Question of the Day - 17 March 2023

We presume you’re asking about former Sahara owner Bill Bennett and not Dr. William Bennett, the politician and commentator who served as secretary of education from 1985 to 1988 under President Ronald Reagan and was a drug czar under George H. W. Bush. (He also wrote The Book of Virtues, a compilation of stories about morality and virtue for young people, but also turned out to be a high-stakes gambler who lost millions of dollars in Las Vegas.)

That being the case, Bill Bennett's was quite a life, one that, in our opinion, is ill-served by his authorized biography, a take-the-money-and-run writing job that simply dumps raw interview transcripts between two hard covers and lets the reader sort it all out.

William G. Bennett was born in Glendale, Arizona, on November 16, 1924. He died in Las Vegas on December 27, 2002, at age 78. In between, he packed in a historic amount of involvement in the casino industry.

Hotels were in his blood, grandfather Archibald W. Bennett having built Glendale’s first one, the Glenwood. Like many of the Las Vegas pioneers, Bill Bennett also had World War II service to his credit, having been a dive-bomber pilot. 

The Phoenix College alumnus began his postwar career by entering the furniture business, establishing a lucrative chain of stores across the Phoenix area. After making his first fortune, he liquidated them in 1962 and put his money into investments. Unfortunately, these went bust and in his late 40s, he was plunged into bankruptcy. Several lean years later, Bennett received a helping hand from the Del Webb Corp.’s President L.C. Jacobsen.

Jacobsen hired Bennett, then dispatched him to help staff the Sahara Tahoe (the current Hard Rock Lake Tahoe), while his second wife, Lynn Hummel, worked in the casino cage. Times were still sufficiently thin that Bennett had to double as a casino host in the evenings. He rose to casino night manager, a post that had to have been somewhat galling to the former owner of a large retail chain.

But if Bill Bennett was resentful, he didn’t show it. Within months, he'd sufficiently impressed the Webb higher-ups that they transferred him to Glitter Gulch to shore up operations at the Mint. Once there, Bennett turned a $4.5 million annual loss into a $10 million profit. Then, he impressed Del Webb himself to the extent that he placed Bennett in charge of both the Mint and the Sahara Tahoe, making a frequent commute between both properties, despite being denied use of the company plane by the stingy aging Webb.

His (literally) high-flying success notwithstanding, Bennett was paid the same as low-performing colleagues in the Del Webb organization. This penurious situation was corrected only when Bennett received stock options that he husbanded carefully. After six years of working for Webb, Bennett left the company in 1971 and turned his stock position into a $5 million golden parachute.

It was during the Webb era of his career that Bennett befriended an ambitious and charismatic liquor salesman named Steve Wynn.

After Bennett's departure from Del Webb, Wynn tried to recruit him for an executive role at the Golden Nugget. Bennett, however, had bigger fish to fry. He and business partner William Pennington went into the amusement-machine business, which in three years gave them a sufficient nest egg to lease a distressed casino from its developer Jay Sarno: Circus Circus.

For nine years, the two Bills suffered Sarno’s presence on the property, both as a resident and as a living ghost, haunting the C-suite in his bathrobe, dispensing unwanted advice. In the meantime, the duo established branches of the Circus Circus brand in Reno (1978) and Laughlin (1983), where they purchased the Edgewater. Bennett and Pennington repositioned the Las Vegas casino as a family-oriented property, reversing its misguided and failing high-roller ambitions.

"Bill Bennett was one of the Strip's top profit-producers for almost a 20-year stretch," a third Bill, Bill Thompson, University of Nevada-Las Vegas professor, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2002. "He cut costs everywhere, but he understood his market: middle-class Americans. The regular guy can afford Las Vegas because of guys like Bill Bennett." 

It took almost a decade, but Bennett and Pennington eventually reversed Circus Circus’ fortunes sufficiently to buy out Sarno and partner Stanley Mallin and to incorporate the property, both steps taken in a successful effort to banish the specter of Mob influence. An IPO of Circus Circus stock opened at $15 a share and reached almost $17 in the first day of trading. Michael Milken of junk-bond fame underwrote the IPO, part of his intermittent dabbling in the gaming industry, which at least had the virtue of giving it Wall Street respectability. (Milken later underwrote the construction costs of the Mirage.)

Pennington bowed out of Circus Circus Enterprises in 1988, but Bennett was far from satisfied with his burgeoning casino empire. Excalibur followed in 1990. It might have been “tacky even by Vegas standards” (according to Playboy magazine), but it flourishes to this day. Ditto Luxor (1993). Evidently pleased with his success, Bennett relinquished his CEO duties and became a still-wealthier man by liquidating his stock position in the company: Those $15 shares were now worth $60 apiece.

Although he stayed aboard Circus Circus as chairman, Bennett returned briefly to Economic Adversityville in 1994, as company revenues went uncharacteristically southward. (The costs associated with the $375 million Luxor and Adventuredome at Circus Circus were blamed.) He resigned and regrouped. Bennett may have been down, but he wasn’t out by any stretch of the imagination. After an abortive courtship of the Hacienda (coveted also by Circus Circus, now Mandalay Bay), he settled on the north Strip Sahara in 1995 and purchased it for $193 million.

For the next seven years, despite a heart attack and several amputations due to diabetic complications, Bennett continued to steer the destiny of the Sahara, charting its transformation into another bargain property, true to his middle-class-friendly philosophy. Bennett could be a rough boss, once firing his own daughter Diana from the presidency of the resort, even as her successor was entering the building (they passed each other on the escalator).

He also sent a food truck multiple times a day to the Frontier to support Culinary Union workers who were on strike. When owner Margaret Elardi sold the property in February 1998 to Phil Ruffin, who promptly unionized, Bennett paid the soon-to-be-ex-strikers a personal visit. One of them told him, “Thank you, Mr. Bennett. I hope you live forever.”

Sadly, it was not to be. Bennett died at Desert Springs Hospital just short of five years later.