That's an interesting question and just the kind of off-the-wall foray into Vegas history that QoD relishes from time to time.
Let's start by saying that the Las Vegas of the 1970s and even late '80s was a very different animal to the corporation-dominated beast of today, with individual casino owners being the norm back then (and downtown still the principal casino hub). By the same token, the city was a lot smaller in those days and the tribe of casino owners a fairly exclusive club; business dealings, in general, tended to be a lot more person-to-person (or even mano a mano -- fist fights were not unheard of as a means of settling disputes back in the '50s and that culture lingered awhile...); and with far fewer venues in town, there were a lot less places for the movers and shakers to hang out at when they weren't busy running their own casinos. Hence, for the characters you mention not to have been acquainted with one another would be more surprising than the converse; the nature of these relationships may still come as a surprise to some readers, however.
For several reasons it probably makes most sense to structure the answer to your question around Steve Wynn, and then to trace in what capacity he has interacted with the other notables you mention (and how their respective paths also crossed). To establish the broad context of this QoD and its answer, consider what a watershed year 1989 was, in seeing both the death of "Old Vegas" and downtown legend Benny Binion and the debut, on the Strip, of the Mirage, encapsulating Steve Wynn's vision of what a resort-casino was to be from now on in the "New" Las Vegas -- while still coming from a man who had cut his teeth and earned his stripes amidst the original casino kings of Fremont Street. But let's not get ahead of ourselves...
In 1971 Steve Wynn -- who'd moved to Vegas with his young family in '67 and since then had been running a wine-and-liquor import company while dabbling in real estate -- presumably made a profit (although later he would contend otherwise) on the small interest he had in the New Frontier (where he was employed as keno and slot manager) when the property was purchased by Howard Hughes. Shortly thereafter, Wynn banked another stash of cash by basically holding Caesars Palace to ransom over a small-but-crucial adjacent plot of land that Hughes had refused to sell to them but (for reasons that history has yet to relate, but which perhaps reflected some pleasure in supporting a young fellow entrepreneur-in-the-making that came with the added benefit of aggravating Caesars) he subsequently agreed to trade with Wynn for a different parcel the savvy young Steve had picked up, knowing that Hughes would want it. Wynn threatened Caesars with a plan to build a diminutive casino right on their doorstep that would block their access to the Strip at the Flamingo intersection, and had them sufficiently rattled to agree to pay $2.25 million for the plot, netting Wynn and his investment partner a cool $1 million profit -- which was still a lot of money in the early '70s. With this latest windfall, Steve purchased downtown's historic but somewhat dilapidated Golden Nugget, which is where our story begins in earnest.
When Wynn purchased his controlling interest in the Golden Nugget, in 1973, downtown casino veteran Jackie Gaughan still owned a stake in the business and he became instrumental in schooling the 31-year-old entrepreneur in the ways of the casino business. In later life Wynn would frequently refer to Gaughan as his mentor and, speaking at Jackie's funeral in March 2014, where he delivered one of the four eulogies, Wynn recalled his days working for Gaughan, who gave him the fancy title of CEO at the Golden Nugget, despite Wynn's inexperience. "If the Nugget does good, Jackie does good. And if the Nugget does bad, Jackie does bad," Wynn recalled Gaughan saying, meaning that although effectively they were business rivals, in the bigger picture of the downtown-casino environment as a whole (where at his peak, Jackie owned 25 percent of the available real estate), it was in Gaughan's interests to teach his new neighbor how to do it right.
"He treated me with a lot of respect in that job and always stopped by my office moving very fast — he had a lot of businesses to keep track of — to give me advice," Wynn also recalled. "One time he said, 'I saw the new Zodiac slots you've put out. Not bad. But you've led with the dollar slots at the door and quarter slots at the bar. You'd be better off with the quarters at the door and dollars at the bar.'" Wynn responded, "You know, you're right. I'll do something about it." But Jackie interjected, "Don't bother. I've already talked to the slot manager. They'll be switched tomorrow."
That incident should not be read in terms of there being any power or ego struggle between the two men, however, from what we can gather. On news of Jackie's death, Wynn immediately issued a statement that read: "I believe it would take a month to name all of the friends that Jackie Gaughan had in the state of Nevada. It would take that long to list all the people from Reno to Las Vegas, from Elko to Laughlin, who respected Jackie for his warmth, his business integrity, his affection for his employees and above all, for his happy, positive personality. I am one of these people whose life was brightened by a friendship and association with that delightful man."
As far as Steve Wynn and the Binions are concerned, both Benny and Jack, there's plenty of documented history there, too, again stemming from the bursting of the young Wynn onto the downtown casino scene. But we get the feeling Wynn's relationship with Benny Binion was less conventional than was his friendship with Jackie Gaughan. To put everything in perspective, allow us to quote veteran Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith, from piece he wrote back in 2014:
"Before downtown became the canvas for [Tony] Hsieh’s creative business marketing and real estate vision, Benny Binion defined the Fremont Street experience. Jackie Gaughan owned more casinos, and Steve Wynn used a Fremont Street address to the best advantage, but it was Binion whose image as the cowboy gambler dominated Glitter Gulch for half a century."
And evidently more of that "cowboy gambler" image rubbed off on Steve Wynn that you might suppose. During the 2009 press conference during which Steve Wynn and Garth Brooks announced the latter was to perform a residency at Encore, the casino owner stunned the audience when he announced, "I've been a roper and a header, a team roper, even had a PRCA card for a while."
It transpired that among Wynn's other notable friends from that era was former Las Vegas Sheriff Ralph Lamb, whose home off Smoke Ranch Road was equipped with stables and a ring for steer roping and this was where Wynn housed his two horses, Chicaro and Spider. The latter, he informed his bemused audience that day at Encore, was a gift from Benny Binion and was "just loved by Willie Nelson," who'd often ride on out to the Lamb ranch with his buddy Steve back in the day. Who knew?
To underline how much Wynn (and the rest of the industry) learned from Binion, while understanding how as men, they were about as stark a contrast to each other as ws the decor and ambiance in their respective casinos, here's a very telling excerpt from a Texas Monthly feature from 1999 titled: "Forget the Sopranos. Meet the Binions."
"There was no health spa at the Horseshoe, no Swedish masseuse, no barbershop, no entertainment. 'I don’t want to see my money blown out the end of some guy’s trumpet,' Benny explained. The drinks were generous—Benny pioneered the tradition that players drink free—and the food was cheap and utilitarian. His late-night $2 steak became a classic casino come-on. There was no fancy dining room or French chef, just a man in a stained apron who stirred up pots of greasy, fiery chili using an old Dallas jailhouse recipe*. For years the Horseshoe didn’t even include a hotel. When Steve Wynn told Benny about his plan to build an extravagant two-thousand-room hotel and casino called the Golden Nugget across the street, Benny wrapped a fatherly arm around his shoulder and said, "Great, they can sleep in your place and gamble in mine."
Wynn was a regular at the poker tables in Binion's legendary casino, which is where we'll pick up our tale tomorrow. For now, we'll conclude with some words from the eulogy that Steve Wynn delivered at Benny Binion's funeral, in which he stated that "He was a man who never showed one shred of pretense ... We will never see the likes of Benny Binion in our lifetime again. He was either the toughest gentleman I ever knew or the gentlest tough man I ever met."
[*Ed: This "authenticity" could well be a great example of one of the fundamental principles that Binion successfully implanted in Wynn, since by that same token it's Steve Wynn's mother's recipe for bread pudding that's still served -- or at least was up until 2011, when we last checked -- at the Golden Nugget, even years after Wynn had sold the joint. If it's not stretching the metaphor to far, we were interested to learn that just as Wynn's ambitions became more grandiose as time went by, so did the bread pudding: What was allegedly the same recipe followed him all the way to the Buffet at Wynn, yet here the chef was permitted, perhaps encouraged, to embellish, "including substituting regular bread with leftover croissants and brioche and adding some apricots, as well as golden raisins," we learned straight from the horse's mouth. We have a feeling that Benny would not have approved.]
