Self-made millionaire Don Barden talked a good game but, when it came to Las Vegas, delivered relatively little. In the first two years of his ownership, beginning in late 2001, Barden replaced furniture and carpeting in the downtown hotel-casino. The buffet and steakhouse were renovated. He also tried rebranding it as "The Fitz," although that never took hold with locals. On the entertainment front, the biggest coup was landing Marriage Can Be Murder, a high-priced dinner theater show.
Barden talked vaguely of buying additional casinos downtown, maybe even on the Strip, of cross-marketing the various gambling houses he owned under the Majestic Star umbrella and even of making Fitzgeralds an African-American-oriented property. He even went so far as to purchase a nearby office building, in 2006, with the stated intention of moving corporate headquarters to Las Vegas. That never happened. Neither did a planned expansion, including a third hotel tower. It went "on hold" in early 2003 and was never heard of again.
Part of the problem was that Barden was always too focused on expanding Majestic Star elsewhere that he never seemed able to devote much time or focus to his Vegas operation. He pursued casinos in Michigan, in the Turks and Caicos Islands, and even landed a prime location in Pittsburgh. The latter was his undoing. Barden’s $450 million Rivers Casino project eventually ran 77% over budget, cleaning Barden out financially and forcing him to yield the casino to developer Neil Bluhm, who finished and opened it.
Barden had so little equity in the Pittsburgh project that, in May 2008, he was forced to pledge Fitzgeralds as collateral against a promised equity infusion. To that end, he began shopping the casino around but found no takers, even at a time when other downtown casinos were changing hands at comparable prices. It was taken off the market the following July. Barden’s last years were spent under a cloud of insolvency and alleged mental incompetence. In Las Vegas, he was written off as a failure, another all-hat/no-cattle casino owner who came into town to great fanfare, only to exit unnoticed. As far as the daily newspapers were concerned, he was a forgotten man.
In recognition of Barden’s passing, Fitzgeralds itself circulated a special edition of the "Fitz Forum" newsletter amongst its employees and patrons, commemorating Barden’s achievements. Culled mostly from Detroit News and Associated Press copy, it included testimonials from several Barden admirers, including Rev. Jesse Jackson and Detroit Mayor Dave Bing. It also included the useful reminder that, when Barden purchased his first Majestic Star riverboat casino in 1996, he was the only African-American owner in the casino business. Fifteen years later, much progress remains to be accomplished on that front. In that, as in many other facets of his life, Don Barden was the exception to the rule. He will ultimately be remembered as one of the liveliest and most controversial figures in casino history, even if his Vegas years were one of the quieter episodes in a life lived at peak volume.
