If you’re racing to the bottom, you have to be an early riser to beat Virgin Las Vegas President Cliff Atkinson. Not content with offering his employees insultingly low wages, he recently and shamelessly played the race card, in an effort to divide and conquer the Culinary Union. When that evidently didn’t work, he called out his goon squad.
Individuals identified by the Culinary as Virgin security and management “tore down and took picket signs and banners,” according to the union’s Bethany Khan. As you can see from the photo above, Las Vegas Metro was on hand, doing what it does best, i.e., nothing. Never mind that free speech and assembly are being infringed. Metro knows which side of its bread is buttered. It’s reminiscent of last week’s scene of New York City‘s finest doing the bidding of plutocrat Jeff Bezos and carting off Amazon strikers. When in doubt, bring out the rubber hose.
Virgin’s conduct takes us back to the thuggish days of Margaret Elardi and the Frontier strike. We’ve had a front-row seat for labor actions against Venelazzo in its early years and Sheldon Adelson‘s minions—once the courts ruled that sidewalks are public spaces—never attempted to interfere with protesters, although some surveillance was conducted. Heck, the 99-year-old Elardi has spent her waning decades as an industry pariah. Hopefully the same fate will befall Atkinson, the puppet and frontman for a mixture of Canada-based pension funds and private equity enterprises.
With the exception of Apollo Management’s current stint at Venelazzo, private equity has never been anything but bad news for casinos, an industry it neither comprehends nor attempts to make work. The deep-pocketed Canadians have Atkinson poor-mouthing his workforce … and never mind that Virgin was reliable enough to swing a $190 million loan recently from Nuveen Green Capital. Virgin LV is coming up against a murderer’s row of Las Vegas events, including the all-important AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, one of the tentpoles of the Las Vegas Strip convention year. Virgin is doing itself no favors with its condescending treatment of its employees. Hopefully, enough people will honor the picket line to make Atkinson and his puppeteers see the error of their ways or fold their tent and sell to someone more Vegas-savvy, preferably the latter.
Las Vegans recently awoke to the news that ancient Whiskey Pete’s in Primm had closed. (Did anyone care?) We actually stayed there once (and had a great view of the desert from our room) but it’s about as low a rung on the casino ladder as you can get. It was dusty, musty and overdue for a dynamite-fueled renovation. It even got left out in the cold when Buffalo Bill’s was scarfing up furniture from Uncle Carl’s Carpet Barn, aka Fontainebleau Las Vegas. There’s a rumor that some Whiskey Pete’s furniture will be carted across the highway to Primm Valley Resort but we were laughing too hard to believe it.
Upon further investigation, we learned that the current CEO of Whiskey Pete’s parent company, Affinity Gaming, is a familiar face. Yes, it’s itinerant executive and S&G cult figure Scott “Woody” Butera. It would be unfair to say that wherer Butera goes, trouble follows. More like vice versa. He’s a restructuring man by trade, the guy you call in when your company has hit the crapper. He presided over the demise of Tropicana Entertainment, after owner William J. Yung III overreached, and was last sighted shepherding Fubo‘s disastrous venture into sports betting. If Butera is running Affinity it means that something serious is amiss … and not through his doing.
With Whiskey Pete’s gone and Buffalo Bill’s barely operational (three days per week), the ghost town of Primm is on life support. An earlier sign of trouble that we should have taken more seriously was Affinity’s shelving of its plan to re-re-rebrand Silver Sevens as its old identity, The Continental. Now those of us with long Vegas memories recall that The Continental was never exactly what you’d call a premier property (to put it very kindly). Placing a pause on the makeover of Silver Sevens not only saves money, it stalls what could be an ill-considered decision. Some names in Las Vegas (Horseshoe, Sahara, etc.) have brand equity. Not so The Continental.
Other cost-saving measures that have a Woody-ish look to them are the banishment of traditional table games from Silver Sevens and the three Primm properties. Another bad sign is the importation of a Silver Sevens general manager from ill-reputed Oyo Las Vegas. Oyo-no, indeed! Meanwhile out in Primm, callers to Whiskey Pete’s are rerouted to barely open Buffalo Bill’s, which suggests Butera has thrown in the towel on midweek business. The official word from Woody is that the Primm menage a trois is being ‘realigned’ to “feature new and ongoing investments at Primm Resorts and Buffalo Bills [sic].” All we can say about those new and ongoing investments is that it’s about time. Affinity probably hopes the Butera Era is an interregnum, a pause prior to better days. If not, it’s Primm’s last gasp.
Anyone remember H-1B visas? Without them, Sam Nazarian (remember him?) would never have been able to finance his short-lived reinvention of the Sahara as SLS Las Vegas. They’re a device whereby overseas investors provide seed money—and indentured servitude—for shallowly financed entrepreneurs like The Naz. They also screw people who are already here out of jobs. Well, H-1B visas are all the rage (the operative word being “rage”) on the American right at the moment. We agree with 2016 Donald Trump that they’re a “scam” (his word) and not with 2024 Trump, who thinks they’re just dandy. Then again, he seems a little shaky on what an actual H-1B is and does, so he may not be the best character witness for either side.
It was a good-news/bad-news day for the Las Vegas Raiders yesterday. By polishing off the New Orleans Saints, they may have saved ineffective head coach Antonio Pierce‘s job for another year. But this sudden aspiration to mediocrity means that the Silver & Black are costing themselves a high draft pick. If they beat the Los Angeles Chargers backups next weekend at Allegiant Stadium, they’ll be even further away from that #1 selection. We respect their integrity, even if the Raiders were graced by the NFL with a schedule full of patsies this season and still managed to lose two games out of every three. There are signs of hope for next season, like record-setting tight end Brock Bowers, but Pierce doesn’t look like the coach to get the Raiders to the Promised Land, let alone a wild-card playoff berth.
When the Raiduhs are supposed to be trying to win, they lose. When they’re supposed to lose in order to get a higher draft pick, they win. Pride and Poise, Commitment to Excellence, and all that.
It doesn’t matter, in all likelihood. Look at the franchise’s record of high draft picks over the last two decades-plus. Everyone gets it wrong sometimes, but with the Raiduhs, it’s a tradition.
Anthony, your writers are starting to get political again. Just. Like they did on twitter, like they did before the election. I thought this was a gambling magazine not a political rag. Next thing you will start have articles by Kamala??? Come on, you can do better than this. No need for this stuff on your website.