The Great Casino Salesman

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Michael Wynn's legacy was, at the very least, ambiguous. He offered his son a friendship, in which the young Wynn sometimes called his father by his first name and followed him at age 10 to Las Vegas for two magical weeks of a bingo venture that ultimately failed. But their closeness left Steve without his favorite hero when his father died in 1963. In every office Steve has ever had, a picture of Michael hangs on the wall. "I'd give up everything for 15 minutes with my father," he once said. "To have him walk through this hotel and see what happened."

From his father, Wynn inherited both a post-Depression-era taste for the good things (Michael, too, never wore anything but custom-made suits) and for education as the guarantee to economic stability; it was Steve who insisted he wanted to attend Manlius School, a military prep school for West Point. Perhaps, above all, Wynn was marked by his father's compulsive gambling. "There is something about children who grow up in that environment that hungers for stability," says Elaine, whose father also was a compulsive gambler. On the eve of the cancer surgery that failed to save his father, Steve sat by his father's bed and took down a list of his gambling debts -- a total of at least $200,000. It took Steve and his mother 4 1/2 years to pay them off with revenues from the bingo business. Wynn has often said since that the only way to make money in a casino is to own one.

Wynn's need to drive his own destiny grew more urgent, say several relatives, after he was diagnosed as having retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease that makes it hard for him to see down or at night, occasionally causes him to crash into glass doors and tends to lead to blindness. When he heard the diagnosis at age 29, says his mother, he was "devastated," and over time his behavior changed. "The rages are more since he can't see," she says. "There's an expression in business, 'I want to sit down and talk to him eyeball to eyeball.' Well, he can no longer do that. He has to rely on other people to do it . . . He's so frustrated. This is how he gets rid of his frustration."

Wynn insists the disease is not part of what motivates him to move fast. But when he tries to explain his nuclear personality, the subject, obliquely, is what he cannot see. "I'm harsh because I'm frightened that in my isolation as a chairman who doesn't see everything the bigger we get, that basically I don't really know what's going on," he says. Ironically, the lack of clarity in his physical vision has kept sharp his animal-like intuition about gambling parlors. In the early days of teaching his kid brother about the bingo business, he would say, "You want to walk around and have the sniff of the place." It also makes him, for all his demons, strangely lucid about himself. He has always said his epitaph should read, RUNNING SCARED, STRAIGHT AHEAD. And he is right.

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CREDIT: TIME Graphic by Steve Hart. [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: Christiansen/Cummings Assoc., Inc. for Gaming and Wagering Business Magazine.}]CAPTION: RAKING IT IN