Yesterday we left off c. 1983, as the off-Strip casino located at 160 E. Flamingo Road was about to change hands and enter into a what with hindsight turned out to be an inexorable slide into decline and oblivion. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Why the principal members of the original consortium of individual and corporate owners, operating as Baby Grand Corp., decided to sell the Maxim in 1983, history doesn't relate. Phil Bryan, GM at the time, who'd been with the property since it opened in '77, speculated to us that it was in light of the mini-recession that Las Vegas was experiencing at the time, which may have prompted some of the owners to call it quits while they were ahead. (The Aladdin was in all kinds of trouble around the time of the Maxim's sale; the similarly off-Strip-located Royal Americana had recently closed; the Silverbird had been sold, pending its rebirth as the El Rancho; and the Riviera was filing for bankruptcy protection, to cite a few notable examples). We can see from public land-transaction records, and from some subsequent lawsuits, however, that official ownership remained in the hands of Baby Grand Corp. until 1998, although the composition of that company apparently saw some changes.
In the absence of any better explanation, Bryan's is the only reason we can give for the decision to sell what appears to have a been a majority interest, in 1983, to northern Nevada cattleman Jack Anderson. Regarding his boss, Bill Zender -- who joined the Maxim at this juncture for the first of his two stints at the place -- recalls that he had "no business running a casino." (Anderson was evidently good with cows, on the other hand -- but more of that to come...). Phil Bryan, who graciously gave us a lot of his time and obviously has very fond memories of the Maxim, painted for us a perhaps slightly rose-tinted picture of the place's perfection. He emphasized its embracing of new technology and noted the state-of-the-art player-tracking system that was installed, but Bill Zender has a somewhat different recollection of what he found at the Maxim in 1983 when he took on the role of Casino Manager.
As far as surveillance was concerned, there were just three pan-tilt-zoom cameras covering the entire pit (which, as we noted yesterday, carried something in the region of six dice tables and 40 blackjack tables), only two of which were capable of recording. Zender also found in place a system riddled with the kind of old-school old-boys-club corruption that saw certain dealers deliberately losing to big players, or the awarding of un-deserved comps to patrons who were in a position to grant favors to members of staff in return (exclusive golfing privileges, free trips to health spas, and so on). Once at the helm, Zender, a casino veteran who'd spent 1979-'81 as an agent with the Gaming Control Board and knows his onions when it comes to game protection and running a casino efficiently, informed us that he set about cleaning up all the nepotism and sleight of hand afoot -- a mission that won him few friends ("people were really pissed," as he put it when we called him.)
Still, Bill Zender concurs with Phil Bryan that there was no discernible Mob influence at the Maxim at any point while he worked there (which he did again subsequently, from 1989-'90). Phil Bryan explained to us that in light of some of the other shenanigans that had surfaced at casino properties around town and which were in the midst of being eradicated (a lot of the Aladdin's financial woes at this juncture were of its own making and as a direct result of how deep in debt it was with the Teamsters Union), when the Maxim opened there was a representative from Gaming Control on the casino floor at all times. We found no evidence of any Mafia connections during the property's lifetime, although that's not to say there weren't a couple of dubious incidents in the the Maxim's history (and our research has unearthed some even more dubious characters who'd been associated previously with the land on which the Maxim was built, but more of that to come).
Returning to our narrative, in 1989 an unwelcome precedent for whistleblowers in Nevada was set by the case of Wiltsie vs. Maxim. Jerry Wiltsie was a poker room manager at the Maxim who reported to some of his superiors that his supervisor was participating in illegal activities (history has failed to relate to us the nature of same). Wiltsie was promptly fired in what he claimed was a retaliatory move, whereupon he sued Baby Grand Corp., the owners, for wrongful termination. However, the presiding judge ruled that because Wiltsie reported his grievance to insiders at his place of employ, as opposed to the relevant outside regulatory authority (in this case the Nevada Gaming Control Board), he was entitled to no protection since he was "merely acting in a private or proprietary manner." (Nevada is one of 15 states without a state statute guaranteeing protection for whistleblowers and this case has since been cited by the defense in subsequent cases of unfair dismissal, so potential 'blowers take note!)
The other notorious incident that we're aware of that took place at the Maxim was the April 2001 murder of Easton, Pa., resident David Sygnarski by a prostitute and her boyfriend. Sygnarski, who was gambling at the Maxim, was apparently lured by sometime working girl Paulette Perry to a hotel room at the property, where her boyfriend Kenneth Grant was lying in wait. Once there, the duo beat the victim and stabbed him fatally in the neck, before helping themselves to all of his cash and stuffing his body under the bed, where it was subsequently discovered by a member of housekeeping. (As an aside, the current writer recalls this case and how the word on the street in the years thereafter was that it was at least in part responsible for the solid bases found as standard in most hotel rooms in town today -- a bedroom protocol introduced in order to avert the chance of such grisly finds again in the future.) By the time Perry and Grant were sentenced in 2003 -- she to life without possibility of parole and he to a minimum of 40 years -- the Maxim was already bankrupt and long-since shuttered. The high-profile murder case probably hadn't helped its chances of survival any, but again we risk getting ahead of ourselves.
In 1993, there were rumors that the Maxim was to be sold to an outfit called Las Vegas Entertainment Network, or LVEN, a producer of television shows for overseas TV networks that reportedly managed to bag Liza Minnelli and Tina Turner for its inaugural "Las Vegas Tonight" magazine-style program, which apparently had aired the previous New Year's eve on France's popular France 3 channel. We haven't seen the show so we can't substantiate the Liza/Tina claim, nor even that this show actually existed, not least because we can verify that LVEN later found itself in some serious hot water with the Securities and Exchange Committee over its deal, or lack thereof, with the Maxim. To quote the official words of the initial Administrative Hearing, the company "In its April and July 1999 quarterly reports ... included as a $3.5 million asset its marketing rights relating to a hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada [Ed: i.e., the Maxim], even though those rights had expired. In its July 1999 quarterly report, Las Vegas Entertainment reported a $3 million phony gold certificate on its balance sheet." Oops.
Those were just two of the more sensational among a string of reporting violations that the company was called out on and the file goes on to explain that, "As of August 9, 2002, Las Vegas Entertainment's stock traded at less than $0.01 per share." All further transactions were ordered to cease and the registration of the stock was revoked. This was hardly the knight in shining armor that the struggling Maxim was in need of.
By the time of the LVEN debacle, the Maxim had expanded to include 795 hotel rooms, with a 20,000 square-foot casino floor, and the deal with LVEN had been valued at $45 million in stock and cash. The property's off-Strip location and diminutive stature -- both literally and in terms of financial resources -- were by this point beginning to take their toll, however, and the Maxim simply couldn't keep pace with the Mirage-inspired innovations that were taking place in close proximity at the major resorts on Las Vegas Boulevard.
From the late '90s to 2001, the Maxim changed hands no less than four times and even briefly closed the casino component (in 1999) following a dispute between its operator and the hotel's (at that juncture they were under separate control). In latter years, the main house entertainment was a show called Playboy Girls of Rock & Roll (perhaps the explanation as to why several sources repeat that there was formerly a Playboy Casino on the site of the Maxim before it was built -- as far as every source, written and human, that we've consulted concurs, there was not). Magician Mac King briefly cut his Las Vegas teeth at the Maxim but first the casino closed again and then, just two months into Mac's "residency," the whole place shut down abruptly, this time for good, in 2001.
We had planned to make this the concluding part of a two-part QoD but as you can see, for a casino without too much seemingly written about it, there was more to say about the Maxim than we'd anticipated. Hence, we're going to postpone the third, and final chapter in this saga (although expect some tangential QoDs to follow...), until after tomorrow's new Reader Poll goes live in this spot. See you on Thursday for Part III, where we'll delve into some murky pre-Maxim history of the site at 160 E. Flamingo Road, in addition to taking a stroll through some TV and movie archives. See you then!
