Double or Nothing: How Two Friends Risked It All to Buy One of Las Vegas' Legendary Casinos (15 page)

What happened, we heard later on, is that Burnett got hit with a low blow by Fox. He'd tried to sell his boxing show,
The Contender
, to Fox—but Fox was outbid by NBC. Not long after, Fox decided to start its own reality boxing show with Oscar De La Hoya and compete with his.

You can't blame Mark for being angry. But you can see exactly where this put us. We had a show on Fox being produced by a guy who was pissed off at Fox. We were caught in the middle of a conflict that we didn't even know about. All we knew was that we were without Mark Burnett. Looking back on it, we were his third-string show, and Burnett had left us with some first-time producers.

Everything proceeded as normal on the surface. There was a crew of about two hundred staying at the hotel and filming six days a week. But once Burnett vanished, everything changed. No amount of glue will hold together a partnership when one of the partners becomes a ghost. We weren't asking him to be there with a tissue every time we sneezed. But you can imagine how we felt when we heard that Burnett had come to town to meet with Sylvester Stallone and didn't even make time to say hello to us.

Even if he'd been around us for a little while during the filming, he would've sustained Tim's attention. But when he left, so
did a part of Tim. Tim's focus went straight to the casino, not into
The Casino
.

This put the producers on site in a bind. They thought they had Joe Pesci. Now, they were scrambling to figure out ways somehow to fill a summer's worth of hour-long episodes—which put me in a bind. Suddenly, I felt like the point guard on a basketball team that couldn't do anything right. I'd expect Tim to be in place to slam home an alley-oop, and he'd be on the other side of the court. I'd look to pass to Mark Burnett and find out he wasn't even
on
the court. But there was plenty of Kool-Aid waiting for me on the bench whenever a time out was called. Life became, “Show up for a shot at eight. This is going to be great!” and “Your show is going to be Fox's biggest of the summer. You're probably going to be on Jay Leno.” What a sucker I was. At eleven thirty at night, I'd find myself tuning into
The Tonight Show
to get a good look at Leno's set. Meanwhile, I didn't even realize that my younger brother, whom I usually talk to five times a day, was barely speaking to me because he felt so uncomfortable being around the cameras.

The ideas coming off Burnett's producers' clipboard didn't feel natural. But I embraced them. If the producers asked Tim and me to make a $5,000 bet on which one of us would win a race to work, I made sure we acted out the wager, hopped in our cars, hit the gas, and weaved through traffic like maniacs. The strangest part of the experience is there was no way to understand what was going on. With five thousand hours of tape being winnowed down into only sixteen hours of actual television time, it was impossible to intuit what the producers were really up to until the show was about to air. It was like playing a basketball game without knowing the score. You only find out at the final buzzer.

The days leading up to the debut were filled with interviews and press coverage. Tim and I would be on the roof of The Nug
get jumping on a trampoline in 100-degree heat for a magazine cover photo shoot, and the photographer would be screaming, “Higher! Higher! Good! Now, can you guys hug each other? Good! Higher! Higher!” We'd come down sweating only to find more Kool-Aid waiting. There were flights to Los Angeles for walks along a red carpet to promote Fox's summer lineup. As the debut grew close, the Kool-Aid began to be served every half hour.
People
magazine at six o'clock.
Entertainment Tonight
at six thirty.
Access Hollywood
at seven. I chugged it all. When I saw my picture on the cover of
TV Guide
, I thought, “Y'know, maybe we do have a shot at Leno.”

Then came the premiere. The show opened with the tension that Tim and I went through during the hearings for our gaming license. It was gripping and revealed the potential of what the show might be. But after the first commercial break, we immediately got a glimpse of where it was headed. A playboy named Big Chuck sauntered through our casino trying to seduce every woman he brushed up against until he ultimately convinced one to go up to his room. The scene ended with Big Chuck in disbelief after realizing that the woman he'd seduced was a transvestite.

Okay, kind of funny. But not exactly the brand recognition we were looking for. The show went downhill from there. Bachelor parties. Swingers. The wannabe cocktail waitress tempted to become a hooker. All of it casted. All of it staged. All of it obvious.

Look, they don't say “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” for no reason. We understood that a good part of the lure of Vegas is sex, and we understood that sex would be a part of the show. But the sex in the show was fake and cheesy and it was smeared all over
our
reputation.

“When they bought The Golden Nugget, Tim Poster and
Tom Breitling vowed to return it to its former Vegas glory,” wrote one columnist. “Great. I just never knew The Golden Nugget was a frat boy fantasy whorehouse in its previous incarnation.” This columnist knew just where to stick the knife. “
The Casino
is so awful,” he continued, “it will have you praying for, as Sinatra once said, ‘a kick in the head.'”

The lower each episode sank, the more the producers reached for sex to keep it afloat. We'd filmed dinner with Steve Wynn, our meeting with the most charismatic mayor in America, and a poker game with legend Doyle Brunson. All of it ended up on the cutting room floor. That left plenty of time for the Trashy Lingerie Girls, bikini bowling babes, and a road trip taken by one of our youngest employees to a legal brothel.

Perry called Mark Burnett to find out what the hell was going on.

“Well, we thought we were getting Tim Poster,” Burnett's producer argued.

“And we thought we were getting Mark Burnett!” Perry fired back.

I'd completely overlooked the underside of Burnett's success. I'd been so entranced by the idea of being on TV in front of millions, of being in the company of Donald Trump, Sylvester Stallone, and Steven Spielberg, that I hadn't given much thought as to how Burnett could possibly be in so many places at once. Tim and I were used to focusing on one company. If you shook hands with us, we were there to honor our end of the deal. Burnett was in a much different place. He could feel comfortable with a half-dozen shows on the air at once. Some would be hits. Others wouldn't work and be quickly canceled. That's just the way it goes in his world. He put his soul into the successes.

Tim will tell you that if he were doing it over again, he
would've thrown himself into the filming when Burnett disappeared. If Burnett didn't like where he was taking it, well, then that would have forced Mark to appear and work it out. Maybe the best solution would have been to turn the show into some kind of contest that allowed people to compete for a jackpot. Either way, we might have had a chance of creating a success.

But our partnership with Burnett degenerated into a summer of angry e-mails and phone calls. There was little that Tim and I could do about what appeared. We'd surrendered the right of creative control. You can imagine the guilt I felt watching Tim go berserk at the sight of letters from longtime customers who were aghast at scenes designed to make a fourteen-year-old boy chuckle. “If that's what goes on at your hotel,” one woman summed it up, “you won't be seeing
my
husband again.”

This was only just the beginning. We had a whole summer of episodes to endure. Tim closed the door to his office and retreated into a shell. The show created a rift between us. That was stressful enough. And I haven't even mentioned the wedge that fit right into the rift. The wedge arrived on the same night as the premiere party. The wedge was a Hollywood actress.

A tense summer of weekly reality shows was about to play out as Tim and I worked through one of mankind's oldest conflicts. What happens when a woman steps between two best friends?

N
ot that anything would have turned out differently, but in the hectic craze that led up to the night of the premiere party, I did something incredibly foolish. I neglected to give my date any guidelines at all about what to wear.

She arrived dressed in a mini skirt and a halter top—which couldn't have been further from the Vintage Vegas image that Tim and I were trying to brand. Tim's first glance at the Hollywood actress left him looking like he'd just bitten into a lemon. And I knew exactly what he was thinking. “What the hell, Tom! The cocktail waitresses have more clothing on than she does!”

To Tim, a woman dressed like that only made us look like playboys. And, well, it was hard to argue with him because Jaime Pressly
had
been on the cover of
Playboy
. Tim also knew that a Hollywood romance was exactly the sort of gossip that would find its way into Vegas Confidential, the column that everybody in the
city wakes up to in the morning paper. There was no way a celebrity sighting was going to get by Norm Clarke. Sure enough, all three of us were in Vegas Confidential the next day. The event was mentioned. So was the debut of the reality show, as was the link between Jaime Pressly and me. After having transformed downtrodden downtown into Times Square on New Year's Eve, you can imagine how Tim felt when he saw the one picture in that column that represented The Nugget and the premiere party. It was a photo of the Hollywood actress who'd showed up dressed in a mini skirt and halter top.

“Tom,” he said right off the bat, “this broad is not for you.”

Tim Poster is one of the most honest guys you'll ever meet. He knew me well enough to complete my sentences. Our rottweiler shuttled between our homes as if she were our child. So Tim told me how he felt and figured that my relationship with Jaime Pressly would end sooner rather than later. In the meantime, what could he do?

That makes Tim one of the few men on earth who was not attracted to Jaime Pressly at first sight. Most people are, and the reasons go beyond the cover of
Playboy
. It's something that can better be explained through a story from her youth.

Jaime's mother was a dance instructor, and Jaime was about four years old when she did a Kermit the Frog routine in green leotards as part of a show before about three hundred people. Afterward, all the dancers had to take a bow by doing a forward roll or some other acrobatic stunt. Jaime's trick was to wrap her legs around her head and then walk around the stage on her hands. When the woman in charge said, “Okay, Jaime, put your legs down,” the tights got stuck in her hairpiece and she couldn't unravel herself. So the woman in charge put her hand under Jaime's legs and lifted her up as if she were a basket. As the contorted four-year-old Jaime Pressly was being carried off
the stage, she waved good-bye to the crowd—which sent everybody into hysterics.

That's Jaime. Wherever she goes, all eyes are upon her—and there will be laughter. Guaranteed, you'd laugh your ass off just sitting around with her, her brother, and the rest of her family while they're telling stories back home in North Carolina.

I met Jaime before she became an Emmy-winning actress on the TV show
My Name Is Earl
. Back in the beginning of 2004, she was doing a lot of independent films and looking for her big break. I was looking for a new act for our showroom. When Jaime left after our initial meeting, she knew that the act she was pitching wasn't a good fit for The Nugget. But I was also searching for a cover model for a photo book called
Vintage Vegas
. It was a collection of models dressed in the time period we were harkening back to at The Nugget. Jaime had been on the cover of
Playboy
, and she had a passion for vintage style and big band music. So I called to find out if she'd be interested. She was, and we made plans to meet at a Lakers' game.

I left The Nugget in the afternoon and flew to L.A. wearing the same suit I'd worn to work that morning. It was one of a bunch of suits Tim and I bought before the reality TV cameras started filming, selected specifically to convey an image as the owner of The Nugget. I felt perfectly comfortable in that suit. But there was Jaime at the Staples Center in jeans, drinking a beer, and wondering if I was showing up for a business meeting.

“Take your jacket off. Pleeeeeeease! You're at a Lakers' game. You look so uptight and stuffy. Roll your sleeves up!” She said it in a way that was comical, but there was a touch of embarrassment in her voice.

Courtside attire at a Lakers' game is casual and, thanks
to Perry and Shaquille O'Neal, we had front-row seats. The thing that you come to learn about stepping into a Hollywood romance is that you're always being watched and critiqued. You discover that the morning after you've been sighted on a date, when a local radio DJ and his partner come on the air and say something like, “Hey, who was that dork sitting next to Jaime Pressly at the Lakers' game last night?”

“Oh, yeaaaaah. That guy with his pants pulled up over his belly button.”

Next morning, the radio talk show hosts were buzzing over who was sitting next to Jaime.

Look at the reality of who you are, Andre Agassi says, rather than the perception of who they assume you to be. I'm with him 100 percent. But it's a different world out there in L.A., and I was going to have to get used to it. From the very beginning, the cloth on our own backs seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I just couldn't see.

Part of
my
upbringing explains why I began to spend more and more time with her. Ever since my dad took me on those Northwest Airlines flights as a kid, I've wanted to head off to the unknown. Both my parents were constantly exposing me to new things in order to help me figure out what I wanted in life. Being around Jaime Pressly was like a trip to a new world—and that world was a whirlwind.

She was recording music, learning Wushu martial arts to prepare for a part in a movie, auditioning for TV shows, and starting a fashion company. I was now overseeing entertainment at The Nugget. Through Jaime, I was being exposed to this new world that I needed to know about. So I figured I could have it both ways. I could be on an adventure with Tim. And I could go out exploring with Jaime.

She certainly didn't mean to be a wedge between Tim and
me. Everybody wants to be liked by the best friend of the person they're dating. But there was no way she was ever going to fit in with Tim, nor in the group of people who'd been around me for more than a decade in Vegas. It was kind of like having a well-knit basketball team that brings in a free agent who's accustomed to getting the ball all the time and scoring thirty-five points a game. None of the other players could adjust. As the point guard, I figured that I could come up with a way to make it work. But even in the quietest moments at home, things were out of sync.

The phone calls that I'd usually get—“Hey, did you see the Barry Bonds home run?” or, “Hey, turn on Fox news”—stopped coming when Jaime was over. The more time I spent with her, the more the underlying tension began to bubble up in arguments over my schedule.

Normally, you work all week and then have free time on the weekends. But running a casino is not a normal job. Weekends are the busiest days of the week. So it wasn't fair to take off for L.A. to see Jaime and leave Tim when he most needed me. You can imagine his reaction when I made plans to go to L.A. for a weekend. In the cheeriest tone that Joe Pesci could possibly muster, he'd say, “Ohhhhhhhhh, that's okay, Tom. Go on and enjoy yourself.
I'lllllll
take care of everything here.”

Asking to leave for even a few days was like breaking an unspoken agreement. Tim and I already had a girlfriend at the time, and her name was The Nugget. She took all of our time and our energy. We didn't have the luxury of making a mistake with her due to inattention. Just walking through every part of The Nugget took four hours out of a day—and both of us made the trip many times each week. Suddenly, I was going to leave town on Tim? After saddling him with the responsibility of being the star of a reality TV show? For six days a week dur
ing the three months of shooting, he'd put up with the cameras following him around when he didn't want any part of them. Now, the mere thought of leaving for a weekend seemed like an act of betrayal.

Jaime worked during the week. So if we were going to see each other, she had to come to Vegas on weekends. When she did, her attitude was: Tim, you had him all week. Now, it's my time. But there were all sorts of weekend obligations at The Nugget that ate up that time. After making the trip week after week, she started to get frustrated. “If you're not going to step back and have fun,” she'd ask me, “why are you working so hard in the first place?”

To Tim, there
was
nothing more fun than living his dream on the floor of a casino. Even though it was an acquired dream for me, a part of me couldn't have agreed more. We really didn't know anything other than working that way. We thought anyone who questioned our work ethic, or who didn't see the fun in the ride, was crazy. Maybe Richard Branson had the right attitude when he said, “It's not work and it's not play. It's all living.” I was still trying to figure it out. Maybe I still am. Finding the right balance is one of the great mysteries in anybody's life.

It didn't help that I had no idea how much time it takes to make a relationship work. Or that Tim had no patience for that learning curve—or for Jaime. Jaime claimed that one of the reasons that Tim didn't like her was that they were too alike, and therefore they were always bumping heads. Of course, Tim wants to bang his forehead into the wall when he hears that. But there's some truth in it. They both had powerful personalities. They're both self-made. And they both hate to lose.

While Tim started his business while he was in college, Jaime began even earlier. She moved out to California at the
age of fourteen after her parents divorced, set out on her own as a model and an actress, and never looked back. There are few places in the world as competitive as Hollywood. If you can't make heads turn, you're nothing. Jaime Pressly fought for everything she got. No matter how successful she became, that sense of struggle never left her.

So it was only a matter of time before a tug of war started—and I was the rope.

Tim's real frustration wasn't with Jaime. It was with me. It was that I couldn't see reality staring me in the face. Jaime and I were a square peg and a round hole. When I couldn't grasp that truth, that's when he picked up his side of the rope.

The force behind Tim's grip can be described quite easily. In fact, it can be summed up by the time he went to dinner with a woman he was living with after she'd decided to become a vegetarian. As they sat down at the restaurant, she began an impassioned explanation of how unhealthy it is to eat meat, how it leads to the buildup of cholesterol, and ultimately to heart attacks and death. She went on and on, stressing how cruel it was to kill the animals, how wasteful the whole process was, and how everyone had an obligation to understand and change their eating habits. So, of course, when the waiter came to take their orders, Tim requested not one, but
two
porterhouses for himself. Then he asked the vegetarian to consider this. “Have you ever seen a sick-looking lion?”

You can see where this was headed. Or maybe you can't. As Tim carved into the prime piece of each porterhouse, the vegetarian went into a rage that culminated in her picking up his martini, hurling at it him, and storming off with the car keys. Tim shrugged, wiped off his jacket, and refocused his attention on the porterhouses. After dinner, he enjoyed a cigar and had a pleasant walk home.

Tim was always going to be Tim. Jaime was always going to be Jaime. Somehow I had to figure out a way to get the rope some slack when we were all in the same place. There was just no way it could work. I would've had to become somebody I'm not and leave the team I was with in order to build another team around her. Nearly everyone can identify with this. We've all seen cases when somebody new comes between two old friends. But there would've been much less conflict in this case if it had played out over a different time. The reality show had become like an oil spill that just kept spreading and gunking up everybody it touched—and tensions kept rising.

I'd asked a local entrepreneur, a friend of ours, named Billy Richardson to help us out on an episode that included the Trashy Lingerie Girls. The show identified him as the guy leading this bevy of half-naked babes into the casino—even though it wasn't Billy! Next thing Billy knew he was picking up the newspaper and seeing himself described as looking like a pimp by the same columnist who so enjoyed twisting the knife. Minutes later, his phone was ringing, and Billy was trying to calm down his wounded and furious mother who was all set to go for the columnist's scalp. Every day, it seemed, I was apologizing for something new. When I woke up in the morning and looked myself in the mirror, I stared straight into the face of a Kool-Aid hangover.

Even worse, there was no way to stop drinking the Kool-Aid. As bad as the show was, it did exactly what it was intended to do. It made us famous and brought thousands to The Nugget. It became hard to walk through the casino to get anything done because people were coming from around the country to meet us.
People
magazine was including Tim and me in its list of top fifty bachelors, and women were showing up and asking me to autograph their breasts. No matter how power
ful you think television is it'll find a way to surprise you. I never would've signed on to do the show if I'd known that one of our youngest employees—the guy who'd gone to the brothel—would be filmed vomiting in a drunken stupor in front of the casino. But people traveled from all over to meet him and get
his
autograph. I began to wonder if the viewers who loved the show and wanted our autographs were really the people we wanted as guests.