As the fight continues for a Boston-area casino, there have been bitter words and a torrent of lawsuits - including yet another filed in the last 48 hours.

And late Wednesday afternoon, ardent fans of the proposed $1.7 billion Wynn Resorts casino in Everett showed up to picket on the front door of Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh, who's been battling the Wynn plan for months over fears it will swamp Charlestown with traffic.

"We want the mayor to know that it's not Wynn that he's fighting - he's fighting the city of Everett, a neighbor," said Vincent Ragucci, a leader of Everett United, a pro-casino group in the city of 43,000 across the Mystic River from Boston. "He's fighting the commonwealth of Massachusetts, because the later we open, the fewer tax dollars that are going to be generated by the casino."

Ragucci said it was citizens protesting on their own time with their own signs – not Wynn puppets.

"Everett United was started three and a half years ago. It was started by Everett people," he said.

The picketing came hours after Wynn filed his own new lawsuit alleging his company has been libelled and defamed by allegations included in a City of Boston lawsuit against him. The Wynn suit was first reported by The Boston Globe. It contends that subpoenas made available to the media as part of the Boston suit against the Massachusetts Gaming Commission that aims to overturn the Wynn casino license included "falsehoods and outright lies" including:

• Claims ex-state troopers working as private investigators for Wynn got access to valuable information inside the attorney general's "wiretap room" that helped Wynn win the license.
• Claims Wynn aides knew an ex-felon, Charles Lightbody of Revere, held an ownership interest in the 33-acre Everett parcel Wynn bought for the casino, which would violate Gaming Commission regulations aimed at ensuring criminal elements do not profit from casinos.

"Someone knowingly disseminated sham subpoenas containing falsehoods - outright lies - designed to interfere with our license granted by the Gaming Commission and defame our reputation. We intend to identify the malicious individuals who did this and call them to account," Wynn said in a statement. "No individual or company who presents themselves honestly in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, by any measure of fair play, should be subjected to the defamatory political abuse that we have experienced, and it is our intention to finally deal with it."

For now, the Wynn lawsuit names "John Doe" as the defendant in the libel and defamation suit. Wynn would use the legal process to depose witnesses and try to identify sources of the allegedly defamatory statements, then change the suit to name them as the defendants.

"I read about it in the paper, and at this point, I have no comment on that. Again, I have to see what the complaint says." Walsh said of the suit after a crime summit in Washington. "It's left hanging way out there, so I'm not really sure what that means."

Besides the new Wynn defamation suit, still pending are lawsuits by Boston, Somerville, and Revere aiming to overturn the Gaming Commission's approval of Wynn for the sole eastern Massachusetts casino license, and suits by Boston and Somerville against Wynn aiming to overturn its state environmental approval and certification its traffic-management plans are adequate.

With videographer Darrell Smith