Question of the Day - 16 July 2021

The Marina Hotel-Casino opened in 1975 on the east side of the south Strip a little north of Tropicana Avenue. It had a 15-story 740-room tower, a casino, a few restaurants that no one remembers, and a showroom that featured second- and third-tier headliners. 

The only aspect of the operation that left any impression on history is that it was one of the quartet of Las Vegas hotel-casinos, along with the Stardust, Fremont, and Hacienda, that wound up in the hands of Allen Glick, purchased with $70 million in loans from the Teamsters Union Pension Fund in a deal arranged by an Illinois insurance-agency owner, Allen Dorfman, long known to maintain ties to the Chicago mob. (Dorfman was later murdered in a gangland execution, presumably to prevent him from cutting a deal to avoid a potential 50-year prison term for conspiracy to bribe Howard Cannon, at the time one of Nevada’s U.S. senators.)

With “ownership” of the four hotels, Glick, a 30-something whiz-kid lawyer from Los Angeles, became the second-biggest casino magnate in Las Vegas at the time, behind Howard Hughes’ Summa Corporation. In reality, he was a front man, supposed to answer to Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, which created a lot of bad blood, and in 1976, only a year after the Marina opened, the Nevada Gaming Control Board uncovered a massive skimming operation at the Stardust. 

When the dust from that settled, the Stardust slot manager disappeared (later found murdered), a Las Vegas detective, newspaper manager, and insurance executive were implicated, and suspicions even reached the governor, Robert List, and Senator Cannon; both politicians were repudiated in the next election. Glick and Rosenthal were also ousted.

Anyway, the Marina muddled along for another decade or so, never making much of a splash, but it managed to remain afloat until Kirk Kerkorian bought the joint in 1988, renamed it the MGM Marina, and not too long afterward closed it. 

Kerkorian was in the process of putting together the real estate necessary to build the MGM Grand, another of his world’s largest hotels, into which he incorporated the Marina tower after his architects and engineers convinced him that the hotel tower was structurally sound and solidly built. Kerkorian renovated the rooms and infrastructure, connecting the building to the rest of the property (to this day, the old Marina rooms are the smallest at the Grand, dating back to 1975 after all). 

Finally, in December 1993, the MGM Grand opened. The Marina still stands, occupying the northwest wing. The rest of the hotel towers are twice as high at 30 floors; the connecting west tower steps down to the old Marina in a ziggurat style.