Word: wynn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sold out to Bally's for a record $440 million. The timing of Wynn's departure from Atlantic City was perfect: within a few months the overbuilt resort began a long slide. By then, Wynn was already focused on his plans for the Mirage in Las Vegas. To build the 3,000-room hotel, he pushed the company's total 1990 debt load to more than $1 billion. He spend $45 million to build a golf course exclusively for high rollers that he lined with 21,000 pine trees trucked in from California and Arizona. The risk paid...
...many ways, Wynn is a hybrid of the old and new Las Vegas. He came to Las Vegas at a time when banks like Thomas' relied for some of their deposits on the Mob-controlled Teamsters Central States Pension Fund. But Wynn was also one of the first Las Vegas entrepreneurs to turn to Milken's junk bonds when it came time to build Atlantic City's Golden Nugget. He still refers to a casino as "the joint." But he was also the first in the business to decide to turn up the lights on the casino floor...
...hand, he donates money for college scholarships, organizes massive registration drives among his employees, endows university chairs and sends out a newsletter to senior citizens that features everything from pending state legislation to muffin recipes. On the other hand, Wynn continues to make headlines for investigations into the possible organized-crime connections of some of his top employees. Just last week he appeared before the Nevada Gaming Commission to defend his father's bookmaker, Charles Meyerson, whom Steve hired 13 years ago as a host for Atlantic City's Golden Nugget and who is paid $400,000 a year today...
Meyerson, however, is not the only top executive Wynn has hired who has caused him headline problems. The one he calls "the most embarrassing in my career," for instance, was the time he was forced to fire his vice president of marketing at the Atlantic City Golden Nugget after investigators found out he had visited on two occasions "Fat" Tony Salerno, the reputed boss of the Genovese family...
These days, however, it is Wynn's personality that is on trial. Many people know Wynn as a witty storyteller who can mimic anyone's accent and who rewards his employees with gifts (he once bought luxury cars for 377 casino supervisors in Atlantic City). But a lawsuit by the former head of Wynn's Golden Nugget casino in Las Vegas, Dennis Gomes, has laid out what colleagues and even some relatives of Wynn's have said about him privately for years: he has a tendency to explode at the people around him. There are many offenses Gomes lists...