F-bleau on ice

Back in June, when I toured the “new look” Tropicana Las Vegas, it was intimated that much of the convention-area furniture and the HDTV sets in the Paradise Tower had been obtained on the cheap from Fontainebleau, when the latter project ran aground. If that’s the case, would-be casino builders in the Vegas area have a chance to snap up everything except the bathroom sink (and, who knows, maybe that too). In one of his crassest moves, owner Carl Icahn is raiding the property for anything that’s not nailed down and holding one ginormous garage sale. The New York Post story implies that Icahn’s suffering “buyer’s remorse” after snapping up F-bleau at bankruptcy auction for a pittance.

Did Icahn jump without looking? Although he said he might be willing to sit on the property until 2015, his patience didn’t last anywhere near that long. The kind of Vegas comeback that justifies this property is still a good ways off. As for that “70% complete” figure that keeps being thrown around, I took a gander at F-bleau last night and I’m still not buying it. Nowhere close. That claim was predicated on many of the lower hotel rooms being fully furnished, so Icahn’s smash-and-grab sale will push the completion percentage below that best-case 70% mark.

Maybe Icahn will get his $151 million back this way but who’s going to want F-bleau now? Penn National Gaming ultimately found the completion cost too rich for its blood. The land might be more without the white elephant that’s sitting atop it. If Icahn wants to be fondly remembered around here, he’ll implode the damn thing. The time has come to pull the plug on F-bleau once and for all.

On a happier note, they’re hiring at Cosmopolitan Las Vegas and doing it online, presumably from fear of being stampeded with untold thousands of applicants if they took resumes “live.” The Cosmo has already hired at least 500 people and will eventually staff up to 10 times that level, at least initially. Our designated Debbie Downer, Sharron Angle, would doubtless disapprove, given that she said jobs at CityCenter weren’t “real jobs” and simply resulted in layoffs elsewhere up the Strip. Got a problem with free market economics, has she?