#meToo, Et Steve

The #meToo movement and events have touched many lives in the past six months. One of the most prominent men captured in it is Steve Wynn, who I first met in the fall of 1981 when as a member of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission we held the first plenary license hearing for the company he then presided over, the Golden Nugget Corp.

As I like to recollect, his attorney,  former New Jersey State Senator and later New Jersey Superior Court Judge Martin (“Marty”) Greenberg asked this as Wynn took the witness stand: “Tell us about yourself Mr. Wynn” and a day and a half later he had completed his answer.

Of course there were more questions and cross-examination by the Division of Gaming Enforcement representing the Attorney General’s department. But it seemed like there was but one question and one answer because Steve Wynn is and always has been a magnetic personality, an evangelist for his industry, it’s “Elmer Gantry”, as you will discover in this very long, perhaps interesting piece (the mob is in it, that’s always interesting).

Steve Wynn is to the casino gambling industry as Walt Disney is to the entertainment industry. Everything Las Vegas is and has become, every single casino and casino hotel complex in the United States, is an expression of Wynn’s vision (a delicate word when talking of a man with Retinitis Pigmentosa which over a lifetime steals your sight and leaves someone functionally blind) and his genius.

Now, he has had his downfall as his more than 50-year run in Las Vegas and then nationally and International, ended two months ago with his ousting from leadership of his third major public corporation — Wynn Resorts — one that yet bears his name even now after his sudden downfall from #meToo allegations and  revelations.

Over the years he has changed politically from a sensible Democrat into a Republican reactionary and good friend of his onetime fierce casino industry enemy, Donald Trump. He is almost my exact age but clearly, from his appearance, is foolishly vain about his looks and so colors his hair black while his  face shows the bite of too many nips, tucks and lifts, and has a second wife about half his age — albeit his voice, which I last heard on a phone call two years ago, remains as youthful and cordial as when he was a young man. His  brilliant first wife is Elaine Wynn, a woman of some fame and renown herself. They are divorced a second time but this time have feuded bitterly and publicly over many issues relating to the company and world in which she was a full partner for nearly the whole of Wynn’s rise to the top. Physically she wears her age becomingly and has kept her politics liberal.

If Wynn is now among the mighty who have fallen before #meToo, then the story of how he rose and how far he went nonetheless is one of the best I know.

That story was/is the seventh chapter in a book I wrote that has never seen the light of day though I tried to find an agent. It’s titled “America’s Trillion Dollar Bet: Gambling in America”. I have here and there updated the chapter now posted here with parenthetical comments. If you like good stories, this is a grand one except for its now uncomfortable fracture by #meToo.

This is a long introduction to a much longer piece so I will divide it into two, with the first part following. It begins:

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In the gambling business there are two times. There is the time before Steve Wynn – and the time after Steve Wynn.

Wynn time began in Las Vegas in 1966 and would have ended almost immediately but for his meeting one man.

“Where does a young guy bump into a fellow like that? It only happens in movies or books and it is great. It happened to me…Parry Thomas has been a great guy that went beyond what a banker does…” said Wynn in 1981. In the years since then everything Wynn did in becoming the most transformative figure in the American gambling industry has confirmed the late Parry Thomas (1921-2016) as a brilliant judge of talent and a man of extraordinary business insight.

Wynn is to casino gambling what Henry Ford is to the automobile industry, as Walt Disney is to the entertainment industry, as Steve Jobs became to the technology industry. Because of Wynn, casino gambling is related to each of those industries as another shining star in the firmament of American culture – a culture based on amusing Americans and transporting them, whether literally or figuratively, to places that they had only imagined, if they could imagine them at all. Like each of them, Wynn discovered ways to make Americans believe that, in the words of one Disney song, “Dreams really do come true”.

Following graduation from the University of Utah, E. (Edward) Parry Thomas began his banking career in 1948 with the Continental Bank and Trust Company of Salt Lake City and by 1955 had risen to a Continental vice presidency when the Cosgriff family, which controlled the bank, asked him to move to Las Vegas to establish a new bank in the emerging gambling center. So the Valley National Bank of Las Vegas came into being in 1955 as Thomas began a storied career as the most influential banker in Las Vegas, a man whose reach would go far beyond banking as he wielded political and business power in his adopted state. Thomas became a mover and shaker with the ability to move, shake, bake and make and break careers in gambling’s booming desert outpost and a man always with an eye out for special new business talent.

By 1966, an era when local and regional banks dominated major business centers like the one emerging in southern Nevada, Valley National had become well established and had already emerged as an important conduit for development financing for the growing casino hotel industry. It could make loans of as much as several million dollars, far from enough today even to furnish a high-end restaurant in a casino hotel but in the 1950s and early 1960s enough to build an entire hotel project.

Thomas and Valley National in fact became the banker and bank representing the eccentric and, for his time, exceedingly wealthy Howard Hughes as he began to sweep up casino hotels and other property in Las Vegas in the early 1960s. By 1966, Parry Thomas had become not just part of but a pillar of the power structure of Las Vegas, and of the efforts by its business and political leaders to begin to put behind them and their community the sordid aspects and personalities that dominated its then recent emergence into the business of gambling and into the culture and imagination of America.

Thomas walked that same fine line like all did then in Las Vegas, serving as a link between casino developers and the Central States Teamsters Pension Fund — the most mobbed-up pension fund ever that remains under federal court jurisdiction as it has since 1982 because of its infestation by organized crime in the bad old Jimmy Hoffa days. Later in the 1960s Thomas helped to bring about changes in Nevada law that allowed casinos to be owned by public corporations with the purpose of cleaning up the industry.

Steve Wynn’s story cannot be told without understanding who Parry Thomas was and how important he was in Las Vegas back in the day, back in those days.

As he recalled in testimony given to the New Jersey Casino Control Commission in September 1981, when the agency conducted its first plenary licensing hearing for the then Golden Nugget, Inc. and its Atlantic City subsidiary, Thomas first met Stephen A. Wynn in the summer of 1966.

Known then and since to all who either know him well or who want others to believe that they do (and very few really do), Steve Wynn was then a respectful, eager 24-year-old embarking on a new business venture in Las Vegas as a 3 percent participant in ownership of the new Frontier Hotel on the Las Vegas strip opposite the Desert Inn (the site today of Wynn Resorts’ Wynn and Encore Hotels and the grand water park Wynn planned when ousted this year). The Desert Inn, pulled down by Wynn to build the Wynn Hotel, was the first hotel Hughes acquired after moving into town in 1964, and purportedly the one in which he lived for years, it was said, as a long-haired, long-finger-nailed hermit.

If in 1966 Howard Hughes, former lover of Katherine Hepburn, creator of actress Jayne Russell, though not of her chest — that being a divine construction by a divine power before the age of implants — and builder of the Spruce Goose, was the man of the day and the hour in Las Vegas, Steve Wynn was not.

Wynn arrived in Las Vegas in 1966 with his small percentage in the Frontier by way of Maryland, where he grew up and where his family had a long-standing partnership in Wayson’s Amusement Company, a legal bingo business that operated in Wayson’s Corner, Md. When his father died from a heart attack in 1963, just as Wynn was finishing his undergraduate degree at the Wharton School of Economics of the University of Pennsylvania, he was thrust into responsibility for running the bingo business and keeping food on the table for his mother and 14-year-old brother Kenneth (“Ken”). Daniel Boone Wayson (called Boone) from the family for which the  Maryland village is named, a descendant of Daniel Boone it is said, has been on Wynn’s board for decades and became non-executive chairman when Wynn had to resign this year.

There, in Wayson’s Corner,  Wynn might have remained but for a visit to Las Vegas in 1965 with an old friend of his father named Herb Liebert, actually a very special friend of his father. Liebert was one of two New York bookies with whom Michael Wynn gambled and with and to whom he lost a great amount of money over his lifetime. The other was Charles Meyerson (of whom there is a great tale a little bit farther on here).

In his son’s words in his 1981 testimony, the elder Wynn was “a degenerate gambler”; a term that translates to mean he was a compulsive gambler, which by 2009 in a television interview with “60 Minutes” was exactly the term Steve Wynn used to describe the gambling that left Michael Wynn’s family heavily in debt at his early death at the age of 47. In any case or a case of irony, both of his father’s bookies would play instrumental roles in Steve Wynn’s rise to the top of the gambling industry.

Liebert introduced Steve Wynn to Las Vegas and helped to open the first door through which Wynn walked into the Frontier, his first fleeting investment in the casino gambling business. Charlie Meyerson, a seemingly gentle, whimsical man (who knows, really, what kind of man — bookie known to all in the mob that he was? I really don’t know so you have my impression of the man the few times I saw him) — Meyerson, whose legitimate business in the 1950s and 1960s and early 1970s was operating school buses on Long Island, eventually was brought by Wynn to work for the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City. There his connections brought a remarkable assortment of New York underworld characters to the Golden Nugget of Atlantic City, not as owners, not as skimmers of revenue, not as tax cheats, but as customers who, gambling on credit, collectively left behind tens of millions of dollars in gambling losses – losses that became taxable casino revenue for the State of New Jersey.  Such are the fortunes of fortune.

In a deposition from testimony that went on for three days about his customer list as part of a personal examination of Meyerson by the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, Meyerson was asked by a deputy attorney general of New Jersey about any and all of his customers, about one for example named Venero Frank “Benny Eggs” Mangano. Mangano was in fact a reputed capo regime in the Genovese Mafia family of New York, later reputed underboss of that Mafia family first established in 1929 by Charlie “Lucky” Luciano, himself the first Mafia Capo di Tutti Capi (Boss of All Bosses).

Why, asked New Jersey Deputy Attorney General Eugene Schwartz, did they call Mangano “Benny Eggs”? “I don’t know”, mused the understated Meyerson, “Maybe he likes eggs.”

(Sources say he got the name because his mother had an egg farm. You can’t make this stuff up, you really can’t — and you just don’t have to because when it comes to gambling, Las Vegas and the mob, it’s all true and it all happened. It was a simpler world when the government chased the criminals instead of criminals running the White House.)

For three days Schwartz asked questions like that and for three days Meyerson gave Runyonesqe “Guys and Dolls” answers like that. In the end, Charlie Meyerson got licensed (by me and the other four commissioners then) as a  junket representative, the Golden Nugget got the “win” on Myerson’s many peculiar customers’ losses; the State of New Jersey, for which Deputy Attorney General Schwartz and I then worked, got 8 per pent of it in taxes and if, at the time, you were a realist, you had to figure that was a good deal for mob-obsessed New Jersey.

And “Benny Eggs” and his friends? They kept playing and losing at the Nugget. If again you were a realist in those years you might have concluded that it was better that “Benny Eggs” and his brethren should lose their ill-gotten gains in a legal casino, where it would be taxed and inserted into legitimate commerce, then criminally to escape their social and financial responsibility as taxpayers.

But, in 1966, all of that lay ahead when Wynn learned that the powers in the consortium at the Frontier, who had assigned him to be the slot department manager, were in fact Detroit gangsters and their fellow travelers in organized crime. Several of them were indicted by federal authorities for criminal violation of interstate commerce statutes in a case arising from their ownership of the Frontier.

The ownership group had turned down an offer from Howard Hughes for the Frontier that would have tripled the value of Wynn’s $30,000 investment. Faced with exposure they had no choice but to take a second, much reduced offer from Hughes, banking details to be managed by Valley National Bank.

As 1966 turned to 1967 Wynn escaped with his original investment but without profit. He was 25 years old. He was traveling back and forth to Maryland to manage the bingo business, which provided a decent living for him and his young wife, Elaine, and for his mother and his much younger bother Ken, who as a minor remained with their mother.  But his life was stuck on hold between Maryland and Las Vegas. That was about to change.

In the course of the debacle at the Frontier, Wynn met Parry Thomas. He did not think much about it though it was apparent that “…if Howard Hughes was the glamour figure in Las Vegas in the late sixties, Parry Thomas was the power figure…He had lent money to the hotels and he was the one that did the job. He was a very, very powerful man and he still is. To be friends with Parry Thomas was a privilege in Las Vegas,” explained Wynn in September 1981. He obtained the privilege, putting it this way: “For some reason, which I wonder as to this day, he took a shine to me, and I had lost my father in 1963, and Parry adopted me.”

After the Frontier, Thomas advised Wynn to give Las Vegas another try, telling him, “You ought to stay in Las Vegas. It is a great place for a young guy and you will get into something. This town is changing very quickly.”

The thing Wynn got into was the wholesale liquor distribution business, spending four not very happy years between 1967 and 1971 owning and running Bestway Liquors. In those years, living in Las Vegas, unhappily selling liquor and still overseeing the family business in Maryland, Wynn grew closer to Thomas and made a thorough study of the gambling business and of Las Vegas.

His eye settled on a small piece of property on the Las Vegas strip running adjacent to the Caesars Palace Hotel but owned by the Hughes organization. The property measured 160 feet wide, but with a 20-foot power line easement, and was 315 feet deep. It extended from the Strip back to the Las Vegas Freeway. Caesars, leasing it for employee parking, had no interest in buying it and the Hughes organization had no plans for its development, which, given its configuration, seemed unlikely.

But there it stood, a narrow strip of land at an intersection that hosted the Flamingo Hotel, Caesars Palace and the Dunes. It’s a location that, after construction of the MGM Grand Hotel, which Kirk Kerkorian announced shortly following Wynn’s successfully turning over the property, would forever after be called the Four Corners of the Las Vegas Strip and become heart central on that neon boulevard of dreams. Today The Bellagio, built by Wynn and now owned by MGM International Resorts, occupies the corner on which The Dunes stood in the 1960s, under the control of wily Morris Schenker of St. Louis, who Life Magazine called “the foremost lawyer to the mob”.

All that lay just ahead and, literally, around the corner, unless you had instinct and imagination.  Steve Wynn never lacked for either and does not to this day. Certainly, he did not lack it at that most critical moment in his very young career. If no one else saw value in the property, Wynn did. He thought the long, skinny site adjacent to Caesars Palace would be a likely place for a slots casino or more simply for the threat of one to Caesars. He knew that if he could get control of it, or even suggest that plan, he would get the attention of Caesars management.

Wynn entered a partnership with a wealthy friend of his father from New York, who co-signed the loan for the property but generously took only a one-third interest in the deal. Wynn borrowed a total $1.2 million, from Valley National Bank of course, which saw no conflict notwithstanding that it was also banker to the Hughes organization, to which Wynn paid $1.1 million for the property, borrowing an extra $100,000 to carry interest on the loan. (These and all the facts in this are taken from and documented in the record of that first Golden Nugget license hearing in he fall of 1981).

Steve (everyone calls him that even if they’ve never met him) held the property for less than a year, in the meantime letting it become known he had in mind to open a slot machine casino on the property. Caesars, which could have had it for $1.1 million or less before Wynn bought it, now purchased it from Wynn and his partner for $2.25 million. They cleared a $1 million profit, two-thirds of which belonged to Steve Wynn. He was on his way: The only question was the destination. Parry Thomas provided one.

As Thomas recalled before the New Jersey commission in September 1981, “…one day I suggested to him, I said, Steve if you want to get into the gaming business directly on your own, I really think you ought to study and take a look at the Golden Nugget. I think it is an absolute gem. I think it is highly under-priced. I think it’s the finest opportunity I have seen in Las Vegas in a long, long time.”

Thomas was not at that moment talking about the Golden Nugget that emerged under Wynn’s leadership or that he went on to turn into a Las Vegas Mecca and later leveraged into the international gambling empire he came to lead. In 1971 the Golden Nugget was a free-standing small casino club on Fremont Street, “Glitter Gulch”, in downtown Las Vegas with all of about 4,000 square feet of gambling space cut up into several rooms. It had no hotel. Nonetheless it was publicly, if narrowly, traded within Nevada and Wynn quietly began to amass shares in the company.

“…I took the $600,000 that I had left over from the Caesars sale – remember I had two-thirds of it and I bought the stock, 128,000 shares at $6 a share is like $900,000. Well, I took $600,000 and borrowed $300,000 or so from Parry Thomas and I had a margin account, a loan account at the bank…” Wynn put up 20 percent of his stock in the Maryland bingo company to guarantee the loan.

As he recalled, on June 15, 1971 Wynn, by virtue of his shares and shares acquired by an investor group he organized, most of whom  travelled all the way with him over the years from one success to another and another to vast wealth of their own, obtained election as a director of the Nugget company and was hired as an executive vice president at $3,000 a month “…the beginning of my career as an employee of the Golden Nugget,” Steve recollected in 1981. What did he do as a company executive with access to all the company’s operations and records? He studied, examined and mastered every detail and quietly but competently built the case for a takeover.

The chairman of the company was Bucky Blaine, one of the Golden Nugget’s founders in 1947 and a longtime figure in the Las Vegas community and gambling business. By August 1971 Wynn and his investors had a large enough stake in the company for Wynn to confront Blaine, ask for his resignation and engineer the removal of the board aligned with Blaine. In his place, Wynn became chairman and his investors became the board of directors.

In his first year in control of “the joint” as he termed the place, Wynn turned the Nugget inside out, tore down the walls to create a single gambling space, made other improvements and investments and quadrupled revenue to $4 million. By 1976 he was ready to take the business to another level. With help and financing from Valley National Bank the Golden Nugget spent $16 million to build in just 10 months a 600-room hotel that engulfed and incorporated the small casino, expanded it and added restaurants and other features of the major strip hotels.

The first 200 rooms came on-line just in time for Memorial Day 1978, the weekend that Resorts International opened the first casino in Atlantic City. That weekend the Golden Nugget did record numbers but when he opened his newspaper or turned on the television that weekend and read about or saw reports about the impact Resorts was making on the East Coast, Wynn knew he had to take a look.

Steve Wynn skied every winter and in pursuing that hobby he met at Snow Bird another skier who happened to be in the gambling business, Jack Davis, the president of Resorts. He put in a phone call. “I called up Jack Davis. Resorts was on television. They showed all the lines and the whole turmoil going on there with the fire marshal letting people in one door and out the other. So I couldn’t resist it. I called up Jack on Tuesday (the day after the holiday weekend) and asked him what he thought about the Today Show or the Tomorrow Show (network television reports on the phenomenal attraction of the first casino in Atlantic City). And he said he didn’t have time. I said, listen, want to trade numbers? I’ll tell you mine if you will tell me yours. We will swap them.”

The numbers revealed that the expanded Golden Nugget averaged more than $50,000 in slot machine revenue a day for four days. Resorts did a little better, in fact a whole lot better, in fact incredibly better than that and better than anyone in the gambling business, including Steve Wynn, dreamed possible.

“He (Jack Davis) said we got such confusion here, I don’t have everything counted. I said let’s talk about the slots. He said, how did you do? I said we had the biggest weekend in the history of the Golden Nugget, unbelievable… Jack Davis told me the year before, when I was there with Parry in 1977 (a trip taken to take a look at Atlantic City but conclude the place was too dismal to contemplate going into business) that he thought they would win as much as $60 million the first year. He said to me on the Boardwalk…I said for the four days, Friday to Monday, 800 slot machines, $210,000. How did you do?”

This meant the Nugget had averaged more than $50,000 a day in winnings — retained revenue — from its 800 slot machines over the holiday weekend, a sterling performance by the standards of the time in the Nevada gambling capital.

Understand that for every dollar a casino wins, that is that it keeps as revenue from slot machines, customers are wagering at least 10 to 12 times as much — the typical aggregate customer payout from slots typically  is about 92 percent, the other 8 percent is “won” and kept by the casino. In 2017 the combined win in more than 1,000 Indian and commercial casinos in the U.S. topped $70 billion — that represents as much as $750 billion to $1 trillion in wagering by casino customers. Lot of money, don’t you think? Well, 70 percent of it comes from slots.

Returning to Wynn’s phone call with Jack Davis, Wynn recalled, “I was sort of talking down to him, too,”  given his boast about those seemingly great Memorial Day weekend results at the Nugget. “How about you. He (Davis) said, how many machines did you have, 800?”

Then, as Wynn described it in his 1981 licensing hearing testimony this happened:

“He (Davis) was real quiet on the phone. I got a little nervous because he was trying to be polite. I said how much. He said about fives times that amount. I didn’t think I heard him right. He said five times that amount. I said how many machines? He said, I think we have 800 but only about 620 working. I said, are you telling me Jack that you won a million dollars in the slot machines? He said, a little more. I said how about the games (table games like craps and blackjack). He said, about the same. For a gambling person that was insanity. Nothing ever approached that.”

In fact, in its first seven months of operation Resorts International, representing an investment of perhaps $50 million all in for its corporate owner — the onetime Mary Carter Paint Company (crazy world huh, from pastels to poker), suddenly became one of the most alluring companies in New Jersey and a national business story as it generated enormous gambling revenue. In its first full calendar year of operation, 1979, Resorts produced $230 million in gambling revenue. Nothing like it had ever been seen or imagined in the casino gambling business and everyone wanted in, even the early skeptics. Especially Steve Wynn. When it arrived in New Jersey, Resorts International’s stock was at $2. The summer it opened the stock climbed to more than $230 a share.

Steve Wynn did not wait long after his conversation with Jack Davis. He arrived in Atlantic City two weeks later . Between June 15 and June 17, 1978 he took a close look at Resorts, at Atlantic City and at potential sites. He had, he recalled, never seen a casino as big as Resorts with 60,000 square feet of gambling space. “Everywhere was human beings (people gambling, waiting to gamble). This was a Wednesday or Thursday of the week, in the middle of the afternoon in June…I have never seen anything like it.”

Busy though he was counting his company’s winnings, Jack Davis made time to meet with him and when Wynn asked if he knew a property owner, not a broker, lawyer or agent, but a direct owner interested in selling a property in Atlantic City, Davis said, “Go see Manny Solomon at The Strand down at the other end of the Boardwalk near Albany Avenue, a nice piece (of land). I think he wants to sell …”

Davis was right. Manny Solomon wanted to sell, to cash in his hand, in the land under The Strand in the suddenly erupting casino boom, and get out of running his nice little motel. “I am not sure he believed who I was because it was very warm and I was wearing a pair of sandals and a Willie Nelson T-short,” recalled Wynn. “I said, Mr. Solomon, you got a very nice piece of land here. Is it suitable for use as a hotel? He said, oh yes, it’s all zoned. I said is it for sale? He said yes.”

Their conversation led to a handshake deal and the Golden Nugget’s purchase of the property and adjacent property. Next came a complex financing in which Wynn and the company teamed with the now defunct firm of Drexel Burnham Lambert, whose driving force, Michael Milken, had led the way in creating junk bonds (high risk, high yield financing. The financing included coupons as high as 14 percent but, in the end, through junk bonds, issuance of more stock by the company against the prospect of its expanding business and development plans, and a debentures issue,  Golden Nugget Corporation came up with more than $100 million to build the Golden Nugget of Atlantic City.

Wynn, then as ever a charismatic figure, went on the road to sell the debt to investors. Needless to say this Elmer Gantry of the gambling business made the sale, closed the deal and raised the money. The Golden Nugget of Atlantic City opened in September 1980, with an all in cost of $160 million including its own bus company, under a temporary permit but without the presence of Wynn, who agreed to step aside from any involvement in the New Jersey property pending resolution of several issues troubling the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement. One such issue, alleged private use of cocaine, seems almost quaint now.

Those issues were resolved at the 1981 hearing, in fact were shown to be of no material consequence as the company obtained its first license. Wynn was found qualified to lead the company, stepped back into its Atlantic City operation and changed it almost immediately.

In its first year in business the property, with the smallest casino in Atlantic City at 40,000 square feet, produced $180 million in revenue. In its second year, with Wynn driving a marketing operation to bring in credit gambling customers – luring them with high-end performers like Frank Sinatra, Kenny Rodgers and Diana Ross, and with lavish spending on the complimentary rooms, drinks, restaurant meals and more that Wynn knows and always knew are the way to caress gamblers’ egos – the Golden Nugget generated $240 million. Ultimately after an expansion of the casino it would produce more than $280 million in annual revenue, making it the market leader in the most important calculation in the casino business or in any other retail business — the amount of revenue generated per square foot of space.

A casino, after all, is a store, a retail operation. It sells opportunity to gamble and gambling but it is not a gambler. It has the advantage of the odds and this house advantage assures a certain, reasonably predictable, return. That return, in turn, generates more revenue per square foot than even the most exclusive and outlandishly expensive stores. The Golden Nugget had a 40,000 and later a 60,000 square foot casino generating $280 million or more a year, which translates to nearly $5,000 per square foot. Ask anyone in commercial real estate or other conventional retail industries if they can imagine a number like that. Chances are, they cannot.

The real estate business really reduces to obtaining the maximum amount of revenue that can be gotten from any piece of ground. Unless it’s an oil well, what is there that can generate a higher return on real estate than the typical large modern American-style casino of 100,000 square feet or larger yet, sporting 5,000 slot machines and 200 or so table games on an acre or two of real estate. There is nothing actually, nothing at all. Steve Wynn knew that in 1978 when he came to Atlantic City. He had always known it. He knows it now. But a lot of other people knew that.

What they didn’t know was what Steve Wynn knew about how to make his casino hotels the most exciting of them all and the ones that everyone would want to visit, would have to visit and later would be copied worldwide in design. Though he would leave New Jersey and put his plans into practice in other places, Atlantic City made it possible for him to do it all and to reinvent the casino industry in the image he made for it.

In 1981, the Golden Nugget Corporation was exploring development of a major new hotel, probably, in fact most likely on the Las Vegas strip but possibly in New Jersey. The working name for the project was Victoria Bay and Wynn’s ideas how to build these gambling emporiums were evolving. He explained some of it to the New Jersey commission at the licensing hearing that fall.

“We have a feeling of what people are up to and why they come. That is for the excitement, for entertainment. Basically, it is an entertainment business, to be there, to get away from the ordinary, every day discipline and humdrum existence, to take a break of a strange and highly accelerated nature.”

But how to do that so much differently from anyone else in the casino business as to make a difference by doing it? “Our goal is to provide that environment better than anyone else in the gambling industry and, to the extent that I look for my own motivation, for my own stimulation, I think when he was alive, to Walt Disney.” So Wynn hired designers to build into his Victoria Bay project the animatronics features found in the rides and attractions at Disney World in Orlando, Fla., ideas that would be abandoned along the way but that led him to the startling understanding he arrived at, achieved and bequeathed to his industry.

He summed it up in his testimony when he said, “That is to say, the place itself becomes, in effect, an adult theme park. That relieves us in one stroke of the terrible burden of overpriced entertainment, and that’s how I characterize entertainment today in the gaming industry…I think the gaming industry has to come up with a new way of offering entertainment and attraction to all the people. The answer to me is to make the facility the attraction.”

Wynn had found the formula, a prescription that says the building is the star and if you can build a star building, they will come. But what building should it be, and at what cost? And where? Las Vegas? Or Atlantic City? And, later, what do you do for an encore? Maybe learn some Chinese.

The Answers Will Be in Part II of “#meToo, Et Steve?