When we last saw the Tropicana, it was 1972 and it had just changed hands for the first time since it opened.
The Trop changed hands several times in the 1970s, until heiress Mitzi Stauffer Briggs bought it. She expanded the theater, brought back the Folies, and built the $25 million 600-room Tiffany (now Paradise) Tower, which doubled the size of the hotel (removing the landmark fountain in the process). A book could be written on the bath that organized crime and, later, Ramada, gave Mitzi Briggs, but for our purposes here, the authorities recorded a conversation among Joe Agosto, the Trop’s nominal entertainment director, Carl Thomas, the casino manager, and Nick Civella, the don of the Kansas City mob, in which the three discussed how they were duping Briggs and skimming cash from the casino. (Later, Thomas and Agosto turned and testified against the mobsters, which helped convict the Kansas City bosses and break the grip of the Chicago mob on Las Vegas.) Mitzi Briggs was bankrupted, but she’s remained in Las Vegas doing charity work ever since.
Ramada Corporation acquired the Trop in 1979 and immediately redesigned the casino in an art nouvelle style, adding the $1 million 4,000-square-foot leaded-glass dome above the pit and 28-color carpeting. They built the five-acre water park that gave the Trop its new nickname, Island of Las Vegas, and the 22-story 800-room Island Tower, returning the joint to a semblance of its former glory.
In 1989, Ramada spun off the Tropicana by forming Aztar Corporation in a complex deal that was great for Ramada, but not, reportedly, so hot for its shareholders or the Tropicana. And in 2002, Aztar finally bought out the rights that the family of Ben Jaffe, the Trop’s original major investor, still held for $117 million. Finally owning the whole schmear, Aztar announced grandiose $500 million expansion plans, which kept getting delayed year after year and never came to fruition.
Instead, in 2006, Aztar sold the Tropicana to Kentucky-based hotel-conglomerate Columbia Sussex Corp., owned by the Yung family, for a whopping $2.75 billion. (For part of the sordid Columbia Sussex saga, see QoD 12/26/08.) Later that year, Columbia Sussex announced a $2 billion four-year total makeover of the Trop; the plans, including five new hotel towers totaling 10,000 rooms, a 200,000-square-foot mall, 20 restaurants, a water park, and a 100,000-square-foot casino, would have turned the Tropicana into the largest casino in the world.
Fat chance. Columbia Sussex ran the Las Vegas Tropicana right into the ground, defaulted on a nearly $1 billion loan in early 2009, and went bankrupt.
The Canadian investment firm Onex Corporation took over the Tropicana in May 2009 and ushered it out of bankruptcy a few months later. Onex’s CEO is Alex Yemenidjian, who served as the CEO of MGM Mirage and the MGM movie studio at the pleasure of Kirk Kerkorian. Since then, Yemenidjian has been implementing the $165 million renovation plan, which is the first facelift of the Tropicana in decades.
The first phase, which was completed at the end of last year, upgraded the back-of-the-house employee facilities. The second phase, now in process, is renovating the rooms, conference areas, and common spaces; it’s scheduled to be completed this August. The third phase, the opening of a new sports book with an entrance from the Strip, a new nightclub, a new spa, more restaurants, and the completion of the casino renovation, is due to be completed in April 2011.
The tropical décor will remain, but with a hipper South Beach flare. The leaded dome over the pit will be removed. Most of the Garden Rooms, which date back to 1957 and are the last such rooms remaining on the Strip, will be demolished.
Ultimately, the goal is to become a AAA Four Diamond hotel. And we wish Onex and the new management team all the luck.
