Revel: What’s -$2 billion among friends?

Stephen Sweeney (D, right), president of the New Jersey state senate, has the honor of having been the first to call for ex-Revel CEO Kevin DeSanctis‘ head on a platter. Garden State regulators moved quickly to put Mohegan Sun veteran Jeffrey Hartmann in DeSanctis’ place, while the latter and colleague Michael Garrity sail away on $7.2 million worth of golden parachutes. Failure is lucrative, at least if you’re a suit at Revel Group. The latter remains tethered to the casino, despite its haplessness, so that the resort can keep the Revel name. However, given how low the $2.4 billion megaresort has fallen, now worth only $450 million, if ever there was a time to re-brand, this is it. If the prospective, Reno-based owners of Trump Plaza can do it …

Hartmann’s got his work cut out: Revel is looking at no profits until 2017 and its 2014 ROI will be one quarter of one percent (yes, 0.25%). A DeSanctis protegé and number cruncher par excellence, he’ll act as a glorified chief restructuring officer, worrying over matters as small as literally saving money on toilet paper. He doesn’t sound like Mr. Long-Term Solution and his new position is a provisional one. After Revel emerges from bankruptcy, Hartmann’s role will be re-evaluated by the creditors to whom he reports. (Ironically, that makes him not unlike those Revel rank and file who were term-limited in their jobs by DeSanctis.) Since the previous regime is blamed for alienating even its target customers, Hartmann’s team will have to do nothing short of reintroduce Revel to the market and erase most of its previous impressions. Easy as pie, right? I don’t envy these guys.

Revel will have company in its misery, as neglect continues to erode business at Bally’s Wild Wild West. A mooted retheming has been on hold for over a year, as customers drift away. It might not make financial sense to redo Bally’s at this time, but did it a year ago either? The cobbled-together casino is a metaphor for Caesars Entertainment CEO Gary Loveman‘s history of hatching an idea, pursuing it partway to fruition, then haring off in another direction. Just think: He could have renamed the made-over property “Boardwalq.”

Slots in a mall turned out to be a succes d’estime for the Tropicana Atlantic City, popular on weekends and in warm weather, but otherwise ignored. (One of these days, somebody’s going to try and put slots out on the Boardwalk itself, I swear.) So the one-armed bandits in The Quarter are going to be operated on a diminished basis. Hey, give CEO Anthony Rodio credit for trying something different, as many others in the Garden State are doing. It didn’t work entirely according to plan but it yielded half a loaf, always better than none.

I was wrong. Instead of going up against other industry heavyweights for a casino license in Massachusetts, developer Neil Bluhm is opting to bid on the lower-cost, higher-taxed slot parlor instead. In light of recent — and expensive — Bluhm projects, a grind joint didn’t seem like a move that would be his style. But he’s got a host city (Worcester) and a string of East Coast casinos that makes his Bay State competition look puny. It’s hardly a done deal but Bluhm’s wallet, casino portfolio and political connections move him to ‘prohibitive favorite’ status.