Wynn some, lose some

by ANDREW GUMBEL

Steve Wynn ruled Las Vegas. Politicians, superstars and Mobsters all paid court to his high-rolling genius. But now, with one huge throw of the dice, he is gone.

Even by the hyperbolic standards of Las Vegas, Steve Wynn is quite something. A visionary, they call him. A genius. A god. A man who, virtually single-handed, rebuilt America's gambling mecca from the ruins of its Mobster-tainted past and made it look respectable for the new millennium. A man who proved that Vegas - a town once notorious for loose morals, fast living and financial transactions murky enough to blot out the desert sun - was safe for children, for families, and even for respectable business corporations.

Most of all, Wynn is a man of imagination, unafraid to recreate the pirate ships of the high seas or the splendours of the Italian Renaissance, and hang the cost. He sank a staggering $US1.6 billion ($3.2 billion) into his luxury dreamboat hotel, the Bellagio, and, to prove he wasn't going to be content with computer-coordinated dancing fountain displays, hand-blown glass ceiling ornaments and gourmet Italian cuisine, stuffed it full of Impressionist masterpieces from his private art collection.

A man like that can go far in so impressionable a town as Vegas, and indeed Wynn became known as the most powerful man in Nevada. Politicians jumped at his command, candidates prostrated themselves to seek his endorsement and his campaign contributions, city planners re-routed roads and sewers at his behest, water authorities allowed him to siphon off millions of precious gallons to feed his private golf course, and a coterie of public officials, showbiz superstars, prominent businessmen, university luminaries and assorted minions rushed to pay homage at every opportunity.

But something odd has happened to Wynn's reign as the undisputed king of the Las Vegas casino world. It has just ended, abruptly, spectacularly, and utterly without warning. This month, after more than a decade of undisputed dominance, his Mirage Resorts empire was eaten up in one enormous corporate gulp by its rival MGM Grand Inc for a dizzying $US6.4 billion ($13 billion), the largest buy-out in the history of the gambling industry.

For sure there have been problems, notably some tough competition from the Bellagio's new competitors on the Strip, the Paris and the Venetian, and a slow start to business at his Beau Rivage resort in Biloxi, Mississippi. Mirage Resorts' share price has fallen from a high of almost $US27 ($55) last May to less than $US11 ($22) at the end of February. But there was nothing to suggest Wynn would give up so easily after a 30-year career of one-man empire-building, and a driving ambition to match that of his perennial rival, the New York construction magnate Donald Trump.

"This capitulation by a man considered egomaniacal is of record proportion," said Robert Chapman, who runs a Los Angeles-based hedge fund specialising in mergers. "Nobody in the arbitrage community expected him to roll over this fast."

Like a mirage in the desert, then, he is gone. Not that Wynn will go away empty-handed. His personal compensation for the deal runs to $US483 million ($985 million), enough to start a new gambling empire if he really wanted one, and certainly more than ample for him to pursue his passions for golf and art and indulge his little fantasy of one day owning a basketball team.

But Wynn, a youthful 58, has seemingly given up being a player. With the merger, his political power has vanished in a puff of smoke and his ability to keep innovating with bigger and glitzier resort hotels has been cut from under him. What could possibly motivate such an abdication?

"I think the guy's basically had enough," Chapman suggested.

Enough of what?

That's not a question Wynn seems ready to answer. After a lifetime of bragging about his achievements and inviting questions on any topic, no matter how uncomfortable, the casino king has gone strangely quiet.

"The man who never shut up has shut up," commented John L Smith, author of a tough biography about Wynn and a columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the city's leading daily.

It is worth remembering that in a town as slippery as Vegas, nothing is ever quite as it seems and everything is forever subject to sudden change. For all the adulation he has attracted, Wynn has always been a deeply ambivalent figure in keeping with the shifting sands of his chosen environment.

On the one hand, here was a man with an Ivy League education, effortlessly elegant taste in clothes and a publically displayed taste for art, in stark contrast to the loud-suited Mob types and the neon vulgarities of the Strip.

On the other hand, Wynn was also the hustling son of a small-time bingo operator who had grown up in the old Vegas and, throughout his career, brushed up against accusations of ties to the Mafia and personal responsibility for everything from money-laundering to drug-dealing.

Wynn likes to say the Mob has been a "non-event" in his life story, but this is also the town of Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky and a clutch of other famous pioneer gangsters, and it would be disingenuous to think he had managed to shrug off their legacy as easily as he has made out, time and again, to federal investigators and licensing boards considering the allegations against him.

"Wherever he has been, the Mob has been close by," Smith writes in his biography, Running Scared.

Wynn's first investment, made through his late father's gambling contacts in 1967, was in the Frontier hotel, an operation so dodgy it resulted in the conviction of three Cosa Nostra figures from Detroit on federal racketeering charges. His next, involving a highly advantageous land-swap deal with Howard Hughes, was the Golden Nugget casino, in which other investors were known associates of Jimmy Hoffa's Mafia-ridden Teamsters Union, which had previously invested heavily in Vegas.

Among Wynn's social contacts at the time were Niggy Devine, a courier for Meyer Lansky, and Maurice Friedman, a business associate of the Detroit Mob leaders. In their company in 1967, he joined a private yacht cruise notable for the accidental death of a young woman passenger who somehow fell over the back of the boat, stark naked, and was chewed to a pulp by the propeller blades.

As his business ventures prospered, Wynn sought new financing from Michael Milken, the junk-bond king later convicted for his role in the grand orgy of corruption on Wall Street in the late 1980s, and branched out to Atlantic City. There, however, he nearly lost his gaming licence after a Mafioso called Tony Castelbuono was caught recycling the profits of heroin trafficking at the gambling tables. It did not help that Wynn later sought Castelbuono's investment advice and went skiing with him.

In 1983, Wynn was prevented from expanding his operations to London after a Scotland Yard report alleged that he had links to the Genovese Cosa Nostra family.

"The man has made an untold fortune in an industry which historically has been proved to be replete with organised crime," the British lead investigator, Frank Pulley, commented. "It was invented by the Mob, it was modernised by the Mob, the Mob have put money into it, and they've taken vast amounts of money out of it."

These are not the stories Las Vegas usually hears about Steve Wynn. In a town that has legitimised much that is illegal elsewhere, and has striven to sell itself as something more wholesome than it is, a man like Wynn is, if anything, admired for his ability to keep his investments just beyond the spotlight of federal investigators. There has never been any major official judgment against him. More often, he is remembered for the opulent luxury of his resorts - the Mirage, Treasure Island and the Bellagio - and the flamboyance of his personality.

Not all of the latter is entirely positive. He has a reputation for vanity (he has had at least one facelift and takes great pride in his tanned, highly coiffed appearance), has a notorious penchant for his own female blackjack dealers, and a celebrated temper that has seen him hurling large ashtrays at employees who provoke his displeasure. But in Vegas they are seen as signs of a certain macho charm. In what other city would a business entrepreneur accidentally shoot off his left index finger, as Wynn did in 1991, with a handgun given to him by a former Chicago Mob hitman?

The emblematic Wynn moment that will go down in Vegas history came in 1993, when he symbolically blew up the Dunes Hotel, once the Mafia's favourite hangout, to make way for the corporate-financed, impeccably upscale Bellagio. That was supposed to be the moment the old Las Vegas finally crumbled and the new, cleaner Vegas took over.

In reality, the transition was never going to happen that fast. With his volcanic personality and his colourful history, Wynn has always been too stealthy and too sly to be fully convincing as the face of the future. He certainly introduced Vegas to the world of mainstream corporate financing, and now the MGM buy-out is likely to solidify the ties with Wall Street.

Wynn himself, though, seems destined to keep running. Maybe he will buy the crumbling Desert Inn on the north end of the Strip, as some are speculating, or maybe he will bolt out of town and find a new beginning elsewhere.

The high-life might be over for him, but with his wealth the options are wide open. As John Smith remarked: "If we could all have an end like that ..."

If nothing else, Wynn played the odds and pulled out while he was ahead. In a gambling town like Vegas, that is reason enough to shower him with admiration.

- INDEPENDENT