Las Vegas has never suffered any shortage of colorful characters and Stratosphere creator Bob Stupak has to go at or near the top of any such list. As part of the long march of hype leading to the ill-fated opening of the Stratosphere Tower, Stupak conceived the Stratosphere Club.
It was a subscription program designed to help finance construction. As Stupak biographer John L. Smith writes in No Limit, "Stupak’s ‘exclusive’ once-in-a-lifetime offer to join the Stratosphere Club was mailed to tens of thousands of former guests. For $1,950, charter club members would receive five free vacations at Vegas World, $500 cash with each visit, unlimited free drinks, free show tickets, free entry to slot tournaments, preferred restaurant seating, four free keno plays per visit," and here’s the kicker, "their names etched in granite at the base of the tower … the club had a potential membership the size of Omaha." Some subscription packages cost over $6,000 but, despite vaguely misleading language, they didn’t buy the purchaser any equity in the Strat itself. (Proclaimed Stupak, "I’m selling them immortality.") That's what would go to those who bought into an IPO of Stratosphere stock.
This Stupakular offer sounded too good to be true and the entrepreneur conceded as much in his promotional letters. Our own Anthony Curtis ran the numbers and counseled against "investing" in a Stratosphere Club membership, observing that you could put the $6,250 it would cost for a premium subscription in a bank account bearing a 4% interest rate and get a better return; ditto chancing that money on the stock exchange. The lower-end subscriptions, with a theoretical 14% return, seemed relatively good buys by comparison.
Names of Club members were embossed on a wraparound Wall of Recognition (later called the Wall of Fame. It was fronted by what Smith describes as "a life-size, 24-carat-gold-plated statue of Bob Stupak holding a pair of dice." One could hardly imagine a more apt symbol for the mixture of audacity and crassness that led to the jumble of amusement-park rides, sightseeing, gambling, dining, lodging and retail that was the Stratosphere hotel-casino. An aquarium had even been part of the concept but fell victim to a budget that shot past the half-billion-dollar mark.
No sooner had it opened in early 1996 than a perfect fiscal storm brought the Stratosphere down. A bloated physical structure and budget ($550 million), excessive leverage, internal conflicts between Stupak and lead investor Lyle Berman, a poor location and worse financial performance led to a Stupakular financial collapse. The observation tower and restaurants were underwriting the hotel and even the casino floor In an flyover of the financial wreckage, Casino Executive Magazine stock analyst Anthony Mello concluded that, had Stupak merely cleaved to his original plan of a freestanding tower, he’d have made a profit.
In July 1996, Stupak resigned as chairman of the Stratosphere board, a role that was more honorific than substantive, having had to relinquish real power to Berman in return for completion money. Already, traces of his idiosyncratic presence were being effaced from the property. Both the statue and Wall of Fame would soon vanish. Subscribers whose names adorned the wall were out an aggregate $16 million dollars when the Stratosphere declared itself unable to honor their agreements and free-fell into bankruptcy (from which it was eventually rescued and made successful by Carl Icahn).
As to the wall’s fate, Smith tells LVA, "It disappeared along with the gold Stupak statue right after [Grand Casinos owner] Lyle Berman took over. Heard it was in storage on site. Stupak surely was able to get the statue, but I never saw it again and he never admitted purloining it."
