The Great Casino Salesman

These days Las Vegas has become so sanitized that some casino operators are complaining. The city's largest hotel, the Excalibur, is a medieval castle that looks like Cinderella's at Disney World. The hotel that Bugsy Siegel built, the Flamingo, is now owned by Hilton. Characters like Benny Binion, who bragged of killing those who crossed him, and Bill Harrah, who in his 60s drag-raced with teenagers on Reno streets, have been displaced by quiet, invisible graduates of business schools. The last convicted felon to be spotted by a local columnist on the Strip was Michael Milken, the junk-bond king. "What this town needs," says Bob Stupak, the crusty owner of Vegas World, "is that scent of vice, a little sin, to stir that desire to come to Las Vegas."

What Las Vegas has instead is Steve Wynn, a casino king who is the son of a compulsive gambler and has an eye disease that could make him blind; who in his late 30s took up steer roping, wind surfing, rock climbing, motocrossing, jet skiing and body building; who once called Donald Trump "twinkle toes"; who let Frank Sinatra pinch his cheek in a commercial for his casinos; who divorced his wife, never moved out and remarried her five years later; and who shot off his index finger two years ago while handling a pistol in his office.

But that is not what makes Wynn interesting. He is on a mission to gentrify gambling in America, cleansing it of its associations with high life and low life while delivering it to a suburb near yours as the innocuous extension of the middle-class weekend outing. Wynn's gambling has neither neon, push-up bras nor black-tie croupiers from the French Riviera. In fact it is not even called gambling. "I'm in the recreation business," he insists.

In many ways, Wynn represents the new face of gambling in America, ingratiating and scrubbed, ready to join with Reagan's "Morning in America" adman to soften resistance to what once was considered a slightly sinful indulgence. Partly because of salesmen like him, gambling is spreading so quickly and quietly across the country these days, says David Johnston, the author of Temples of Chance, that "few people realize Minnesota has more casinos than Atlantic City." The business has exploded in just over a decade, with casino revenues going from $2 billion a year in 1978 to nearly $10 billion today. In 1990 there were just three states with casinos, not counting those on Indian reservations; now there are 16.