Question of the Day - 27 August 2022

[Editor's Note: First things first, we apologize for the technical glitch (in Deke's consciousness) over the inaccessibility of the results of the recent poll on naming the Vegas XFL team. Take two's the ticket; here's the link.]

We ran an answer about Margaret Elardi four years ago and as far as we can tell, nothing much has changed between then and now, except that Margaret is now 97, as you state.

We spent a fair amount of time trying to update our answer, but as we mentioned the last time, the Elardis are, basically, a question mark. 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 affairs ever since. At times, we’ve attempted to elicit a response from Casino Royale over various matters, but have always been stonewalled. As Anthony Curtis says, “Casino Royale simply will not respond to anything.”

But we did manage to cobble together something of a history from various secondary sources, which we've updated here.

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 keeping the books for her husband Charles's contracting business in Corona del Mar, 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 75, ever since. The smallest casino on the Las Vegas Strip, Best Western took over management of the 152 rooms in 2012 and renamed it the Best Western Plus Casino Royale, but Tom Elardi retains ownership of the land and the gaming license.

We figure that partnering up with Best Western is as close as the Elardis want to come to divesting of their Strip properties. The Forbes profile of Margaret concluded, “Though she refuses to talk with Forbes — or anyone else from the media — she did 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. But that's the way we ended our original QoD in 2018 and four years later, it appears as if the grand dame intends never to sell out.