Question of the Day - 26 April 2021

Today, we conclude our five-part series that answers the question, "In your opinion, who were the most influential Las Vegans in history."

Our final installment proves the rule that last isn't always least. In fact, this Las Vegan could be the most influential of them all, which is why his thumbnail is the longest of the top ten and he's the only one in this series with a QoD of his own.  

Steve Wynn

On November 22, 1989, Las Vegas’ best and brightest queued up for the opening of the city’s newest hotel-casino, the Mirage. They wanted to be the first to see Steve Wynn’s signature $650 million creation, but also to snigger at it. Surely, they thought, it had to be a colossal failure, a “destination-oriented megaresort.” Who, they wondered, wanted to come to Las Vegas for a vacation that wasn’t centered on gambling? An erupting volcano? A 20,000-gallon aquarium? A rainforest, fer cryin' out loud?

Well, the conventional wisdom was proven spectacularly wrong. In fact, the success of the Mirage signaled the start of one of the greatest building booms in any city in history. Wynn himself went on to build Treasure Island (1993) and Bellagio (1998), the latter Sin City’s first billion-dollar hotel-casino. In time, Steve Wynn would become a persona non grata in the casino industry, but three decades ago, the world was his oyster.

It wasn’t his idea to go from being Steven Weinberg, born 1942, to Steve Wynn. That was his father’s notion, as a means of avoiding anti-Semitism. Wynn or Weinberg, he had gambling in his blood, as his father owned a string of bingo parlors on the East Coast. Still, young Steve’s inheritance was $350,000 in gambling debts he father owed at the time of his passing during heart surgery in 1963, when Steve was 21 and had to abandon a law education at Yale to run a Maryland bingo joint.

He made enough from that adventure to purchase a sliver of the Frontier Hotel & Casino when he moved to Las Vegas in 1967. That was also the time of a fateful meeting between Wynn and banker Parry Thomas, who became Wynn’s business tutor and source of funds, some of which Wynn parlayed into a liquor distributorship.

Successful land deals and prosperity from selling wine and spirits enabled Wynn to buy into the Golden Nugget in 1971. Two years later, he'd become the majority shareholder. He added a hotel tower in 1977 and lured Frank Sinatra to be the headliner in the Nugget’s modest showroom.

For a time, Wynn was distracted by fast-growing Atlantic City. He built a Golden Nugget on the Boardwalk (now the Atlantic Club, a non-gaming hotel), which, although the smallest casino in town, soon became its highest grosser, its fame built in part on TV spots in which Wynn played straight man to Sinatra. Ten years on the Boardwalk were enough for Wynn, who sold the A.C. Nugget in 1987. 

The $440 million sale price helped bankroll The Mirage, as did junk bonds engineered by Michael Milken. Treasure Island, which opened in late 1993, was built for a comparable bargain ($450 million) and was as close as Wynn ever came to an explicitly themed resort, with its nightly pirate battle, which never failed to draw a crowd. 

Almost five years to the day after the debut of Treasure Island, Wynn opened Bellagio, still among the top draws on the Strip. For his doorstep attraction, Wynn outdid the volcano and pirate battle with a vast lagoon on which an array of underwater jets shoot water into the air for nightly aquatic ballets.

Wynn’s first undoing, such as it was, was in trying to build two megaresorts at once, pairing Bellagio with its Biloxi sister, Beau Rivage. The ensuing strain on Mirage Resorts’ finances was enough to drag the stock price down far enough to attract the attention of Kirk Kerkorian, who after some initial resistance from Wynn engineered a $6.6 billion buyout of Mirage Resorts, which was folded into the renamed MGM Mirage. While that deal was being consummated, Wynn went bargain hunting and snapped up the seemingly unwanted Desert Inn for $270 million.

After promising to try “every trick in the book” to turn the Desert Inn around, Wynn quickly gave up and demolished it in favor of Wynn Las Vegas, an attempt to out-Bellagio Bellagio.

At the same time, Wynn already had bigger fish to fry. He’d won one of the initial three (later six) casino concessions in Macau, where he eventually opened four hotel-casinos, then went on to build Encore Las Vegas and secure a concession for what was initially called Wynn Boston Harbor. The man seemed unstoppable. 

Then the whole thing collapsed.

We don't need to go into the sordid details (if you like, search the QoD archives for our coverage of them), but in 2018, a Wall Street Journal story led to Wynn's sudden resignation as Chairman and CEO of Wynn Resorts and the liquidation of his ownership in his namesake company. The Nevada Gaming Commission attempted to bar him from ever doing business in the Silver State, but Wynn beat that one in court. His age and damaged reputation make it highly improbable that he will ever be a force in casinos again.

By the same token, it's unlikely there will ever be a force in the casino business as strong as, or more influential Las Vegan than, Steve Wynn.