In terms of quantity, quality and proximity, the Los Angeles Times is the closest thing Las Vegas has to a major metropolitan daily. (Hell, the Sacramento Bee puts the Las Vegas Review-Journal to shame.) Indeed, the LAT treats Sin City as a distant, less-virtuous suburb of the City of Angels. A recent spate of stories jibes with the current trend of cautious optimism in the Vegas casino industry. Admittedly, LAT coverage focuses on our bargain-based appeal, but the perception of affordability is a reliable building block for tourism in Southern Nevada. For instance, the deservedly beloved El Cortez gets a lot of LAT affection, especially for its Cabana Suites, the location of Sharon Stone‘s death scene in Casino. Admittedly, if the rooms are “tiny” in the building’s newish, 64-unit configuration, I’d can only imagine how cramped they were when it was a 120-room motel. However, correspondent Christopher Smith gives them props for decor and value alike. Smith also accords some backhanded compliments to the Plaza Hotel & Casino. Still, I wonder if Tamares Group couldn’t be bothered to paint over water stains on the casino ceiling, how much better could the place be? A less-jaded friend of mine paid the Plaza a visit right after its reopening and fled almost at once, so underwhelmed was she.
Keeping with the bargain-conscious theme, reporter Mary Forgione enumerates 21 Vegas bargains costing less than Continue reading
Having already taken charge of the hotel operations of the JW Marriott Las Vegas Resort & Spa (for historical purposes, best known as The Resort at Summerlin) last summer, Michael Gaughan Jr. 
Las Vegas‘ 
Not even a rocky start in Atlantic City has cooled the ardor of Landry’s Restaurant CEO Tilman Fertitta for new casino acquisitions. Earlier today Landry’s announced that it had bought Isle Casino Hotel, putting Fertitta into the Biloxi market. The colorful executive is promising a large-scale, year-long reinvention of the property (probably well overdue), which will include adding many of the F&B brands already familiar from his Golden Nugget in downtown Las Vegas. While 
Faced with Landry’s aggressive offer (more, in strictly EBITDA-multiple terms, more than Boyd Gaming forked over in its $278 million purchase the nearby Imperial Palace), one can’t blame Isle CEO Virginia McDowell (right) for taking the money and running from Biloxi. While it seems counter-intuitive to bail on the Gulf Coast, Santarelli forecast that the sale would “be well received by investors” and that Biloxi was a “tough and highly competitive” place to do business … especially if you have a superannuated facility, I might add. Meanwhile, Isle GM Doug Shipley has been sent out to walk the casino floor and calm the workforce. If they’re apprehensive, it’s with good reason: Fertitta had a reputation for running a tight and unhappy ship during his early years in Downtown.
“We said to Kevin [Antunes], ‘Listen, we don’t want to hear any accordions in ‘Beat It.’ … It’s gotta be Michael Jackson.’ We said to Jamie [King], ‘We don’t want any — and I don’t want to insult anybody — French clowns dancing at a Michael Jackson show.’ ” — Jackson family attorney John Branca 
Those nice folks at CityLife must think I did all right by that last cover story because they’ve got me taking the lead on their media blitz vis-a-vis the impending (March 12) opening of the Smith Center for the Performing Arts. The three-auditorium venue is a cause near and dear to the hearts of such gaming-industry figures as Jim Murren (who’s in for $1 million), Don Snyder, Elaine Wynn ($5 million), Diana Bennett and others. It’s also the future home-away-from-home of Clint Holmes, hence my tendency to refer to it as SmithCoast. Anyway, I’m looking at a massive stack of reading materials plus a slew of interviews, hence the intermittent nature of S&G this week. Thankfully, things have quieted down a bit since Steve Wynn went thermonuclear on Kazuo Okada‘s posterior.
Wall Street analysts are weighing in on Wynn Resorts‘ preemptive strike against Kazuo Okada last weekend. Surprisingly, J.P. Morgan‘s Joseph Greff rates it as a positive in re Steve Wynn‘s ambitions for expansion into Japan and says it doesn’t hurt him in Macao, either. (So, causing a prominent Japanese businessman to lose face in his own country will have no negative cultural ramifications? Hmmmm … ) Deutsche Bank‘s Carlo Santarelli concludes that the fundamental picture of Wynn Resorts remains the same: “a solid risk reward story with limited expectations and strong free cash flow.” He furthermore noted that Okada knew Wynn’s sleuths were looking into his alleged palm-greasing before he leveled accusations that Steve Wynn was trying to buy influence in Macao, throwing a certain amount of discredit upon Okada’s j’accuse. However, Santarelli appears to walk back his previous remarks vis-a-vis a higher price target for WYNN, which he restates at $148/share. Regardless of how meritorious Okada’s indictment of Wynn was, throwing $135 million at the University of Macau, a gift timed to coincide with the expiration of Wynn’s Macanese casino concession isn’t bribery but it’s as crass, clumsy and heavy-handed a way of currying official favor as any of which I can conceive.
Save the date. Essentially forgotten amidst all the publicity surrounding last week’s opening of the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas, the erstwhile “Mob Experience” at the Tropicana Las Vegas is announcing a March 1 grand reopening. It has been rechristened Mob Attraction Las Vegas (although reader Jeff_in_OKC suggests the more musical “Mobicana Mobarama”) The A/V portions of the exhibit have been “upgraded and enhance[d]” — i.e., they’ve replaced the bells and whistles that got repossessed by 
As his company’s 
“It is hard to value Caesars [Entertainment] based on traditional financial measures because it has consistently lost money since its 2008 leveraged buyout by a group led by Apollo Global Management and TPG Capital. It carries $22.5 billion of debt and burns cash.” — Barron’s Associate Editor Andrew Baryis 
If I had 
Abboud having played the role of outraged carpetbagger, Iarossi turned on Genting Bhd., the favored whipping boy of casino proponents and opponents alike. Even though Sands had spent considerable money on lobbyists like himself, Iarossi felt no compunction about being the pot who called the kettle black. It was Genting‘s lobbyists who were to blame, he asserted, with their “big money splash.” Skepticism about the viability of Genting’s $4 billion, 
As new casino boss Thomas McCartney tries to stabilize the sinking ship that is The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, he’s tossed overboard some human ballast 
Follow the ‘Star. Although Caesars Entertainment‘s answer to lacking a player-capturing presence in regions like New England, Ohio and the Mid-Atlantic states has been to commit itself to new bricks-and-mortar casinos, MGM Resorts International may be inventing a better mousetrap. For a pittance, it’s getting to steer Dan Lee‘s in-progress Mojito Pointe casino, in the premier Louisiana market, Lake Charles. Now comes a reciprocal player-incentive alliance with Ameristar Casinos, thereby extending MGM’s corporate tendrils into Iowa, Indiana, Missouri and Colorado. There are more goodies in the deal 
Kazuo Okada either won or lost his first skirmish with Wynn Resorts last week, depending on which newspaper you read. Perhaps wary of displeasing a big advertiser, the Las Vegas Review-Journal spun the outcome as a Wynn-win situation, based on the fact that Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez (right) restricted Okada’s process to “reasonable” limits, pending some “serious questions” she had about certain requests (Translation: No fishing expeditions for Mr. O). But if you read the Las Vegas Sun, it’s apparent that Okada 
“It’s one of the imperatives of the Las Vegas hype machine that we never allow ourselves to dwell on our mistakes, publicly or privately. How many people remember Avenue Q at Wynn? Hairspray at Luxor? Columbia Sussex at the Tropicana? The Hacienda casino? It’s as if these things never existed, and they’ve been swept from the collective Las Vegas psyche that’s always focused on looking to the next play.” — David G. Schwartz, director of UNLV‘s Center for Gaming Research writing in the Two Way Hard Three blog.
Making a pilgrimage to Lourdes is so 20th century, especially when you can go to Planet Hollywood and worship at the feet of a Jersey Shore cast member. No word on whether last weekend’s manifestation of the inexplicable cultural artifact known as “Jwoww” to her acolytes caused the blind to see, the crippled to walk or madmen to come to their senses. Probably the other way around, from the look of things.
An S&G source says Creative Casinos CEO Dan Lee has arranged mezzanine financing and may soon go to the bond market to raise capital, presumably for Mojito Pointe for potentially for ventures elsewhere. The Lake Charles market draws heavy play from Houston‘s Vietnamese-American community, I’m told, and Mojito Pointe manager-to-be MGM Resorts International already has a presence in Vietnam. Lee’s old company, Pinnacle Entertainment is also going into ‘Nam so it would be true to form for Lee to crash Pinnacle’s party … again. Sahara owner Sam Nazarian (left) is also said to be schlepping a $450 million bond offering around, to finance a makeover of Sam’s Place. We hear he’s had trouble finding takers in Los Angeles but, if successful, plans to re-skin the buildings and market the Sahara as an alternative to the Cosmopolitan … although the jury’s still out on the Cosmo’s business model, even at one of the best intersections on the Strip.