Word: wynne
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...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...
...Wynn has denied the accusations, and his allies argue that the Gomes lawsuit was a desperate response to the one filed by Wynn for breach of contract when Gomes quit to go work for more money as president of Donald Trump's Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. But Wynn does not deny that he has a temper."You know where a temper comes from? Being able to get away with it." He laughs. "I'm a self-made brat. I'm like everybody else: I want to get away with it if I can. I've been indulged...
Among the things he gets away with: throwing a chair at his brother Kenneth, who heads the company's design-and-construction subsidiary; ordering an executive to fly in for a meeting and then leaving him stranded as Wynn flies off to Los Angeles for a haircut; offering paternal words of forgiveness to a transgressing employee and, with a string of expletives, ordering him fired the minute the door is closed. "He consumes everyone's dignity around him," says Lester Colodny, who designed the famous ads that featured Wynn and Sinatra. "Once on a trip I was talking to Steve...