Question of the Day - 14 September 2018

After more than 5,100 Questions of the Day answered over 14 years, plus perhaps five times that many questions submitted, it’s a rare event to receive one that has never been asked before. But such is the case with today’s QoD. Though we’ve mentioned Margaret and her son Tom in a number of answers, the Elardis have never been the subject of one of the daily answers. 

We, too, have always been interested in them, though they’re a tough nut to crack. They owned the Frontier during a labor strike in the 1990s that lasted seven long and contentious years, during which the family took a beating in the press, which might have led to the deafening silence with which they’ve conducted their business ever since. At times, we’ve attempted to elicit a response from the Casino Royale over various matters, but have always been stonewalled. As Anthony Curtis says, “Casino Royale simply will not respond to anything.”

So we’ve cobbled together the following report from various secondary sources.

A brief 1999 profile in Forbes described Margaret Elardi as “a grande dame with brass knuckles — almost as rich as Steve Wynn and just as shrewd, though much less visible.”

Forbes reported that Mrs. Elardi started out by managing the books for the contracting business of her husband Charles in southern California. They had two sons, John and Tom. They’d made enough money to retire to Las Vegas in the mid-1960s, where Margaret got into the casino business by reopening the Pioneer Casino downtown, which was closed at the time. “To keep an eye on the business, Elardi slept upstairs,” Forbes wrote.

In 1981, she paid $3 million for the small Pioneer Casino in Laughlin, which she sold, along with the downtown Pioneer, seven years later for more than $100 million in profit. She sunk $70 million of it into the old Frontier on the Strip, though a year later, she became embroiled in the Culinary Union strike, which lasted until Phil Ruffin bought her out in 1998 for $167 million. (He borrowed $50 million for the down payment and the Elardis carried back the rest, payable over five years.)

In the meantime, the Elardis bought the old Nob Hill and rebranded it Casino Royale. It’s been run by Tom Elardi, who’s now 71, ever since. The smallest casino on the Las Vegas Strip, Best Western took over management of the 152 rooms in late 2012 and renamed it the Best Western Plus Casino Royale, but Tom Elardi retains ownership of the land and the gaming license.

As for selling out, we figure that partnering up with Best Western is as close as the Elardis want to come. The Forbes profile of Margaret concluded, “Though she refuses to talk with Forbes — or anyone else from the media — she did recently tell an acquaintance: ‘Die with your boots on. Don't ever sell out.’"

Of course, for the right price, it's not hard to imagine them taking the money and going on to bigger and better things.