Case Bets: Caliendo, ColSux & Sixty Votes’ latest

After 14 months on the job as Monte Carlo‘s resident headliner, Frank Caliendo is calling it quits, effective some time next spring. The impressionist and Fox Sports regular cited having to spend time away from his family and the rigors of commuting (from Phoenix?!?!?) as reasons for hanging up his John Madden riffs. Caliendo’s show isn’t nearly as physically rigorous as Donny & Marie or Terry Fator: Ventriloquism in Concert, both of which play schedules identical to Caliendo’s, but not everybody’s cut out for long Strip runs. Since MGM Resorts International appears to have a solid box office hit in Jabbawockeez‘s müs.i.c, there’s no danger of the former Lance Burton Theater going dark. Then again, Monte Carlo could always bring back … Lance Burton, still without a new Las Vegas gig after all these months. As for Caliendo, it was good while it lasted.

Bennett bio botched. There’s a good biography to be extracted from the troubled life and eventful times of Excalibur and Luxor creator Bill Bennett. Unfortunately, Forgotten Man is not that book. Author Jack Sheehan really phoned this one in, so much so that it’s like reading through piles of semi-organized interview transcripts. The physical presentation by Stephens Press is beautiful but its editorial input seems to have MIA. Still, Bennett emerges as an eminently fair employer, one who didn’t just believe in trickle-down economics but actually practiced them. If Circus Circus had a good year, he reasoned, the employees should get a piece of it. I wonder what he’d think of the fiscal pickle into which the casino industry got and the ways — like suspension of 401(k) plans — it’s used to extricate itself.

Gone, baby, gone. Private equity fund Blackstone Group has essentially repossessed 14 hotels it sold to Columbia Sussex in 2005. For good measure, it kicked out ColSux management, which it had previously intended to retain. The $1.4 billion hotel purchase, combined with CEO William J. Yung III‘s vastly more expensive acquisition of Aztar Corp.’s casinos, was a splurge that has left the Kentucky-based hotelier in a world of hurt. One of its two remaining casinos, the perennially overpriced Westin Casuarina, is probably next to go, leaving the leased Horizon, in Lake Tahoe. Some of the Blackstone-acquired hotels are being boycotted due to ColSux’s anti-union policies, so it will be interesting to see how the next act of that particular drama plays out.

The ‘fix’ isn’t in. Expect to start hearing a lot about Carcieri v. Salazar, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that bars so-called “reservation shopping” by tribes recognized after 1934. The Secretary of Interior cannot take land into trust for them. Ergo, no tribal casinos for tribes whose federal status postdates Franklin Delano Roosevelt‘s first term in office, basically. The House of Representatives has passed a rider known as the “Carcieri fix,” which restores to the Interior Dept. the powers the Supremes took away.

When the appropriations bill upon which Carcieri is riding goes to the Senate, it will be at the mercy of Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who sets the calendar. And which way do you think Old Sixty Votes is leaning on this one? He’s tilting towards a countervailing bill from gorgon-like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) which would require tribes to demonstrate not only ancestral ties to land they want taken into trust but contemporary ones as well. That’s such a tall order it’ll have a chilling effect on the expansion of tribal casinos, as intended. Considering that Reid’s casino-industry backers in Nevada, perhaps even tribal-friendly Station Casinos, stand to gain more than they lose from the Feinstein bill, expect the House bill to be thwarted and Feinstein’s to be appended to the backside of some must-pass piece of legislation. If it has to be advanced as a stand-alone bill, Feinstein and Reid will probably bide their time until the next Congress, with its dramatically changed complexion.