Question of the Day - 08 August 2019

Whether or not it's politically acceptable, we're glad you asked. This is a great story -- with some new information that was recently revealed. It's worth reading all the way to the bottom, if we do say so ourselves. 

Steve Wynn’s father was a bingo-room operator in various East Coast locations. Wynn graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and was on his way to Yale Law School when his father passed away from longstanding heart problems, leaving hundreds of thousands in debts. Young Steve took over the business, disposed of the debts that didn’t die with his dad, and parlayed some profits into moving to Las Vegas where, trading on his family history, he invested in and worked at the Frontier, then owned and operated a wine and alcohol distributorship.

In 1963, according to Fly on the Wall—Recollections of Las Vegas’ Good Old Bad Old Days, which we published in 2000, the vacant acreage on the northwest corner of the Strip and Flamingo Avenue, directly across from the Flamingo and Dunes, became available for purchase. The Flamingo owners turned down the opportunity, due to the wash that ran right through the property and flooded during storms.  

While hanging around the Flamingo, none other than Kirk Kerkorian heard the land was for sale and bought it at the deep discount that the wash engendered. When Nate Jacobson and Jay Sarno were getting ready to build Caesars Palace, they wanted that corner; Kerkorian leased them the land on which Caesars would be built.

All went well until sometime after Caesars opened. From out of nowhere, young Steve Wynn held a press conference to unveil an artist’s rendering of a motel and small casino he was planning on building on a tiny parcel of land directly alongside Caesars on Flamingo.

Sarno went running to his landlord Kerkorian who, like everyone else in Las Vegas, had no idea where the parcel had come from. It turned out that the 40-foot-wide lot was in the extreme northern corner of a piece of land the Dunes Hotel had given the state of Nevada to use as an off-ramp for the impending Interstate 15. The parcel was in excess of what was needed for the ramp, so the Dunes sold the small plot to Steve Wynn.

This is where it gets interesting, at least to us.

This new piece to the puzzle showed up recently in a just-published book about Las Vegas that we really like, Eyes in the Sky, by Karen Leslie. Eyes in the Sky tells some outrageous, but true, tales from the glory days of Las Vegas’ past through the eyes of six young men who settled here in the ’50s and proceeded to work their way up the casino- and sign-industry ladders. (More on that in a moment.)

In Eyes in the Sky, we first catch a glimpse of Steve Wynn when he approached Kent Carmichael, manager of Ad-Art Sign Company, as he was working on the massive pylon sign at the Frontier. The young and intensely curious Wynn, who at the time was the slot and keno manager at the casino, asked Carmichael to show him the inner workings of the sign. Carmichael escorted Wynn almost all the way to the top, climbing a series of vertical and vertigo-inducing ladders through the guts of the pylon, where the two made a lasting connection 150 feet above the Strip.

So when Wynn wanted an artist’s rendering for his little motel-casino at the edge of Caesars, he hired Ad-Art to produce it. Kent Carmichael had hired our old friend Betty Willis, designer of the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign and the Blue Angel, to work at Ad-Art and he had her do the drawing that Wynn unveiled at his press conference.

In Eyes in the Sky, Karen Leslie describes Wynn’s concept: “A tongue-in-cheek depiction of a gangster-themed casino, complete with old Packards and cartoon characters in fedoras sporting machine guns, that looks like it came right out of Chicago.”

“I want to call it ‘Gangland,’” Wynn told Carmichael.

“Jeez,” Kent said under his breath. “Isn’t calling a casino next to Caesars Palace ‘Gangland’ a little reckless?”

Steve shook his head, making it clear he didn’t think it was an issue.

And it wasn’t. “Wynn never intended to build Gangland,” Leslie writes. “He was banking on the idea that Caesars’ owners wouldn’t want anything remotely resembling a gangster-themed property built next to their Palace. He used the rendering as leverage to persuade them to purchase his property.”

Wynn’s gamble paid off. Caesars bought the little lot for $2.25 million. Wynn had paid $1 million for it. The profit helped him start the process of taking over the Golden Nugget downtown. (It also earned him the enduring enmity of Kirk Kerkorian, who had the last laugh in the matter. He had to wait decades, but at the moment when Wynn was most vulnerable to a hostile takeover, Kerkorian bought Mirage Resorts right out from under him.)

So that’s how Steve Wynn got his big break in the business.

Eyes in the Sky has a ton of stories like this one. Kent Carmichael, for example, built the steel box that stored Benny Binion’s silver dollars decades before they were uncovered in the Pahrump desert; he also crashed through the eye-in-the-sky catwalk right in front of a teenage Wayne Newton during a performance at the Fremont.

A young Curt Thompson, who had a long and successful career as a casino executive, was given a ride by Sammy Davis Jr. to Thanksgiving dinner when his car broke down outside the Jolly Trolly; he later threw Willie Nelson out of the Mint for disturbing the peace, long before Nelson became a country superstar.

Dan Celeste, a veteran Las Vegas entertainment and food-and-beverage director, had to personally deliver fresh Dover sole to the Palm Springs' home of Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’ manager, via a private jet owned by Al Benedict, president of the original MGM Grand (before it turned into Bally's).

Gene Sagas, chief engineer at a number of properties, got stuck in a tiny escape route right under the stage where Siegfried and Roy performed.

We could go on and on about all the cool episodes in this book. Needless to say, we highly recommend Eyes in the Sky (available on Amazon). It’s a great read and will give you a deep look behind the scenes of a Las Vegas that was either never publicly known or has been nearly forgotten.