburg — where he became captivated by something that would help dictate the course of his career.
‘My proudest moment’
In the late 1990s, video poker machines were nearly as ubiquitous in South Carolina as palmetto trees. Bars, convenience stores, and other establishments would have rows of video terminals that circumvented state law by not paying out winnings themselves — cash prizes would instead be handed over by an attendant. By 1999, there were 37,000 video poker machines in South Carolina generating $3 billion in annual revenue, according to reports from the time.
Clearly, it didn’t last — a 1999 ruling by the South Carolina Supreme Court struck down a planned referendum on video gambling, and banned the machines themselves. It was the largest rollback of legal gambling in U.S. history, a professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas told the Los Angeles Times. By June of 2000, all of the video terminals were gone. But they had been around long enough for Cheves to notice their allure.
“As a college student at Wofford, you would see video gaming when you were filling up with gas somewhere, going into a convenience store,” Cheves said. “I saw it more so in the restaurants or the bar areas where people were gathered around, having a cocktail, laughing, maybe having one hand on the machine. Couples would play it together, people were having fun and celebrating their wins. It looked like it was part of an atmosphere. That literally caught my eye when I was 19 or 20. I liked technology, I saw the devices around town, and I thought this was something I wanted to pursue.”
The laws in South Carolina, though, made it tough to pursue that line of work at home. After a stint at Collins Entertainment — which at the height of the video poker boom owned about one of every six machines in the state — Cheves began to expand his horizons. He worked on gaming projects in other states, dabbled in real estate, lived for a time in England and Brazil, even tried to garner support for riverboat gambling on the South Carolina coast. But it would be another opportunity in the Carolinas that would present his biggest breakthrough on the gambling front.
The Catawba tribe has lived for thousands of years along the river of the same name, and its modern-day tribal lands are located in York County. The lone Native American nation located in South Carolina to be recognized by the federal government, the Catawba claims about 3,000 members today. But due to a 1993 settlement that exempted the Catawba from the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, they were unable to get in on the gambling boom that’s brought revenue to so many other federally recognized tribes throughout the country.
The Catawba worked for over a decade to change that, finding themselves rebuffed by both South and North Carolina. What followed was a saga involving the Catawba, their ancient rivals the Cherokee, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, Cheves, and allegations of donations being used to apply political pressure. According to a 2022 story in Roll Call, the U.S. Department of the Interior granted the Catawba’s request to build a casino complex off Interstate 85 in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, reversing an earlier denial. The Cherokee, who operate two Harrah’s-branded casinos in western North Carolina, sued to stop it.
But Graham — with the backing of Democratic rival Sen. Charles Schumer of New York — tacked on an amendment to a defense funding bill granting the South Carolina-based Catawba permission to build a casino in the Old North State, nullifying the Cherokee suit. “The Catawba Nation has been treated unfairly by the federal government, and the legislation that was passed rights that wrong,” a Graham spokesperson told Roll Call at the time.
The Cherokee leveled accusations squarely at Cheves, whose Sky Boat Gaming was formed in 2009 to help the Catawba pursing gaming opportunities, and who has long been known as a well-connected political donor. Cherokee chief Richard Sneed railed against “political contributions and questionable lobbying campaigns conducted by Mr. Cheves” in a complaint before the defense funding bill rendered his lawsuit moot.
To Hughes, facing down such condemnation is part of the price of doing business. “People who do things in business seem to always draw criticism,” he said, “and the people who do nothing don’t draw criticism. Which would you rather be?”
And ultimately, the Catawba campaign was successful — after opening a temporary facility, the tribe broke ground on its $700 million permanent casino and resort in late June of 2024. By that time, though, Cheves was no longer associated with the project; the tribe had reached a settlement to buy out his stake after regulatory issues surrounding Sky Boat’s ownership of surrounding parcels threatened to drag the project to a halt.
Looking back now, Cheves said he has only fond memories. “They hired me back in 2009 to do the impossible, and it's probably my proudest business moment. So I'm full of glee. I'm happy about it,” he said.
“It's unfortunate how we had to part ways. But I'm now developing over 600 acres that surround the tribal casino, and that ripple effect is going to continue to grow. It’s going to look like we're building a mini-city around a casino. Every business has its challenges. You always have to pivot, you do different things. But I'm extremely proud of what we did for the Catawba. And there are a lot of Catawba citizens who are very grateful and thankful for what we did.”
Brazil to Greenville
It was a curious pairing — the businessman from the Upstate of South Carolina and the Brazilian-born soccer star regarded as one of the greatest players in the history of the sport. But Cheves had become familiar with Ronaldinho while working in Brazil in the early 2000s, at a time when the attacking midfielder was lighting up the scoreboard for heavyweights like Paris-St. Germain and Barcelona. And Cheves knew what an association with such a legend could bring to his minor league team back in Greenville.
“I just thought we could do something special here and unite the community,” Cheves said. “I’ve always been a believer that the front door of every community could be sports. And I thought if we had an out-of-this-world superstar like Ronaldinho involved in our club, with all of his firsthand soccer knowledge, it would just be the icing on the cake for what was possible in Greenville.”
Cheves reached out to contacts in Brazil, and secured a meeting with Ronaldinho in Miami in late 2023 to pitch the retired soccer star on Greenville. But still, it all seemed outlandish — Ronaldinho, winner of both the World Cup and the Champions League, buying into a South Carolina team in a minor league two rungs below Major League soccer? At least it did until October of 2024, when Ronaldinho formerly joined the Triumph’s ownership group.
Five months later, a smiling Ronaldinho — given name Ronaldo de Assis Moreira— stepped out of a van and greeted a cheering crowd in Mauldin for the groundbreaking of the Triumph’s new stadium. Afterward, fans took turns sitting in the chair that Ronaldinho had occupied.
“It was not a hard sell,” Cheves said. “He and his partners did their due diligence, got to know downtown Greenville and the area where we’re doing the stadium, and they fell in love with the community. So it was not a hard sell at all. In fact, they got excited about it when they learned how big the Latin community is in the Upstate of South Carolina. It was a very symbiotic thing that happened.”
Cheves hopes Ronaldinho will be back in Greenville for the Triumph’s first match in its new stadium, and added that the Brazilian’s business venture Groupo Ronaldinho “works on this project every day.” Going forward they’ll surely be working with Cheves, who joined the Triumph’s ownership group in July of 2024 and became chairman in September of 2025. The Triumph’s parent company is Greenville Pro Soccer, which also operates the Greenville Liberty women’s team.
Cheves said he had been active in shaping the Triumph’s future before founder Joe Erwin stepped down as chairman of the ownership group. Now in the top spot, “I am planning on being extremely active, because we’re in such a crucial stage with this 6,000-seat stadium,” Cheves added. “We only have one shot to do it, and we’re going to do it right.”
It’s perhaps no coincidence that Ronaldinho’s involvement and the stadium groundbreaking, both potentially transformative events in the future of professional soccer in Greenville, occurred with Cheves in an ownership role. On the stadium in particular, “Wallace played a central role, along with several other key players, in making this happen,” Hughes said.
“The toughest part of developments is the work no one sees. Because when the shovel goes in the ground, a developer's work is largely over. It’s very complex to sit in a business setting and imagine everything that may happen in a multiuse stadium for decades and decades into the future. The three main parties ended up being the city of Mauldin and Wallace’s team and our team, and it would not be under construction if it were not for each team playing a magnificent role in caring about this community.”
Cheves’ presence in Greenville, though, goes well beyond pro soccer. His Cheves Capital group invests in everything from real estate to tech startups to beverage companies. Cheves mentors young entrepreneurs, serves on numerous boards, and led a capital campaign to renovate the neonatal intensive care unit at Prisma Health in Greenville after his youngest son received treatment there.
“It was very scary time for us, but we were blown away with the staff and the doctors,” Cheves said. “It was a very emotional time, but it was also encouraging to know that we had that world-class, top treatment here down the street in Greenville, South Carolina. The only negative part was there were some facility conditions that were subpar, because hospitals age and things happen. We were asked to co-chair of a fundraising committee to rebuild the NICU At Prisma, and we were happy to be a part of that.”
One aspect that attracted him to the Triumph and Liberty, Cheves said, was an associated nonprofit that works to help underprivileged youth through Furman University and the YMCA. He’s spearheaded the clubs’ outreach efforts in areas such as youth soccer and special needs programs. Cheves and his wife Sloan have also become active in a program at their church, St. Paul’s Anglican, that each weekend feeds 80 to 90 kids in need.
“I am probably the last person who wants to put their name on something,” Cheves said. “I want to lead by example, and I hope that my kids and their friends and other young entrepreneurs can see there’s a good balance — if you do well, you give back and you give back more.”
Santee stepping stone
Back in Santee, the old outlet mall with its graffiti-strewn walls and busted-out windows won’t be standing for much longer. As of late 2025, Cheves was getting permits lined up to have the facility torn down. He’s formed an entity called Santee Development Corporation that he hopes will one day transform this corner of Orangeburg County into a glittering casino complex with a hotel, spa, restaurants, and retail spaces.
“I know how challenging things can be when it comes to anything new in South Carolina,” Cheves said. “We tend to really overthink anything that could be deemed as progressive. But you look in the Southeast and see how much gaming has grown. You've seen how popular our lottery has been. You see how popular sports betting has been, how big tribal gaming has become in North Carolina. We’re surrounded by competitors.”
Indeed, 43 U.S. states now allow some sort of commercial or tribal casino gambling, according to the American Gaming Association, while 38 allow retail or online sports betting. Nationwide, the industry supports 1.8 million jobs and generates $328.6 billion in economic impact. In North Carolina, the three tribal casinos have generated $262 million in tax and tribal revenue, according to the AGA, while the 11 legal online sports betting operators have added another $105.1 million.
“We’re losing a lot of money,” Cheves said. “It's a sad thing, but sometimes South Carolina is slow to adapt. I think there are a lot of people who didn't like the way that video gaming was handled in the 1980s and ’90s, which is very thoughtful. There are things about it that I didn't like, either. But there's a thoughtful way to do it where you have one facility that's protected, it becomes a destination, it's not in your face. You actually have to want to go there and show state ID that you're 21 or older. I think that would be the proper stepping stone.”
A lot has to happen first — including a change in South Carolina law. Toward that end, House Bill 4176, called the “I-95 Economic and Education Stimulus Act,” was introduced in March of 2025. The bill would establish a gaming commission in South Carolina that could award casino licenses in counties containing a section of I-95, with a 15 percent tax placed on revenues. Three percent of collected tax would go to the eligible county, the latest version of the bill reads, with the rest going into the state’s general fund.
Unsurprisingly, the idea of a South Carolina casino has drawn the ire of some religious leaders in the state. “It is a moment of moral reckoning,” Palmetto Family Council president Steve Petit testified before the House Ways and Means Committee in April of 2025. “These are systems that feast on desperation. They promise hope, but they deliver harm.” And yet despite the loss of one of its chief backers — Rep. Chris Murphy of Dorchester County, who resigned from the State House in August of 2025 — the bill has received bipartisan support, with both Republicans and Democrats listed as sponsors.
The bill passed the House Ways and Means Committee in April, and “we are hopeful that we will have a vote early in 2026,” Cheves said. If the measure passes the full Legislature and is signed by the governor — again, huge ifs — the process would then become open-bid, with Santee Development Corporation potentially vying for a casino license with the support of leaders in Orangeburg County.
“We’re working very closely with the county to prove to them that we believe we have the best location, we believe we have the best design, we believe we have the best team to implement this, to create the most jobs, to create the most economic benefit for the county and to create the highest benefit dollar-wise for the state,” Cheves said. “And we're asking the state and the county and the local government for zero dollars in tax abatements, zero incentives. We're coming in out of our pocket to create this opportunity, and that will be our pitch to the county.”
If it happens, it would mark a sea change in arguably the most strident anti-gambling state in the union, one of just four — along with Georgia, Utah, and Hawaii — with no legal gambling at all, excluding lotteries. But as always, Cheves sees opportunity amid the challenge. “I’m bullish on it,” he said. Given his history with the Catawba and Ronaldinho, it’s easy to see why.
“The biggest mountain I was ever part of moving was what we did in Kings Mountain with the Catawba. That was an amazing feat. But if we can pull this off in South Carolina, I would say that that would be 2.0, for sure,” he added. “But I'll tell you, from the polling that we've done, there's been a shift. There's not the stigma there used to be around gaming back in the 1980s and ’90s. It's becoming more accepted. It's what people see every day. The lottery is now accepting debit cards, everything is becoming digital. And we believe that now is the time.”
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