Question of the Day - 29 March 2020

The Amarillo-born Wichita-based billionaire is no stranger to gambling, either in or out of Las Vegas. Over the years, he's owned a greyhound race track in Wichita, a casino in the Bahamas (Marriott Resort & Crystal Palace Casino, which he purchased in 1993 and sold in 2005), and the Frontier, as you mention, on the Las Vegas Strip. 

Ruffin’s first blip on Vegas’ radar occurred in Oct. 1997 when he made a $167 million deal with the Elardi family to purchase the Frontier. Since the Frontier was being picketed by the Culinary Union and the strike had dragged on for six-plus years, Ruffin’s gaming application moved forward at express speed: He was licensed in 10 weeks and took over the casino on Feb. 1, 1998.

Settling the Frontier strike was, Ruffin now says, "the key to the deal." He reinstated 280 striking employees with full seniority and back pay. He renamed it the New Frontier, then tinkered with various reinventions. At first, he planned to rebrand the property as a Radisson. That scheme was scrapped partway through a property upgrade meant to bring the place into conformity with Radission’s specifications.

Then, in January 2000, Ruffin announced the New Frontier would be imploded to make way for City by the Bay Hotel-Casino. It was to feature sea lions, a wave-making machine, and a miniature version of Alcatraz. But Wall Street was skeptical of Ruffin’s cash-flow projections. A $900 million lawsuit was filed by a rival developer with ambitions to open a San Francisco-themed resort that further complicated matters.

In April 2002, Ruffin was back with a proposed $800 million 1,500-room resort, to be erected just north of the New Frontier with an unspecified hotel company as partner. That, too, went nowhere, as did an attempted purchase by Harrah’s.

Ruffin tried again in March 2005, announcing a $1.3 billion 3,000-room megaresort, eventually dubbed Montreux, but 13 months later, Ruffin was still trying to put a deal together. But a glut of projects along the Strip had driven construction prices upward and Montreux’s budget eventually reached $2.7 billion. 

Two years later, Ruffin told the Sun he was dickering with El Ad Properties to sell the New Frontier site for a mind-boggling $40 million per acre, double what Ruffin himself had said the land was worth a couple of years earlier. He eventually sold the property for $1.24 billion, $36 million per acre, for which Ruffin had paid $4 million an acre in 1998; it was the high-water mark for Strip real estate before the Great Recession. El Ad quickly closed and demolished the place … only to find that it couldn’t raise the capital to rebuild on the site. 

Not bad for a college dropout who, according to Forbes, abandoned Washburn University in favor of running a couple of hamburger stands, then rolled his salary into buying real estate. By 1959 when he was 24, Ruffin had parlayed a Wichita truck stop –- bought with money borrowed from his dad -- into a tri-state empire of 61 Total-branded convenience stores and self-service gas stations. Kansas oil wells, office buildings, warehouses, industrial parks, a bank, a dairy, and at least 14 hotels spread across five states. His Harper Trucks grew to encompass one-third of the U.S. hand-truck market. And that’s just a partial listing of Ruffin’s non-gambling ventures.

At first, he invested his New Frontier profits in municipal bonds –- and quickly got bored. "I’m not an investor," he told a reporter.

Instead, he went into a joint venture with Donald Trump, breaking ground on Trump International Hotel and Tower in July 2005. The tower opened in March 2008. 

A year later, Ruffin bought Treasure Island from MGM Mirage Resorts for $600 million in cash and $175 million in secured notes. One of the attractions for Ruffin was that MGM had recently spent $83 million to refurbish the property, so he wouldn’t need to do any fixing up. He has, of course, over the years, but TI was far from a fixer-upper. Exactly 10 years later, he turned down what he called a "huge" offer to sell TI to a Chinese firm. “There isn't any price they could throw at me that would interest me,’’ he told the Review-Journal. "Money's not that valuable. Assets are valuable, especially when they're irreplaceable.’’

Finally, Ruffin picked up Circus Circus from MRI last December for $825 million. He has the big clown casino, Slots A Fun, Adventuredome, the RV park, and a 40-acre vacant lot to play with. 

Today, Phil Ruffin is 85 years old, has three children from his second marriage, all of whom run various branches of his business empire, and is on the Forbes list of the world's billionaires, ranking No. 838 with a net worth of US $3.1 billion in 2019. He married Oleksandra Nikolayenko, the former Miss Ukraine 2001, in 2008 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort; she's 46 years his junior and they have two children, ages ten and seven.