{"id":78,"date":"2009-02-03T17:12:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-03T21:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/blogs\/dmckee\/index.cfm\/2009\/2\/3\/Case-Bets-Seminoles-Tropicana-Shuffle-Master-Stanley-Ho"},"modified":"2022-02-08T07:12:59","modified_gmt":"2022-02-08T15:12:59","slug":"case-bets-seminoles-tropicana-shuffle-master-stanley-ho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/case-bets-seminoles-tropicana-shuffle-master-stanley-ho\/","title":{"rendered":"Case Bets: Seminoles, Tropicana, Shuffle Master, Stanley Ho"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seminoles offer<\/strong> to lay $288 million and 12,000 new jobs on the table, for starters. Sunshine State Republicans blow them a raspberry. Constitutional or not, Gov. Charlie Crist<\/strong>‘s compact put a good deal in place for both sides. (It wasn’t so good if you were a non-tribal casinos, but they’d been underperforming even before<\/em> Crist gave the Seminoles table games.) Unfortunately, Florida solons seem bent on pissing it away for a variety of reasons, spite — mainly toward Crist — not least among them.<\/p>\n

Good news at Trop(s)<\/strong>. It’s a rare and welcome day for Tropicana Entertainment<\/strong> when it can announce not one but two pieces of good news in the same day. At the Tropicana Las Vegas<\/strong>, a marketing firm has been retained to try and reposition the LV Trop<\/a> as a service-and-value-oriented property. TropEnt promises “to elevate its service and value standards,\u201d in a slap at Columbia Sussex<\/strong>, its nominal parent company.<\/p>\n

Out East, you can stick a fork in the Cordish Co<\/strong>. purchase of the Tropicana Atlantic City<\/strong>, now that the former has missed the deadline<\/a> for reaching an agreement. What’s the response from hapless Trop trustee Gary Stein<\/strong>? Why, to extend the sale another three months<\/em>, of course. His Plan B<\/a> would involve dropping any minimum-bid requirement from the bankruptcy auction.<\/p>\n

Sending the Trop to Chapter 11 auction without a stalking-horse bidder hardly looks like a strategy that will drive the price up. ColSux was a lousy owner but neither it nor its creditors deserve to be ripped off like this.<\/p>\n

As for Cordish, Stein is playing the role of battered spouse in a co-dependent\/abusive relationship. Cordish, he coos, is still “actively engaged … They have certainly not withdrawn.” Why anybody would still listen to Stein, whose credibility is somewhere south of zero by now, is a mystery for the ages. Enough!<\/em> It’s well past time that the New Jersey Casino Control Commission<\/strong> sacked this sorry excuse for a trustee. These monkeyshines aren’t remotely funny anymore and the vaudeville hook is way overdue.<\/p>\n

Unless the NJCCC knows something the rest of us don’t, there’s no longer any viable excuse for not giving TropEnt at least a probationary interval as owner\/operator. Its creditors have every incentive to make revenue grow there if they’re to see their money again — unlike ColSux which was acted as though it was perfectly happy to drive financial performance straight into the ground so long as the Trop was run on the cheap.<\/p>\n

At least one<\/strong> Wall Street analyst likes Shuffle Master<\/strong>‘s choice of CEO<\/a> better than I do. Timothy Parrott<\/strong> is a great guy for all I know, but there’s little in his recent background to suggest that he’s the turnaround specialist Shuffle Master needs.<\/p>\n

Stanley Ho, sugar daddy<\/strong>. The godfather of Macanese gambling has shown a sudden upsurge of interest<\/a> in the fortunes of Australia’s Labor Party<\/strong>, funneling $587,000-plus into its coffers. As though to prove it isn’t completely Dr. Ho’s bitch, the ALP returned $326,000 from Angela Leong<\/strong> (aka<\/em> Mrs. Stanley Ho). Because, you know, they’ve got standards. Yeah, that’s it. (It’s not unlike the Obama administration’s exception-proves-the-rule attitude toward appointing lobbyists to critical guvmint jobs. Plus \u00e7a change<\/em> and all that.)<\/p>\n

Seems the ALP has been talking a good game about cleaning up campaign finance — and the conservatives who’ve been resistant — while raking in beaucoup<\/em> HoBucks, even if they say they returned two-thirds of the money. Because $195K is totally cool but $587K would be de trop<\/em>, I guess.<\/p>\n

Or was the total extent of ALP-accepted Ho largesse even larger still<\/a> … like $912,000 maybe? The numbers are all over the one place but one thing is for sure: In the words of Opposition parliamentarian Michael Ronaldson<\/strong>, “The whole deal simply doesn’t pass the sniff test.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seminoles offer to lay $288 million and 12,000 new jobs on the table, for starters. Sunshine State Republicans blow them a raspberry. Constitutional or not, Gov. Charlie Crist‘s compact put a good deal in place for both sides. (It wasn’t … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[106,23,103,15,36,33,25,107,61,9,20,21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30702,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions\/30702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}