at the time Bally’s was beginning construction of its new casino, Coin-Op physically separated itself from Runyon, but Runyon remained its only customer. And if Coin-Op/Runyon weren’t enough, there was Dino Cellini. O’Donnell had hired him as a slot salesman despite the fact that Cellini had run a casino in Cuba for Meyer Lansky—even more baggage. O’Donnell had to know he’d have big problems being licensed.
Despite his many ties with unsavory people, Bill O’Donnell refused to go quietly. At the hearing on his application, he offered an impressive parade of character witnesses to convince the commission he should be licensed. The witnesses included the former head of the Chicago Strike Force; a retired agent in charge of the FBI’s Chicago office; and a former U.S. Attorney with a record of prosecuting organized crime. Touching every base he called a federal judge, two Jesuit priests, and a half dozen bankers who tried to convince the regulators O’Donnell should be licensed. The commission members were impressed. They found, “He is obviously a man with many fine attributes, including those of kindness, generosity, loyalty, intelligence, and leadership ability.” But it wasn’t enough. The taint of dealing with the mob was too much. Like the Perlmans, O’Donnell was forced to leave Bally’s before the casino could be permanently licensed.
Setbacks with the Perlmans and O’Donnell didn’t discourage the mob. They tried to infiltrate casinos that had already been licensed. Golden Nugget, Inc. was an example.
Golden Nugget Chairman Stephen Wynn represented the new, mob-free Las Vegas, and when he decided to branch out to Atlantic City he was licensed without a hitch. Wynn had visited the resort shortly after the 1976 referendum. He was one of a large number of out-of-town investors who came to town to size things up, but most of them couldn’t see past the burned out buildings and squalor. They went away—Wynn included—believing it was a big joke, satisfied that Atlantic City could never compete with Las Vegas.
Shortly after Crosby and friends opened Resorts International, Wynn made a return visit. He was dumbfounded by the thousands of people waiting in line for hours to get onto the casino floor. The line went through the hotel lobby and out the door, spilling onto the Boardwalk where police were needed to control the crowd. Once inside, there was pushing and shoving for seats at the blackjack tables. Wynn was in awe of Resorts’ success. “I had never seen anything like it. It made Caesar’s Palace on New Year’s Eve look like it was closed for lunch.”
The unexpected success of Atlantic City’s first casino was like an explosion. It sent out shock waves that stirred interest across the nation. Not since the coming of the railroad had Absecon Island been such hot property. Within no time, there were dozens of firms beating a path to the resort, investing fortunes and gobbling up real estate.
Steve Wynn is typical of the “moneymen” lured to Atlantic City by the news of Resorts International’s profits. Handsome, charming, articulate, and polished, Wynn is a gambling prodigy. His entire life has been involved with gambling. “Since the day I took my first breath I have been a kid who has never had a meal, a dollar for tuition, or a piece of clothing on my back that didn’t come from gambling.” The son of a bingo parlor manager who grew up in suburban Maryland watching his father gamble away his earnings, Wynn learned an important lesson while still a child. “One thing my father’s gambling did was that it showed me at a very early age that if you wanted to make money in a casino the answer was to own one.”
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963 where he was an English major, Wynn went home to Maryland to run his family’s bingo games. Things went well but Wynn was frustrated; bingo was small time and merely whetted his appetite for the real thing—he headed for Las Vegas. Wynn wasn’t there long before he came into contact with a banker named Parry Thomas, who at the time was a major figure in Las Vegas. Thanks to Thomas, when Howard Hughes bought the Frontier Hotel in 1967, Wynn got his first break. At the age of 25 he was named vice-president and put in charge of the slot machine operation. The following year he bought a liquor distributorship, which he owned until 1972 when he parlayed everything for his first big gamble. The $1 million he had raised was used to purchase a casino site from the Hughes organization next to Caesar’s Palace. Wynn knew that Caesar’s didn’t want a competitor right next-door and waited for Caesars to make him an offer; eventually they did—the sale price was $2.5 million.
With the profits from Caesar’s, Wynn bought more than 100,000 shares of stock in the Golden Nugget. Parry Thomas felt the stock was undervalued and told Wynn that if he wanted control of a casino, this was his chance. While the Nugget had a prime location and a popular name, it was poorly managed and had no hotel rooms. Wynn’s stock purchase was enough to gain a seat on the Board of Directors and appointment as executive vice-president. But he wasn’t satisfied; he wanted to be boss, and at the age of 31, made a bold power play. He confronted Golden Nugget President Buck Blaine with proof of mismanagement and stealing by casino employees. Wynn threatened Blaine with a stockholder’s suit, exposing his incompetence, unless he stepped down immediately. Blaine couldn’t take the heat and agreed to exit with a contract as a consultant.
By August 1973, less than a year after his initial stock purchase, Steve Wynn was in charge of the casino. Within a year casino profits skyrocketed from $1.1 million to $4.2 million. By 1977 he completed construction of a 579-room hotel tower, with the casino’s profits soaring to $12 million. Steve Wynn had come a long way from running bingo games.
When Wynn learned of the money being raked in by Resorts International, he decided to fly east again. One look at the lines of people was enough to convince him. He wasted no time looking for a casino site. By the time he left Atlantic City to return to Las Vegas, Wynn had an agreement for a choice piece of real estate. The property chosen was the Strand Motel on the Boardwalk. The Strand was one of the motels built during the ’50s when Atlantic City was trying to capture part of the tourist market traveling in cars. There were a few good seasons but as its novelty wore off, most of the Strand’s rooms were empty. Had Wynn wanted to purchase the site prior to the ’76 referendum, he probably could have acquired it by simply assuming the mortgages against the property; however, by summer 1978, the Atlantic City real estate market was on fire and the sale price was now $8.5 million.
Within months Wynn demolished the Strand and began construction of a tinsel palace that soon became a magnet. Golden Nugget invested nearly $200 million in creating a glittering Victorian hotel casino. With huge murals depicting early 1900s beach scenes, mirrored ceilings and walls, crystal chandeliers, stained glass, marble columns, and gold-colored slot machines, the Golden Nugget was a dazzling, and purposely overstated, piece of architecture (later sold to Bally’s and now the Atlantic City Hilton). It was designed to appeal to the middle-class’s craving for nostalgia and established Wynn’s name in Atlantic City.
Steve Wynn thought he had found a new marketing executive in Mel Harris. He was the person Wynn needed in Atlantic City. They had met during college and Wynn’s wife Elaine had known Harris since high school. The three rekindled their relationship in the early 1980s, and Wynn was so impressed he hired Harris in the summer of 1984 to be vice-president of marketing at a salary of $400,000. Wynn admitted that he thought so highly of Mel Harris he believed Harris might move quickly into the position of chief operating officer, a step below Wynn.
The decision to hire Harris was made with the knowledge that there were some skeletons in his closet. Harris admitted to a “social” relationship with some mob figures. After all, his father “Big Allie” Harris had been one of the biggest bookmakers in the Miami area. In addition, Harris’ first wife was the daughter of Louis Chessler, another Lansky associate who had worked to bring the mob to the casinos in the Bahamas. His security staff was aware of these links, but Wynn concluded that Harris’ social relationships weren’t enough to prevent hiring him. What Wynn didn’t know was that a few months before he was hired, Harris had met with Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno. Fat Tony was head of the Genovese crime family in New York. In December 1984, a month after Mel Harris was elected to Golden Nugget’s Board of Directors, the Division of Gaming learned of the meetings with Salerno. Harris, who
