Although Sheldon Adelson was laying covetous eyes upon the Meadowlands last week — and reiterating his risible drivel about the 
mystical power of brick-and-mortar casinos to deter problem gambling — for the time being Las Vegas Sands is upping its bet on Sands Bethlehem. While, by Vegas standards, doubling your room inventory to 600 and increasing your meeting space to handle 500 people doesn’t sound like much, it’s big news back east. There will also be a non-Mario Batali Italian restaurant and one of the Emeril Lagasse restaurants will be swapped out in favor of another, more Cajun-focused.
Sands Bethlehem President Mark Juliano, the man charged with overseeing all this, is the subject of an engaging profile … albeit one which questions whether his anti-loitering program is so much noise. (The propensity of Asian-American players to sell their free-play cards and then either hang out around the casino or its neighborhood was the subject of unflattering New York Times attention earlier this year.) “No one has trouble selling their cards. If they’ve made a policy change, I haven’t seen it. Security still looks the other way,” says player David Kravitz.
In any event, for a man who traded away Marina Bay Sands to run Sands Bethlehem instead, Juliano sounds like a very happy camper.
* Atlantic City Mayor Don Guardian put the best spin he could on the bargain sub-basement sale of Revel to Brookfield Asset Management for $110 million. “These are the first people that realized what I’ve been saying about Atlantic City turning the corner and being a great investment 
due to the low prices,” he announced. Crabby runner-up Glenn Straub, however, intends to raise a stink at tomorrow’s bankruptcy court hearing. Or he might try to top Brookfield’s offer.
At the moment, however, he seems more interesting in airing a laundry list of accusations. To wit, “that Revel improperly accepted a bid from Brookfield after a specified deadline, that Revel’s attorneys reneged on an agreement to share information with him on competing bids, and that six hours of closed-door meetings on what was supposed to be the first day of bidding was improper.” Brookfield, for its part, looks a lot less formidable when you consider that lenders could soon foreclose upon its Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, although Brookfield assures the media that its troubles in Sin City will not impinge on its Boardwalk investment.
Incidentally, Trump Taj Mahal‘s attempt to welsh on its collective bargaining agreement got drop-kicked out of bankruptcy court. “The court does not have authority to reject a portion of a CBA,” Judge Kevin Gross told the litigants. Trump Entertainment Resorts finds itself stuck behind union local Unite-Here, which rejects any concessions, and Carl Icahn, who won’t bail out the Taj without concessions. What are the odds it lasts past mid-November?
* Is SLS Las Vegas struggling? In an effort to court the locals player it’s offering up to $100 in rebates on losses, now through Halloween, provided that you’re a member of the players club. It’s a one-time offer but applies to all games in the SLS casino. Where things get a little dicey is SLS’ extension of the offer to the “greater Las Vegas area,” fuzzy language that could provoke a lot of hair-splitting. The rebate is loaded onto your players’ cards, in shades of a “rebate” program that went over like a lead balloon. Players looking for value probably aren’t going to get all hot and bothered for this promo.
