Rushing in where angels fear to tread, Kazuo Okada (right) has broken ground on his $2 billion, two-casino megaresort in the Philippines. You may remember the project as a bitter point of contention between Okada and erstwhile BFF Steve Wynn, who alleges that Okada tried to drag Wynn Resorts into it, by hook or by crook. Now Okada says he “is in talks to get a local partner.” That’s a euphemism for, “I’m in too deep, would somebody please bail me out?” We’ve heard close variants of it from Morgans Hotel Group, when it overpaid for the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, and from Las Vegas Sands when it had committed to a retail mall at Sands Bethlehem and found money running short. The fact that Okada is rattling his tin cup up and down the archipelago speaks to the leeriness major gaming operators display toward the Filipino gambling industry. Genting‘s Hong Kong subsidiary is pursuing a casino of its own … but is spreading the risk among a multiplicity of partners.
Wynn may need to choose his friends more carefully. First Okada, now UFC thug Alistair Overeem, who brought Encore free publicity — of the let’s-find-the-crime-scene sort — when he shoved a woman in the face, during New Year’s Weekend. The Lorenzo Fertitta employee was charged with battery yesterday. Defense attorney David Chesnoff must have been getting a contact high off all that testosterone and Axe body spray. He proclaimed, “There are two sides to this story.” Up yours, Chesnoff! There is no side to any story that justifies hitting a woman. Your parents must have given you a real careless upbringing, counselor.
Someone who pushed people around, in a figurative way, was über-lobbyist Harvey Whittemore (left), the former poster boy for “juice” in Nevada. Now his finances will be poked and prodded while former business partners sue him for embezzlement. Since the news broke, the Reno Police Department and the State Bar of Nevada have taken an interest, as today’s Las Vegas Review-Journal reports, and the Gaming Control Board may be on the case, too. (Two of the litigants are shareholders in the Peppermill Resort Spa Casino, near Reno, and had been pursuing a controversial gaming development in Sparks.) According to the suit, it wasn’t the failed, infamous Coyote Springs exurb — Whittemore’s signature project — that sucked up the money but the rainmaker’s high-on-the-hog lifestyle.
When he was still on top of the world, Whittemore strong-armed the Sparks City Council mercilessly in the case of the Lazy 8, which has since turned into a bottomless ethical quagmire for several of the key players. But his fortunes appear to have taken a downward swing in recent years: He traded in a prestigious, high-profile job at Lionel, Sawyer & Collins, the gaming-law firm in town, for what the R-J describes as “a small law office in Reno.” How the mighty have fallen.
