Question of the Day - 01 February 2024

On July 26, 1993, Ray Cuddy and Jacob Sherwood broke into the Spanish Trail home of Kevyn Wynn, Steve Wynn’s older daughter. When she came home from having dinner with family at the Mirage around 10 that night, the men, wearing masks, overpowered her. She thought she’d interrupted a burglary, until the men informed her that they were after money from her father’s casino.

They shoved into her bedroom, then helped themselves to six figures worth of her jewelry, forced her to take off her clothes, put tape over her eyes, and placed sunglasses over them. Then they took compromising photographs of her and told her that if either she or her father went to the police, they’d sell the pictures to the National Enquirer.

Next, Kevyn Wynn was tied up and placed on the floor of the back seat of her car with a quilt thrown over her. and driven to a long-term parking lot at McCarran Airport.

Meanwhile, the kidnappers called the Mirage, insisted on speaking to Steve Wynn, and demanded $2.5 million. And yes, your husband is correct: Even Steve Wynn couldn’t withdraw that much cash from his own cage without attracting an enormous amount of attention to himself and the money. Wynn informed the kidnappers of this.

They hung up, apparently talked it over, then called back with a demand of $1.45 million. Apparently, Wynn figured he could get his hands on that much cash without heat. Either that or he had his own private stash of cash somewhere. Those details have never, at least to our knowledge, been revealed. However it happened, Wynn agreed to the terms, went to the cage, and stashed the cash in a bag.  

The kidnappers instructed Wynn to drive to Sonny’s Saloon, a bar near the Mirage. Wynn told them that he didn’t drive at night, so his driver would deliver the cash. The kidnappers agreed.

Wynn, who’d been warned that he’d be under constant surveillance, called in one of the Mirage’s security officers, who posed as the valet and left the money in the seat of a car at a mini-mart parking lot next door to the bar.

Once the kidnappers had the money, they called Wynn and told him where to find his daughter. Mirage President Bobby Baldwin drove Wynn to the airport where he found Kevyn’s car. And Kevyn.

The Wynns called in the FBI the next morning. It wasn’t a tough case to crack.

One agent later testified that the kidnappers left a trail that would "choke a goat." Phone calls made from the pay phone at Sonny’s Saloon were traced to the men. Surveillance cameras at the airport recorded Kevyn Wynn’s car entering and a Volkswagen, actually registered to one of the kidnappers, following Kevyn's car in, then leaving 20 minutes later. Fingerprints from one of the kidnappers were recovered from the parking-lot ticket linked to the VW.

Dumbest of all, one day after the kidnapping, Ray Cuddy, the "mastermind," put down $130,000, in cash, on a $196,000 red Ferrari Testarossa. The dealer notified the FBI, then identified Cuddy from a photograph the agents showed him. When Cuddy returned to the dealership to pick up the car a week later, he was taken into custody.

Though it was an open-and-shut case, Cuddy and Sherwood refused plea bargains that would’ve resulted in 12-year prison sentences. A jury convicted them both of kidnapping and extortion, enough to keep Cuddy behind bars for 20 years and Sherwood for 14. Both served their full sentences; Sherwood maxed out in 2010 and Cuddy in 2015 at age 69.