It wasn't so long ago that Pinnacle Entertainment was the fair-haired boy of the casino industry, especially after it hit a home run in the Lake Charles, La., market with tony L'Auberge du Lac. Then it nearly followed Columbia Sussex over the precipice in the crazy Aztar Corp. bidding war. Its much-anticipated Lumiere Place in St. Louis is now regarded as a succes d'estime, a budgetary overindulgence. (It's certainly failed to make any significant dent in proximate Ameristar Casinos and Harrah's Entertainment operations.)

Pinnacle paid a bundle to agglomerate land on Atlantic City's Boardwalk that it now can't afford to develop -- and may be regretting the precipitate fashion with which it shut down and demolished the Sands, which could have been generating a modest revenue stream all this time. A Baton Rouge riverboat project is behind schedule, and now ...

Isle of Capri Casinos and Harrah's now can welcome Pinnacle to the club of U.S. casino owners who have found nothing but a dead end in the Bahamas. (In fairness to Harrah's, it never got a chance to operate there, its Baha Mar project having fallen victim to internecine plotting and counterplotting that still haven't been sorted out.) The torrent of red ink from Exuma has done a number on Pinnacle's bottom line, which really doesn't need any more bloodletting right now.

It seems that Pinnacle decided last summer to either sell or outright close its casino on Exuma and will draw the blinds on Jan. 2 (which tells you just how bad business must be). Given that the Bahamas also turned out to be a fiscal graveyard for "Pile of Debris" (one of the bad decisions that ushered out the Goldstein Era), no wonder Pinnacle's Exuma casino is wanting for takers. Yes, they couldn't even get James Packer to take this turkey, so things must be very dire indeed. The ill-starred property has even been purged from Pinnacle's corporate Web site. "Bahamas casino? What Bahamas casino? No, we never had one of those. Where did you read that?"

I'm tempted to say this is the end of U.S. casino operators trying to reinvent the Bahamas as a market for Vegas-style gambling. But this is an industry with no shortage of persistence and optimism, mostly justified but sometimes not.

Last-minute reminder: The final episode, "Vegas" of Stargate Atlantis -- partly shot on the Strip -- airs tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific. I'm just sayin'.