Somebody Sent Us These II

Continuing a very occasional series, here are some casino-related ephemera that have washed up on the shores of cyberspace. For instance …

… only about 25% of the rooms at the newly announced Gansevoort Las Vegas will enjoy this particular Strip view. Guess which ones will command the premium price points? And how many Strip hotels will be able to boast that the best views are to be had from the bathroom? Now there’s a marketing hook! But not as compelling …

… as all-you-can-eat caviar. For that kind of culinary largesse, I’d gladly drop $38 at Bellagio on a buffet dinner. Of course, you’d need a wheelbarrow to get me back to the garage … especially after that theoretical, $8 “bucket of Bloody Marys.” However, you still have to go to New York City if you want to drop $666 on the Douche Burger, a caloric atrocity that seems tailor-made for the more uncouth elements of the Sin City clientele. A Strip restaurant that cross-pollinates a David Lynch TV series with Hooters seems like a hoax in the making. But Twin Peaks is the real thing and but one of many. Satire is quickly becoming impossible, especially …

… when it comes to bizarrely imitative architecture. China has us hopelessly beaten — clobbered insensate, you might say. Not even Sheldon Adelson at most extravagant could match these. I guess we’ll have to come up with something original instead. Even the Philippines are giving Las Vegas a run for its money, judging by $1.2 billion Solaire Resort & Casino, whose design scheme has my correspondents making comparisons to Wynncore. It certainly has that overripe look. Or do you disagree?

U.S. casino operators, however, will undoubtedly continue to give the Philippine archipelago a wide berth, especially with the FBI looking into a little $25 million matter known to some as “bribery.” It looks like Kazuo Okada‘s Universal Entertainment was a little careless with its petty cash, resulting in a “payment the company now says should never have been made.” Yeah, that’s one way of putting it when 25 million clams have changed hands in exchange for land rights you got for free a year earlier. Whoops. Since a Nevada-based Okada subsidiary was responsible for the jiggery-pokery, our friend Kazuo (right) finds himself in the hot seat again. Three mid-level flunkies have been blamed for the creative accounting, although Universal hasn’t explained how this came to be. As Steve Wynn learned, almost too late, where Okada goes, trouble is close behind.

However … no Vegas casino has (to our knowledge) been taken to the cleaners in a $33 million caper. That’s what happened to James Packer‘s Crown Casino, in Melbourne, where the internal-surveillance system was tapped into and turned against the house. “Packer’s 11” was evidently an inside job: “a member of gambling staff in the VIP area had been sacked,” reported SkyNews with poker-faced detachment. Things have been going so well for the misfortune-prone Packer of late, I suppose a kick in the pants from Fate was overdue.

One of my sources insists — I repeat, insists — that Boyd Gaming had a $500 million offer on the table for its Echelon site for at least a year. That’d be $5.75 million an acre, leading one to wonder why Boyd eventually deemed a considerably lower offer from Genting to be the better deal.