The Great Casino Salesman

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In many ways, Wynn is a hybrid of the old and new Las Vegas. He came to Las Vegas at a time when banks like Thomas' relied for some of their deposits on the Mob-controlled Teamsters Central States Pension Fund. But Wynn was also one of the first Las Vegas entrepreneurs to turn to Milken's junk bonds when it came time to build Atlantic City's Golden Nugget. He still refers to a casino as "the joint." But he was also the first in the business to decide to turn up the lights on the casino floor, and the only one ever to write a ballet about the history of Las Vegas. In his name dropping, he is just as likely to mention Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould as he is Sinatra.

On the one hand, he donates money for college scholarships, organizes massive registration drives among his employees, endows university chairs and sends out a newsletter to senior citizens that features everything from pending state legislation to muffin recipes. On the other hand, Wynn continues to make headlines for investigations into the possible organized-crime connections of some of his top employees. Just last week he appeared before the Nevada Gaming Commission to defend his father's bookmaker, Charles Meyerson, whom Steve hired 13 years ago as a host for Atlantic City's Golden Nugget and who is paid $400,000 a year today to do the same job for the Mirage. Police had alleged that Meyerson arranged for free hotel rooms, food and beverage for 59 mobsters and convicted criminals since the 1980s, including three men connected to the Genovese crime family who showed up at the Mirage last July. Wynn argued that Meyerson had no special relationship with any of these clients, and on Thursday the commission agreed with him, voting unanimously to issue Meyerson a license.

Meyerson, however, is not the only top executive Wynn has hired who has caused him headline problems. The one he calls "the most embarrassing in my career," for instance, was the time he was forced to fire his vice president of marketing at the Atlantic City Golden Nugget after investigators found out he had visited on two occasions "Fat" Tony Salerno, the reputed boss of the Genovese family.

These days, however, it is Wynn's personality that is on trial. Many people know Wynn as a witty storyteller who can mimic anyone's accent and who rewards his employees with gifts (he once bought luxury cars for 377 casino supervisors in Atlantic City). But a lawsuit by the former head of Wynn's Golden Nugget casino in Las Vegas, Dennis Gomes, has laid out what colleagues and even some relatives of Wynn's have said about him privately for years: he has a tendency to explode at the people around him. There are many offenses Gomes lists in his lawsuit, including using the company's contractors and its jet for personal reasons; routinely harassing female employees; ordering executives to obtain the phone numbers of cocktail waitresses; and referring to blacks, and employees in general, as "niggers." The lawsuit also addresses the infamous Wynn outbursts, as in the time he "started becoming very upset with a casino executive, and . . . his eyes bulged, and he started screaming at the top of his lungs and banging his head on the table."