A major Strip hotel put out of commission for weeks, thousands evacuated, 13 injured and $90 million in damage? No big deal, says the Clark County Fire Department. You see, Union Erectors didn't intend to set the Monte Carlo on fire, so it's all good, per impeccable Fire Dept. logic. Ergo, not even a fine for Union Erectors, even though the company merely assumed it had a valid permit and its fire watch was "ineffective." (Let's see: You're on duty to watch out for risk of fire and a massive conflagration breaks out? Yeah, I'd call that ineffective.)

Move along, folks. Nothing to see here. Just like ...

The spreading stain of renegade remodeling jobs is fanning out beyond Harrah's Entertainment and into some of the companies it has gobbled up, either in whole or in part. First up is the former Caesars Entertainment (née Park Place Entertainment, née Hilton Gaming), which built Paris-Las Vegas, site of some do-it-yourself sauna installation.

Perhaps this one can be traced all the way to the grave of Arthur Goldberg, on whose watch Paris-LV was built. Such a control freak was Goldberg, he was notorious for insisting on signing all checks of $5,000 or more. Casinos formerly owned by the late Ralph Engelstad (what else but Imperial Palace?) and by Boyd Gaming (the Barbary Coast) are also on the inspection list, which gets longer by the week.

Which means it's a very ill-chosen time for Harrah's CEO/President/Chairman/Grand Pasha Gary Loveman to try and push whistleblower Fred Frazzetta under the bus, but a Mar. 18 press release did just that, terming Frazzetta "irresponsible" and lacking in credibility. (If anybody's credibility is eroded at this point, it's not Frazzetta's.)

"The company has not suggested that any of the terminated employees," of shuttered Harrah's subsidiary Roman Empire Development, "were responsible for the improper renovation work," reported the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Which is interesting, because -- back in my days at the Las Vegas Business Press -- one of the first tips we got about the evolving private-equity buyout of Harrah's was that its in-house design operation would be scrapped and outsourced.

So the high-profile sacking of 200 Roman Empire employees may have been a pre-planned cost-cutting move masquerading, at the time, as a forceful response to the Rio/Harrah's LV/Flamingo renegade-renovations debacle. That shiny halo that Gary Loveman wears in Christina Binkley's otherwise excellent Winner Takes All has gotten a mite smudgy of late.

No slam-dunk for Wynn dealers. Liz Benston guides readers through the whys and why-nots of whether a recent California ruling against tip confiscation at Starbucks will have any effect on a similar regime at Wynn Las Vegas. "[D]ealers say Wynn is using the tips to supplement supervisors’ salaries," writes Benston. Hell, that was Wynn's own justification at the time: That he couldn't get any good pit bosses because there was better money to be had by being a dealer. Rather than raise the bridge, Wynn chose to lower the river and you all know how well (or badly) that has gone.

On the move. Another high-ranking Strip exec has "ankled" over to Fontainebleau. First, the Cosmopolitan's Audrey Oswell, now Riviera Holdings CFO Mark Lefever. Glenn Schaeffer is building himself quite a braintrust.

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