Alas, the only remaining vestige of the original, Y-shaped layout is the two-motel wing, the so-called ‘5000’ wing, where some of the old rooms do duty as offices. Like the Trop’s barrel-vaulted Tiffany-esque glass casino ceiling (which was not part of the original design), these rooms are frequently mentioned for potential demolition, so see them while you still can. New owner Penn National Gaming is already talking about revisions to the Trop a few years hence. As for the rest of the interior, a series of renovations (the most recent in 2011) have rendered today's property "the Tropicana" more in name than reality.
The Trop opened in April 1957, with 300 rooms, causing the Las Vegas Sun to rhapsodize about the "lush, tropical beauty to its desert site about one mile north of the airport on the Los Angeles highway."
However, Guarantee Reserve Life Insurance owner Ben Jaffe (who was also chairman of Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel) was unfortunate in his timing when he chose to enter the Strip-resort race in the mid-1950s. Most of the local construction labor was tied up in the Stardust and Jaffe wound up having to liquidate his Guarantee Reserve and Fontainebleau holdings to cover the cost of building the Tropicana.
Jaffe ran into more trouble after he sublet the gambling concession to "Dandy" Phil Kastel. The latter’s high profile and ties to Mob boss Frank Costello were too much even for the Nevada Gaming Control Board to overlook and he was denied a license.
Even with the more acceptable Louis Lederer at the helm, the skim at the Tropicana was known within a month of its 1957 opening, when a sheet of paper detailing the scam was found on a wounded Costello after an attempted Mob hit. Lederer was ousted, replaced by Kell Houssels and Robert Cannon.
Kell Houssels parlayed an initial six percent stake in the casino into majority ownership, buying out Jaffe in 1959. That same year, he and entertainment director Lou Walters had the brainwave of importing Paris' Folies-Bergère. It ran until 2009, when then-CEO Scott Butera made the short-sighted decision to terminate it, causing the showroom to devolve into a revolving door of short-lived acts.
By 1964, two more low-rise wings had been added to the Trop. The lounge was also redone as the Blue Room and became the city’s leading jazz venue. (Siegfried & Roy got their start at the Trop in 1967.) Houssels sold the property to Trans-Texas Airways in 1968, although the airline kept him on as general manager until 1970. Soon afterward, Trans-Texas entered negotiations with Deil Gustafson, a Minnesota banker, and the Trop changed hands again in 1972. Gustafson, however, was loaning money to the Detroit Mob through a holding company and, when the Nevada Gaming Control Board got wind of this, he was forced to relinquish majority ownership. Chemical heiress Mitzi Stauffer Briggs then bought in and was responsible for the building of the first of the Trop’s two towers, the Tiffany Tower. (The Island Tower would be added in 1986.)
Although Briggs was presented as a "clean" owner, the Mob was still merrily skimming cash from the casino, fronted by entertainment director Joe Agosto. This was exposed in a federal investigation dubbed Operation Strawman – a fitting description for the roles played by Gustafson and Briggs, who were forced to sell to Ramada Inns in 1979, sparking a raft of additional changes to the Trop’s design. Ten years later, Ramada spun off its casinos as Aztar Corp., which spent much of the 1990s and early 2000s trying to decide whether to fish or cut bait on a Tropicana renovation.
Instead, the Trop put itself up for sale during a time of inflated casino values. A dizzying bidding war ensued, won by low-rent Kentucky hotelier Columbia Sussex Corp. The latter attempted to run the Trop on the cheap, skimping on labor and maintenance, and looking the other way as prostitutes prowled the property at will. So heavily leveraged was Columbia Sussex from the Aztar acquisition that it quickly toppled into bankruptcy. But the venerable Trop was rescued, purchased on the cheap by Canadian private equity firm Onex Corp.
Former MGM Mirage executive Alex Yemenidjian was installed as CEO and embarked on a vigorous "South Beach" makeover of the property. However, not even Yemenidjian could make the hotel-casino profitable. Penn National Gaming, though, thinks it can and has bet a $360 million purchase price on doing so. Penn executives have praised Yemenidjian’s renovations and won’t be making any structural changes for two years (a possible third tower has been mentioned), but the company recently stated that it plans to invest $20 million in improvements right away (mainly to the players club), with more to come.
