Double or Nothing: How Two Friends Risked It All to Buy One of Las Vegas' Legendary Casinos (13 page)

Meanwhile, who's getting screwed? Not some billion-dollar corporation. The money is coming right out of Tim and Tom's pockets.

So the pit boss has to catch a play like that. Of course, the dealer will throw up his hands. “Oh, jeez, sorry, that was a mistake.”
That's
when we can have surveillance hone in on the dealer. Or go back over the tapes to see how many times the dealer has made that same “mistake.” If he's made it eighteen times in front of eighteen sets of melons, you know he's full of shit.

The owner has got to trust the dealers and the pit bosses to protect the integrity of the game. Most of our people did just that. But you don't know everyone's situation. Some have gambling problems. Some have drug problems. The dealers dress up nice and pitch the cards, but the truth is they may be vulnerable. When your inventory is cash, then
you
become vulnerable.

There's a story the bookmaker Bob Martin once told Tim that gets to the naked lure of Las Vegas. Bob had about $30,000 in cash stacked on his desk one day when he had to leave his home in a hurry. A cleaning lady was in the house. After he left, Bob realized that he'd left the money out in full view. “I'll bet,” he said to himself, “she's gonna take it.”

When Bob got back home, the money was gone. There was nobody else in the house and he'd only been out for a few hours. It had to have been the cleaning lady.

The next day, Bob confronted her. “Hey, I had a bunch of cash in here.”

She immediately admitted to taking it.

And that's how Bob Martin let the story end.

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” Tim said. “Did you call the police? Did you fire her? What did you do?”

“I just told her to give me the money back.”

“That's it?” Tim said. “You let her keep her job after she tried to steal 30 grand from you? You let her stay in your house?”

“Tim, listen, she
had
to take the money,” Bob said. “The bait was too strong.”

So you have to come to grips with those five words. You have to understand that honest people who'd never knock off a truckload of televisions or hold up a convenience store will be tempted to think that your cash is theirs when it's in their hands. You also have to understand that your employees will be watching how you respond after somebody has made a grab for it.

The first time it happened, our president brought it to us in the most professional manner. “We have a situation,” Maurice Wooden said in the calmest voice.

Maurice loaded a videotape, and we watched a young guy in a baseball cap walk over to the cashier and turn in a winning slot machine ticket. The ticket valued $40. But the cashier took the ticket, counted out $3,000, gave it to the kid in the baseball cap and put the ticket aside. It wasn't a bright idea. The camera caught it all. Maurice had the details in no time. Mother and son. Mom was the cashier.

Tim is the kind of guy who—if the mother had come to him and explained that she had a problem and needed the money—might have given her a loan. He comes off as a tough guy. But the sign hanging in his office that read
NO ACT OF KINDNESS SHALL GO UNPUNISHED
was really there to protect him from the goodness of his own heart.

Maybe if you're running a large corporation, you can be
detached. But he wasn't a corporation. He was a guy getting robbed. The videotape hit Tim in the belly like a mugger's baseball bat. Even worse, the robbery made him wonder if everyone who worked for us took the new guys for dupes.

“Arrest her!” Tim said. “Arrest her while she's working, and have her led out in handcuffs in full view of everyone in the casino!”

That wasn't necessary. The police were already on the case. Maurice later told us the woman had apologized. She'd asked if she could return the money. She'd asked if we could forget the whole thing. She was hoping for the kindness that Tim might have extended had she asked him for a loan.

There's a time for kindness. The only reason Steve Wynn had been able to learn about the stealing at The Nugget when he took over was because he'd been benevolent to that bar owner. But there are times when it's foolish to be kind. No, we told the women who'd stolen from us, no.

The next time a situation unfolded, it became less personal and more of a technical issue. You realize the bait is always large enough to make someone think they can grab it without the trap clamping down. So you need to study and adjust your traps.

But if you have to spend this much energy watching people on your team who simply can't help themselves, think of the precautions you need against people who come through your doors with the sole purpose of robbing you blind.

I'd listen in amazement to Pete Kaufman, who for years worked at the Barbary Coast and the Bellagio trying to catch the cheats, as he talked about the diligence the guys on the floor needed to flush out the teams of scam artists that constantly attacked the casinos.

Pete is the son of a cardiologist, and he approached his job
with the intensity of a surgeon. Still, it took him hours to catch on to a player sitting at third base on a blackjack table who always seemed to make the correct play based on a card he wasn't supposed to know—the dealer's hole card. Even when this player lost a hand, he'd made exactly the right move based on the percentages.

A monitor in surveillance would barely register anything suspicious about the guy on third base. The camera was taking in the layout of the table, the cards, and the variation in bets. The only indicator that the guy on third base was cheating was his growing pile of chips. If you were looking at only the deck, his hand, and his chips—like the guys in surveillance—it would be almost impossible to sniff out his operation.

Pete smelled something wrong, though, from the casino floor and changed the deck. When that didn't work, he changed the dealer. That didn't make a difference, either. The guy's pile of chips just kept growing. So Pete kept studying the guy from afar. Finally, he noticed the guy on third base glance off in the direction of the bar. Then, after awhile, he saw a guy at the bar nodding. So he followed the head rotations of the guy at the bar. The guy at the bar was occasionally turning toward the slot machines. So Pete studied the slot machines. There was a guy playing one machine who didn't really seem to be focused on cherries and lemons. He was putting money into the machine. But what he really was doing was using his position to get a direct angle on the dealer's hole card from behind. Every time the dealer lifted his hole card to check if he had blackjack, the guy at the slot machines scoped it. As soon as he did, he signaled the hole card to the guy at the bar, who signaled it to the guy on third base.

Pete needed proof. So he got a long computer printout and positioned himself between the guy at the bar and the guy on
third base. He opened the printout, spread it like the wings of a bird, and pretended to read. The printout was perfectly positioned to block the view. Then Pete waited to see what would happen. In no time at all, the guy at the bar changed seats to reestablish the connection.

As soon as he did, Pete walked over to the guy on third base.

“You can't play here anymore,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I'm going to give you ten seconds to get out of here,” Pete said. “If you don't—”

Meanwhile, the guy at the slot machine was already running out the side door.

The casino can distribute pictures of these guys all over the country. It can rig up an electronics system to determine if the dealer's hole card gives The House blackjack—so there's no need for the dealer to lift that hole card until all the players have gone through their hands. But there's no end to the scam artists, and no end to the ways they can sting you.

It took hours of Pete's time to figure out the ruse. And how can you know that your guy on duty is going to be as smart and focused as Pete? Bottom line is, when you hear a story like that, it makes you realize you never truly know what's going on right under your nose.

It's hard to fight when you don't know what you're fighting against. But over time, the sheer force of Tim's strategy was overwhelming the problems that previously existed or that the strategy had created. So many more people were coming in to play that we had to hire more dealers. So much more money was on the tables that the volume of tips shot way up. The Internet sites used by dealers to track the average weekly tips by casino showed us climbing in the rankings. We began to
attract experienced dealers from The Strip who wanted to get in on the action. One young woman working at our tables was making more than her mom—and her mom was dealing at the Mirage.

In a place where even the cameras couldn't tell you everything that was going on, we at least knew one thing: Money was pouring in.

Once, Tim watched a high roller go through half-a-million-dollar swings in minutes on a monitor in his office, knowing that one of our interest payments was due the next day. As the tension ramped up, he had to turn away. Tim and Steve Cyr left The Nugget and headed down the street to the Dairy Queen. It was exactly this sort of scenario that some of the smartest guys in Vegas anticipated. They thought we'd be overwhelmed and out of business in no time.

Tim called in twenty minutes later to see how the high roller was doing. He found out we'd made millions in about the time it took him to down a Peanut Buster Parfait.

T
here are moments that never go away, that become part of who you are, no matter where your life leads. One of those moments occurred for me about two months after we took over The Nugget, on March 5, 2004, when Tony Bennett walked into the joint. I remember the moment like it was yesterday—and I wish it were yesterday.

Although I had no idea what Tony was about to pass on to me, I immediately sensed that something was up because the world slowed down right in front of my eyes. Tony was wearing a gold sports coat, blue tie, and a pocket square, and he looked like I hope to look when I'm seventy-eight years old. There was a serenity coming off of him, and maybe it struck me all the more because I'd been working nonstop for two months with reality TV cameras trailing me sixteen hours a day. There were nights I was so exhausted I didn't even go home. I just flopped
in a bed in one of our hotel rooms as one day tumbled into the next.

Just shaking Tony Bennett's hand and hearing him say hello made me smile. It's a piece of art, his voice. It's so pleasant that you can't help but stop and appreciate it when he orders tuna for lunch. Not long ago, Tony put out a CD of duets with some of the greatest musicians in the world. He performed his hits with Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney, Celine Dion, Bono, K. D. Lang, Stevie Wonder, Sting, Elton John, James Taylor, and, I suppose I could list them all. But my point is of all the songs on the album, there was only one that wasn't a duet. When Tony Bennett recorded “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” he sang it alone. Was there anybody else in the world who could sing Tony Bennett's signature?

Nobody could've represented what we were trying to bring to The Nugget better than Tony. Our rebranding celebration was all about “Vintage Vegas.” But there's also a quality of eternal youth in Tony that Tim and I wanted to bring to Fremont Street.

I've got to admit that I was proud of myself. Ten years earlier, I was driving into town with a hundred bucks in my pocket. Now, two months after we'd taken over The Nugget, I'd booked Tony Bennett for a weekend of performances and a gala to benefit Andre Agassi's foundation. Once again, it comes back to substance. It was Andre and Perry who'd made the connection. Tony is a big tennis fan, and he loves Andre's game the way the rest of the world loves Tony's voice.

Tony, Andre, Perry, Tim, and I had lunch like five old friends. Afterward, Tim and I walked Tony toward our empty showroom. It's an old room. Tony knew it well. He'd seen Frank Sinatra perform on the same stage decades before. You couldn't find a more intimate place to play in Vegas. There are only 425
seats. Nothing like it really exists in Vegas anymore, and nobody in the world understood that better than Tony.

That's because Tony had seen the city grow up. There wasn't a single tall building when he'd first arrived back in the '50s. Everything was ranch style back then. Louis Prima was the draw of the day in the Sahara's lounge. The movie stars were crazy to hear Louis scat, so they came from Hollywood. Frank Sinatra created the Rat Pack with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. as an after-hours lounge act to compete with Louie. Dinah Washington would come into town with two suitcases, say, “I'm here, boys,” and sing until the sun came up. It was that kind of town. The owners of the hotels became friends with the performers. Early on in his career, when Tony wasn't drawing much of a crowd, he offered to return a portion of his salary to the owner of the hotel he was playing at. The owner refused to take it. The friendships are what Tony never forgot.

The success of Las Vegas lured in the corporations. They built big hotels with glitzy showrooms and created extravaganzas that attracted thousands—even millions when you added all the performances up. They put a precise value and ticket price on every seat and filled their registers. Which was great, except that when Tony arrived in Vegas to sing, he no longer knew who the boss was. It was impossible. Each joint had eleven bosses.

There were no small, intimate showrooms like ours left for a Tony Bennett. Maybe you'd find a few off the beaten path that could barely feed some unknown comics. But a theater with only 425 seats could no longer support a star night after night. We were able to make it work that weekend because we weren't worrying about tickets or prices. We wanted the world to look at us. And when it did, Tony Bennett is what we wanted the world to see.

Tony stepped up to our stage that afternoon and started walk
ing around. It's not like he was studying the floor the way a golfer looks at a green before a tricky putt. But he was paying attention to it, almost like he was listening to it. Tim sat in a chair. I was standing next to him. Then all of a sudden Tony started to sing “Fly Me to the Moon”—a cappella. Slowly I felt myself sink to the steps beneath me, and I sat on the floor. The moment took me away, but it was so memorable I can tell you exactly what it felt like. Tony's dad used to climb to the top of a mountain when he was a young man in Italy and sing. It's said that everyone in the valley below would stop what they were doing, look up, and listen. When Tony sang a cappella that afternoon, I felt like one of those villagers.

Time had not only slowed down, it had gone backward.

Tony picked up a mike, and the band joined in. Over the weekend, there would be many standing ovations. But my favorite moments came in this impromptu rehearsal. How many people get a private performance from the guy that
Sinatra
called the best? It must've been how Steve Wynn felt being around Frank. What I loved most was watching Tony's diligence. There's a story that goes back to the days when Tony and Frank were in their prime, and they were booked to do a benefit at a hotel. The singers left their rooms and headed down to the showroom through the kitchen because that was the way many of the hotels had it set up years ago. The two of them were waiting in the wings to go on, when Frank turned to Tony and said, “How do you like that? Another kitchen.” Well, this was another stage, just as that was another kitchen, but Tony was paying attention to every little detail, going over the sheet music with his band as if he were a kid preparing for his
first
performance.

Watching Tony, you couldn't help but pause and reflect. He would ultimately lead me to an understanding of how my partnership with Tim works. But at the time, I just sat there think
ing about all the things that had to happen in Tony Bennett's life for him to be in our showroom at that very moment.

Tony likes to refer to himself as the original American Idol. When he first got married, they say there were two thousand women outside the church dressed in black in mock mourning. He recorded his classic, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” in 1961. But not long afterward, the airwaves were filled with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Marvin Gaye, and war-protest songs. If the '60s represented a cultural revolution, then music was at its cutting edge. Tony's label didn't know quite how to respond to the changes. By 1969, Tony was pressured to do an album called
Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today.
The classy artist we all visualize in a tuxedo was suddenly repackaged on a psychedelic album cover. The experience made him feel lousy. But even worse, as time passed, it seemed the public no longer wanted to hear his music. By the end of the '70s, he had no recording contract, he got caught up in cocaine to dull the pain of his mother's death, and more money was going out than he was bringing in.

I'm not revealing any secrets here because Tony is open about this in his autobiography. One night, after his accountant called with news that the IRS was starting proceedings to take away his home, he overindulged, and passed out in the bathtub with the faucet on. His wife at the time suspected the water was running for too long, and when she went into the bathroom she found Tony unresponsive, pounded on his chest, and had him rushed to the hospital.

Tony came through a wiser man. Not long afterward, he called his sons for help.

Danny and Dae had grown up sitting on Duke Ellington's piano stool. They had many talents, but not their father's gift for performance. They started a country rock band in the '70s that
you probably never heard of even though the name was quite distinctive—Quacky Duck and His Barnyard Friends. It didn't last long.

But Danny was good with numbers and understood how the industry worked. And Dae was a natural in the recording studio. Danny met with his dad's accountants. He structured a deal with the IRS to keep Tony's house. Then, as Tony's manager, he began to reinvent Tony's career.

Well, that's not the best way to put it. What he did was go to work on Tony's legacy. Tony stayed Tony. Danny just introduced Tony to young audiences through MTV,
Late Night with David Letterman
,
The Simpsons
, and college concerts. The kids, accustomed to punk, disco, and new wave, had never heard anything like him. They were just as mesmerized as their parents and grandparents had been.

By the mid-1980s, Tony was re-signed by Columbia Records. He could be seen at the MTV music awards and lifting up Grammys. Tony hadn't bridged the generation gap—it was said he'd demolished it. Danny had maintained Tony's musical integrity while boosting Tony's popularity. At age eighty, Tony's album of duets would be at the top of the charts along with the Dixie Chicks.

Demand for Tony's performance at The Nugget was overwhelming. I remember us cramming in as many extra seats as the room could handle. As the performance approached, I focused on certain areas of the hotel the way Tony had paid attention to our stage and the sheet music. I stepped into the kitchen and tasted the shellfish. I made sure the ice sculptures would go out for our VIP crowd at just the right time so they wouldn't melt. I wanted everything to be perfect for Tony. When I asked him what I could get for him, he had only one request: some bottled water.

When Tony came out on our stage that Friday night and the crowd rose to its feet, the image that sticks with me is of Tim. I remember him looking over at his mom and Uncle Jack and swallowing hard. It was one of the proudest moments of his life. The kid who'd moved at age six to Las Vegas with a family that didn't have “two nickels to rub together” was now the owner of a casino featuring Tony Bennett. I'll never be able to describe how good it felt to help Tim have that moment.

The party never seemed to end that night. I must have started for home at about five o'clock in the morning. If I was tired, I didn't notice. Everything that transpired that day had given me a heightened sense of awareness. As I drove south on I-15 and left downtown, the color of the sky was what the locals call “Vegas blue.” It's a very unique tone of blue—somewhere between baby and navy—that signals the end of the night and the coming of the morning. It doesn't show up every day. When it does, a lot of people don't notice it because they're just coming in after a long night, and they've had too much to drink or lost a lot of money and they're wiped out. Vegas blue is a reminder that the city is built on a beautiful desert. A lot of people think of Vegas as a façade. But until you've seen Vegas blue, you've never really seen the city. The moon was bright. I stared up at that moon and wondered how many times I'd driven home at three o'clock in the morning with Bally in the backseat and not even noticed?

 

One of the things about constantly striking out on new business ventures is you're always confronted with different situations. That means you're probably going to make mistakes. Believe me, you won't have to turn too many pages to find some. But there's a yang to that yin. When you push yourself into new worlds you're also putting yourself into a position to meet a Tony Bennett and a Danny Bennett.

The lessons I learned from Tony never stopped, and they always seemed to catch me off guard. One day over lunch, for instance, he called me an artist.

There are a lot of words you could use to describe me. But not once in my first thirty-four years had anyone ever called me an artist. Much less one of the great singers of our time—
and
a renowned painter! I remember painting an evergreen tree in first grade. One quick stroke down in brown for the trunk, followed by a few swift green lines across for branches. As soon as I finished, I bolted out the classroom door to play kickball. A very brief exhibit on Carol and Fred Breitling's refrigerator was as far as I ever got in the art world.

But Tony was serious. He brought up a conversation that he'd once had with Cary Grant in which they'd agreed that entrepreneurs were the artists of the future.

I never went to business school. Maybe if I had, I would've been familiar with the business-as-art metaphor. I've heard that when Steve Jobs was overseeing the invention of a Macintosh computer, he used to stare at the design of a Porsche in a parking lot for inspiration. Ed Borgato likes to compare Warren Buffett's holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, with a Jackson Pollock painting. A splash of Geico Insurance here. A splatter of Dairy Queen there. Throw in some Helzberg Diamonds. A little Fruit of the Loom. Dabble on the
Buffalo News
and Nebraska Furniture Mart. Add a big splash of United States Liability Insurance Group. If you look at the roughly fifty stock holdings in the portfolio from a distance as colors and shapes on a canvas you could easily see a masterpiece in profit. So, yes, Warren Buffett is an artist in his world as Steve Jobs is in his.

I could even see Tim as an artist. You definitely got that feeling when you walked into his office during the final years of Travelscape. It was dark except for pinpoint beams of light that
came from the ceiling and focused on an array of computer screens lining his desk. The temperature in that room was fixed just above freezing. The Sniffer used to wear a coat when he went in to see Tim, and joke that it was so cold he could see the vapor of his own words when he spoke. There were people who worked for us who were actually scared to knock on Tim's door—as if afraid to disturb the thoughts of a temperamental writer in his garret. So you could make a case for Tim using a company as paper and pen to create his own drama.