The Great Casino Salesman

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Wynn's ambitions command attention because he has scored one success after another, even if his first Las Vegas venture was a flop. At 25, he took money he had made in his family's bingo business in Maryland and invested $45,000 to purchase a 3% interest in the Frontier Hotel, where he became the slot manager. But several stockholders of the hotel turned out to be stand-ins for Detroit mobsters, and Wynn was forced to sell early. He was never accused of being anything but an innocent in the affair, and he did get something invaluable out of it: a friendship with the most powerful banker in Las Vegas, E. Parry Thomas. Wynn came to his attention partly because he stood out in the Las Vegas of the late '60s: he was young, fit, wore understated tailor-made suits, had the vocabulary of the English major he had been at the University of Pennsylvania, and had a wife so pretty she had once been voted Miss Miami Beach.

Thomas first set up Wynn in a liquor distributorship and then arranged for him to buy a tiny parcel next to Caesars Palace that was owned by Howard Hughes. News of the sale to Wynn made front-page headlines because it was the first piece of Las Vegas property the reclusive Hughes had ever sold; what also got noticed was the price Caesars paid for the lot 11 months later to keep Wynn from building his own casino there ($2.25 million). Wynn walked away with a nice $766,000 profit. He used that money to accumulate more stock in the aging Golden Nugget casino downtown, got on the board and almost immediately began to investigate the operation. He found that everyone from parking attendants to bartenders was stealing money. With that evidence, he staged a takeover by threatening to sue for mismanagement and, at 31, became the youngest casino chairman in the history of Las Vegas.

In June 1978 he went to Atlantic City, where the first casino had just opened. "I had never seen anything like it," he says. "It made Caesars Palace on New Year's Eve look like it was closed for lunch." Wearing shorts, sandals and a Willie Nelson T shirt, he walked down the Boardwalk to the old Strand Motel; less than an hour later, he walked out having agreed to buy it for $8.5 million in cash. Wynn razed the Strand and built the 506-room Golden Nugget, which quickly exceeded by 50% the revenues it was projected to make based on its size.

In 1987 he sold out to Bally's for a record $440 million. The timing of Wynn's departure from Atlantic City was perfect: within a few months the overbuilt resort began a long slide. By then, Wynn was already focused on his plans for the Mirage in Las Vegas. To build the 3,000-room hotel, he pushed the company's total 1990 debt load to more than $1 billion. He spend $45 million to build a golf course exclusively for high rollers that he lined with 21,000 pine trees trucked in from California and Arizona. The risk paid off: in 1991, the Mirage's second year, operating cash flow hit $201 million, a record for a single casino.