Meanwhile, Sarno and Mallin planned a resort embodying everyone’s childhood fantasy of running away to join the circus. Circus Circus was built in the shape of a tent, and trapeze artists performed overhead. A live pink elephant "flew" around the casino on a sort of overhead tram. Sarno himself would dress up as a ringmaster and walk through the casino. By adding a midway to the casino, Sarno had begun catering not only to families with children, but to children themselves.
None of it worked well enough to turn a profit. Mallin says the mistake was opening without hotel rooms to provide a captive casino clientele.
"About that time there was a gasoline crunch, and you could shoot a cannon down the Strip and not hit anybody," Mallin said. "We didn’t weather that. We lost five or six million, so we leased it to Bill Bennett and Bill Pennington." Bennett had casino-hotel experience as an executive with Del Webb Corporation, and Pennington was his partner in a slot machine business.
"They struggled the first year, then conditions turned around, and to tell the truth, they were probably better operators than we were," said Mallin. "They exercised their option to buy after a few years, and Circus just went terrific."
Sarno was sometimes called a "front" for mob interests associated with the Teamsters. In a 1979 trial involving skimming at other casinos, gaming executive Carl Thomas testified that he had skimmed Circus Circus profits. Mallin, however, denies the Teamsters played any role except lender.
Mallin became a full-time investor. Sarno spent the rest of his life trying to raise money for a giant hotel to be called the Grandissimo. He envisioned 6,000 rooms. The Sarnos had four children. Jay Jr. runs his own engineering firm. September is a stockbroker and senior vice president at Prudential Securities in Beverly Hills. Freddie is a stockbroker. Only Heidi Sarno Strauss remained in Las Vegas; she divides her time between her own business—a flower shop—and a family.
In the 1970s, Jay Jr. remembered, his parents brought him along to a charity auction because the items being auctioned included a number of authentic mementos from America’s space program, with which he was fascinated.
"One item was a patch from the uniform of Jack Swigert, the commander of Apollo 13, and my dad started bidding on it," said Jay Jr. "The bidding reached $10,000 and the other bidder dropped out and he got it. I thought he was just trying to show off. I asked, ‘Why did you buy that?’ And he said, ‘To give to you.’"
With that, Sarno handed over the patch as nonchalantly as another man would present a lollipop. Jay Jr. has kept the historic patch clean and safe for nearly 30 years.
After Sarno cashed out of Circus Circus, he was simultaneously flush and frustrated at his inability to get enough financing to build the Grandissimo. His boredom led him deeper into gambling, usually at the crap tables at Caesars, where he had once ruled the empire and was still treated as royalty. Not one but two of his own brothers, the hotelman Sam and the doctor Herman, had dropped dead at these tables in the excitement of a crap game. Jay had his own fatal heart attack in a suite at the same hotel, in 1984.
Jay Sarno’s influence will always be evident in Las Vegas, especially at Caesars Palace. Even today, when September comes home for a weekend in the town where she grew up, she is never an overnight guest with relatives or friends. She stays, by choice, at Caesars: "I walk through the same casino I did as a kid, and I see some of the same people." Now and then she assaults the crap tables. "It’s where I grew up," she said. "I feel happy here. I feel close to my dad."
This concludes our two-part biography of Jay Sarno, taken from The First 100: Portraits of the Men and Women Who Shaped Las Vegas, which is a must-read for any fan of Las Vegas history and is currently available in paperback for just $3.99.
