The Great Casino Salesman

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Even the most stalwart opponents of gambling are breaking down. Louisiana, whose constitution orders the legislature to "suppress" gambling, decided to call it something else and in less than two years has gone from no gambling to riverboat gambling to approving the largest casino in the world on five riverfront acres in downtown New Orleans. Last fall the Bible Belt state of Missouri became a destination for riverboat gamblers off the shores of Kansas City and St. Louis. By the turn of the century, half of the states or more will probably have casinos, in part because of a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision that recognized the right of Indian tribes to offer gambling games on their reservations. There are efforts to build casinos in downtown Detroit and Chicago, in pastoral New Hampshire and Maine, in the desert elegance of California's Palm Springs, at historic Penn's Landing in Philadelphia, and on the lakefront sites of abandoned steel mills in Gary, Indiana. Some entrepreneurs are even talking of the day when Americans will find video slot machines at every local bar or bet from their living rooms through interactive television.

In this crowded field, Wynn stands out not because he owns the nation's biggest casino company (Caesars is, with revenues last year of $928.5 million in contrast to $833 million for Wynn's Mirage Resorts Inc.) or because he is the first to think of inserting family fun into betting parlors (Circus Circus Enterprises Inc. did in the mid-'70s, with acrobats and clowns performing above the casino floor). But he is the first to apply to gambling the Disney formula for class-crossing, universal family leisure: cleanliness, measured frivolity and a sense of architectural detail. In the right environment, he argues, everybody and nobody is a gambler. "This place is filled with people like me and you -- none of whom think of themselves as gamblers," he says from his casino office. "They think of themselves as folks who are on vacation, and while they're here -- hey, let's put some money in the slot machine."

The Wynn philosophy seems to work. His three-year-old, $730 million casino in Las Vegas, the Mirage, is the biggest moneymaker on the Strip, at least in part because patrons come to see the man-made volcano out front that erupts at night every 15 minutes, the sharks swimming behind the registration desk, the white tigers lounging below Roman columns in their glass cage and the dolphins in the seaquarium. His new Treasure Island casino, to open in October, will re-create at hourly intervals a cannon fight between two battleships and offer a permanent home to the elegant Cirque du Soleil. If Wynn gets his way, he will be permitted to build two casinos in Connecticut that will mix betting with moviegoing, ice skating and line dancing. And his next project in Las Vegas will envelop gambling inside a 160-acre resort that will include a golf course, intimate villages, a replica of Rick's Cafe Americain (the gambling joint from the movie Casablanca,) and a 14-acre lake where visitors can water- ski during the day and watch a laser show at night.