When I wrote yesterday that the spirit of Bill Yung still seemed to be afoot at the Tropicana Las Vegas, I didn't know the half of it. Mike Weatherford has the skinny on the shuttering of Folies Bergere and it boils down to a payroll dump. Folies performers were Trop employees and Raw Talent Live or whatever show with whom Trop President Ron Thacker is dickering would 'four-wall' the Tiffany Theater, placing Thacker in the role of landlord: collecting the rent and doing maintenance as needed.

Combine this with projected capex spending of about $6 million a year (some of which may be coming from money budgeted for Folies) for the next five years -- at a time when the Trop is falling further and further behind the competition -- and a prolonged Scott Butera regime is beginning to look like a bleak prospect. Here's hoping the bankruptcy court clears the way for an asset sale and soon. What the Trop needs is someone who can do a reverse-Yung: Buy it at a depressed price and use the money thereby saved to spruce the old gal up or, better yet, do a partial tear-down-and-rebuild job on her.

You came to Nevada but it was closed. Not surprisingly, Gov. Jim Gibbons' new budget would balance the ledger by socking it to visitors and literally stealing from the indigent. As for casinos that haven't collected on dishonored markers -- too bad. Gibbons wants them to pay taxes on the duff debts forthwith. If all that doesn't work, Midnight Jim could take a cue from Circuit City and hold a 'going out of business' sale. Speaking of which ...

Progressive Gaming, R.I.P.: The phone is off the hook and the vultures are circling Progressive's corporate HQ. It appears that Progressive's debts will be settled, to some extent, by holding a fire sale of its best intellectual property to "a major slot machine manufacturer." Could it be minority owner IGT? Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

In a sidebar, it's reported that Black Gaming has one month to avoid defaulting on nearly $200 million in debt. It appears that CEO Randy Black Sr. was so busy shoveling money into his own pockets that he missed an interest payment yesterday. Say what you will about Black, he's definitely got his priorities. The "unbundling" of the Strip shows every sign of trickling down to markets like Primm and Mesquite, where Black has enjoyed a near-monopoly for most of the past decade (Mesquite, not Primm).

Prospective buyers could include guys like Stephen Siegel. Snicker if you like at his plan to create "synergy" between the Gold Spike downtown, the obscure Barcelona and the Mt. Charleston Hotel. But Siegel Group Nevada has been quietly rolling up a sizeable bundle of assets, has a reputation for reinvestment and, as I've said before, has done more with the Gold Spike than Tamares Group ever did with it or any of Tamares' other Downtown properties. It also sounds like Siegel's got a knack for marketing, itself no small asset in this economy.

Harrah's LV renews Rita Rudner's contract ... signaling the Apocalypse?