Double or Nothing: How Two Friends Risked It All to Buy One of Las Vegas' Legendary Casinos (11 page)

Tim, Andre, Tony, and I celebrate the re-branding of The Golden Nugget.

We jumped on a trampoline in 105-degree heat for this cover shot to promote
The Casino,
our reality show.
(Tomas Muscionico)

Tim considers the portrait that Tony Bennett painted of us his most prized possession…even though it's hanging up in my house.
(Brittany Hanson BLR Life Photography, painting by Tony Bennett)

Walking the red carpet at the premiere for
The Casino.
Anyone got a glass of Kool-Aid?
(Charles T. Lang/Driftwood Entertainment)

The 50-foot heads: Our images were never the same after we appeared on the reality TV show and the world's largest television screen.
(Megan Edwards)

The “eye in the sky” isn't much fun when you're losing $8 million.
(Scott Duncan)

The Fertittas took Tim and me in like family. Frank Fertitta Jr.
(far right)
came to Las Vegas back in 1960 with $160 in his pocket and eventually started the Palace Station. His sons, Frank III
(next to him)
and Lorenzo
(far left),
grew the company, Station Casinos, into a multi-billion dollar empire.

Once the negotiations to sell The Nugget began, I refused to shave until the deal was signed. After Ed Borgato, our financial advisor and lead negotiator, slammed down his fist, we sold it for a $113-million profit.

The bride, Vanessa Tarazona, gets the official stamp of approval.
(Brittany Hanson BLR Life Photography)

The journey continues.
(Scott Duncan)

But this was a huge leap. It's hard enough to develop shows that cab drivers will casually mention to their passengers. In Vegas, you're competing for the same eyes that are staring at Paris Hilton in a million-dollar dress made of only gambling chips as she walks down a runway at the Palms. We had to do something dramatic to make people want to come over from The Strip. We had to take people back to the glory days and into the future at the same time. It was a tricky concept, and I wondered how Steve Wynn might go about pulling that off.

We greeted Steve and Elaine as their car pulled up, and we all headed inside the lobby. Steve stopped and stared at the LeRoy Neiman painting as if mesmerized by a song that took him way back. People who know him best say he's always looking forward. But for a moment, one of his fingertips rested on his lips, and you could sense the warmth of his memories bumping up against the passage of time.

The Golden Nugget was really the start of it all for Steve. Its success was his springboard. The Nugget had a history as a downtown grind joint in the days when a casino on Fremont Street meant sawdust floors and bets placed with silver dollars. There were no hotel rooms in The Nugget when Steve arrived in 1972. If you look at pictures from the '50s and '60s, you'd think downtown was a railroad stop. When somebody came up with the idea to put down carpet in a joint downtown, it was seen as a monumental upgrade. Imagine the odds against transforming a downtown grind joint into the very definition of the word “class.”

That's what Steve Wynn did. The Golden Nugget was one of Nevada's first publicly traded gaming companies. After making a shrewd land deal, Steve used his profit to buy enough shares in The Nugget to get a seat on the board of directors in 1972. Those shares got him an office the size of a broom closet.
Within the next two board meetings, he catapulted himself out of that broom closet and into the role of chairman and CEO.

Once in charge, he added hundreds of rooms and built state-of-the-art suites. Then he brought Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings to a stage that looked out upon 425 seats. The performances were intimate experiences, the type you never forget. Not only did the eyes of the city turn to The Nugget. People came from all over to stay and play there.

But The Nugget was not Steve's baby. Steve's mind is always moving on. I guess you could say that land is his canvas and hotels are his paint. Every piece of art he creates is different. Once a work is finished, his mind moves on to the next. After transforming The Golden Nugget, Steve turned his attention to Atlantic City for a while in the early '80s. Then he came up with an idea to build the most expensive resort in the world on The Strip—the Mirage.

People called him crazy. The cost of the Mirage was so exorbitant that it needed to take in a million dollars a day just to break even. And the people who called him crazy had no idea that upon completion, the Mirage had in its coffers only two weeks' worth of operating cash. But twenty thousand people lined Las Vegas Boulevard for the opening ceremony. And when the fifty-foot volcano out front erupted, all eyes were on the Mirage. It was tough to get a room afterward. Siegfried and Roy's tiger show became the hottest ticket in town.

After the Mirage came Treasure Island with its pirate ship and booming cannons out front that branded Vegas as the Disneyland for adults. A few years later he built the Bellagio. Nobody before had ever created a lake containing fountains that danced to music with the precision of synchronized swimmers. The equipment had not even been invented to give birth
to such an idea. A prototype was laid out in a dirt field to see if it were even possible. A robotics company was then brought in to coordinate sound, light, and water. The fountains danced, and once again the city was wide-eyed. Inside the hotel, Steve had filled an art gallery with Van Goghs and Gauguins.

There was nowhere to take the “theme” form beyond the Bellagio. So Steve looked inside himself and lifted his art to a new level. After he sold The Nugget, the Mirage, Treasure Island, and the Bellagio to Kirk Kirkorian in 2000, he shifted his thinking. Rather than create a majestic theme that could be admired from afar, he built a mountain with a waterfall
within
the most lavish resort ever—the Wynn—and used it as a magnet to attract people off the street to an extraordinary gallery of cars, jewels, and great food.

The collection of Wynn's work over the last three decades has transformed a gambling town in the middle of the desert into one of America's fastest-growing cities. You really have to take a step back to appreciate not only the hotels he built, but their overall impact on Vegas. His hotels lured in millions of tourists, forced his competitors to keep up with the increase in visitors, and fueled the city's enormous expansion. There are medical centers in Las Vegas because of Steve Wynn. There are dental hygienists in the suburbs who have no idea that they live where they live and work where they work because of Steve Wynn.

It's said that owning a casino in Las Vegas makes you feel like royalty. That's just the feeling that Steve exuded as he entered the casino. Maybe it's charisma. Maybe it's mystique. But as Steve led us through the casino—pointing out changes made over the years and how the layout used to be—we couldn't help feeling like we were in
his
house. How could we think otherwise when employees who'd worked for him more than twenty years ago respectfully approached to say hello?

He stopped to point out a painting on the wall in a restaurant called Lillie Langtry's. It was a large portrait of a woman in the Old West—exactly the sort of work a casino restaurant commissions for $5,000 just so it can call itself Lillie Langtry's. But Steve explained that our restaurant was named after a real person—a famous lady in her day. Then he told us how he'd come upon the painting of Lillie Langtry.

The Golden Nugget now covers the length of a block on Fremont Street. But when Steve bought the hotel, it was only a third of the block. Over time he purchased one piece of property after the next to expand it to its current size. One of the places he bought and knocked down was an old dump called the Lucky Casino. Before he made the purchase, he took a tour of the place. Up in the attic he noticed a bunch of boxes and asked the owner what was inside them.

“Just a bunch of paintings collecting dust,” the old guy said. Steve glanced at one and was intrigued. “If you want,” the old guy said, “just take 'em.”

Steve had the boxes sent to his office. There were about thirty paintings—all western motifs. He sent them out for an appraisal, and it turned out some of the paintings were fairly significant. This one painting of Lillie Langtry, he pointed out, was now worth about three or four hundred thousand dollars.

Tim and I looked at each other. We had $300,000 hanging on the wall and we didn't even know it!

That's Steve Wynn. A lot of us can recognize a Picasso or a Rembrandt. But Wynn sees jewels when others can't. The irony is Steve has retinitis pigmentosa—a disease that gradually narrows peripheral vision. Yet I've heard Michael Eisner say that Steve sees better than anybody he knows.

The beauty of having a dinner with Steve is that you think differently afterward. You hear a story about the painting of Lil
lie Langtry, and it makes you pay attention to your business or your property in a way that you just didn't two hours earlier.

We started our meal, and it wasn't long before Tim mentioned how much he loves Sinatra. Steve began regaling us with one story after the next. I won't even attempt to retell them. I'd never do them justice. But a moment of inspiration came when Steve told us about the time he asked Sinatra how he did it.

Steve loves the song “I've Got You Under My Skin.” He'd studied every word of the liner notes on the album when it was first released and knew all the facts about the recording. But what he really wanted to know about was the process. “How do you do it, Frank?”

Frank's response will always stay with me. He started by reading the lyrics over and over to find the song within himself.

It was as basic and simple as finding trust in the ordering of a sandwich or the picking up of a phone. So basic that even a guy like me, whose singing is generally confined to the shower, could relate. The process that Frank used to create masterpieces was like the one I used to prepare a proposal for investors to raise money. It was about diligence—and finding the essence of something.

What do you want to say and how are you going to say it? That's where the creative process always starts. Afterward, you can bring in the great musicians and rehearse until you've got magic. But you're going nowhere until you've found your own voice. I realized I needed to respect that part of the process as I moved forward at The Nugget. I was going to have to read and reread the landscape around me. I needed to find my own voice.

For Tim, finding his voice was the easy part—for our song at The Nugget, anyway. He knew exactly how he wanted to run our casino. Maybe he didn't want to show up at every rehearsal. But his voice was natural, and it came from deep within.

He wanted to bring back what he loved about Las Vegas. He wanted to call back the days that he knew as a six-year-old, the days when a guy got treated like a big shot even if he was a small fry. That's what made Vegas special. He wanted to bring back the days when a guy from Buffalo would come for the weekend and later brag to his friends that he had a great weekend in Vegas—and it meant something. When that guy would return to Vegas—even if he wasn't a high roller—he would hear, “Mr. P., how you doing? We have a suite for you. You smoke Luckys right? You like VO, don't you? You're set for the eight o'clock show.” Back in those days, the guy from Buffalo could lift a house phone and call anywhere in America. The call was on The House. Your money was no good unless you were gambling. Back in those days, you could have a conversation with the owner of the joint. You went home and could say that you knew him.

When you feel like a king, you don't feel bad about losing your money at the tables. Or, as Tim says, maybe you don't feel so good about it, but at least it puts a little salve on the wound.

It ate at Tim that corporations had taken over most of the casinos and made them so impersonal. It drove him crazy to see blue-haired ladies sticking their cards in the slot machines trying to get enough points for a free buffet. Don't even get him started on how the corporate casinos have ruined their own sports books and lost much of the action to offshore Internet operations.

Tim knew that if he treated people like kings and gave them the best gamble, they'd keep coming back. That was the history of Vegas, and he was connected to that history, so connected, he had an idea to replicate the very commercial that Steve Wynn and Frank Sinatra had done more than twenty years before.

At the time of our dinner, the Wynn was still under construc
tion, so the timing was perfect. As Steve was “between hotels,” he'd need a place a stay. The idea was to do a commercial where Steve came in the front door of The Nugget, and we'd greet him just as he'd greeted Sinatra. “Hi, Mr. Wynn. We're Tim and Tom, and we own this place.” And Steve would tuck some cash in one of our palms and say, “Make sure I have enough towels.”

Steve loved the idea. When he did the math, he realized that the age difference between him and Sinatra back when he filmed the original commercial was roughly the same difference between him and us now. The entire dinner took on the feel of Steve, the father, handing the kids the keys to the car. Make sure it's a joy ride, he told us. Downtown needed people who could hit the gas, people who could create energy and enthusiasm, people determined to think differently, people willing to make mistakes because you don't have successes unless you're learning from your failures. He reminded us how lucky we were. The Nugget had always been an intimate place, and we had the personalities to bring back the intimate atmosphere. You can't make somebody comfortable with money, he told us. Only a person can make a person feel comfortable. Your minds should never have to be boxed in by corporate bureaucracy. You don't have to wait for fifteen other sister properties to agree to execute a change. You can have a meeting and say, “Let's do it tonight!”

But Steve also told us where to slow down and maneuver carefully. We weren't on The Strip and wouldn't get much revenue from shopping. The casino was our core and—just as it was for him three decades before—this was our first experience at overseeing one.

Funny, there would be days ahead when the reality TV cameras would make Tim and me feel like prisoners in our own
home. But now I'm glad that a camera was with us for a short time at dinner to record a story Steve told about the need for constant vigilance. A story that started with a phone call he'd received just after he'd taken over The Nugget: