"It's purely a real estate transaction. He bought the land," says Jonathan Jossel, CEO of PlayLV, which managed the Las Vegas Club Hotel & Casino prior to the sale. The property remains zoned for gambling and, should he wish to, Derek Stevens should have no trouble getting a gaming license for the site. He is, after all, the holder in good standing of licenses at The D and the Golden Gate casinos. However, Stevens told Vegas Inc. that "it's still too soon to tell exactly what he will do with the property moving forward."
The slot machines, table games and "as many … as possible" of the Vegas Club employees – no exact number has been released -- will move across Main Street to the Plaza Hotel, where they will continue in the service of PlayLV (a subsidiary of a Lichtenstein-based conglomerate Tamares Group, which sold the Las Vegas Club to Stevens for a reported $40 million). Understandably, PlayLV did not part with the Vegas Club player database either; it wants those customers at the Plaza. The fate of the giant, vertical marquee and the oversized statue of Mickey Mantle remains unclear.
Although Tamares has functioned in downtown Las Vegas strictly as a landlord and not a developer, its retention of the rights to the Vegas Club name may give a clue as to its intentions. Jossel, who last year himself was awarded with a casino license, stressed, "We still have a lot of land downtown," including 11 vacant acres, "and a lot of gaming equipment that we can use downtown." So Tamares certainly has the potential to build a new "Las Vegas Club" casino on a different site, though we’d be surprised if it did anything that cash-intensive (and out of character). Tamares will certainly have the inventory of slots and tables it would need for such a project, not to mention a fondly remembered brand name.
Stevens, meanwhile, plans to take his time assessing the future of the ex-Vegas Club. Shortly before its closing, rumor had it that a CVS pharmacy would be taking its place. Stevens also inherits 410 hotel rooms that have been dormant for the past two years.
This isn’t the first challenge – or name change – that he’s faced. He reinvented the badly faded Fitzgeralds as The D and expanded the Golden Gate without impairing any of its early-20th century charm. He also thinks well outside the box, having bought the former Clark County Courthouse and, $10 million later, opened an outdoor-concert arena on the site.
If anybody’s likely to brainstorm a winning formula for what used to be the Las Vegas Club, Stevens is the man. "I look forward to beginning the evaluation of the building and coming up with our version of the best use of the property," he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, as a team of engineers readies for a month-long inspection of the property. "Obviously, I’m bullish on downtown Las Vegas and feel fortunate to be a part of the growth in Las Vegas."
