For two years now, Vegas has been without a Steve Wynn casino. But like Renaissance courtiers gossiping about the king, the town’s buzz is always about what Wynn is doing, may be doing, or could be doing.
After selling the Bellagio, the Mirage, Treasure Island and his other properties in 2000, Wynn bought the old Desert Inn, including the extensive golf course and country club property behind it, and announced that sometime in the future he would be back with a project that would top even his grandest mega-casinos of the past.
Six months ago he gave it a name – Le Reve, – French for “the dream” and also the name of a Picasso painting that Wynn owns.
At the World Gaming Expo in October, he revealed a few details. It would be French and Asian themed and include four resorts in one, built around a huge Times Square-style “public plaza” full of Carriage Trade shopping, cafes and bistros. It would also feature a world-class art museum similar to the one he had at the Bellagio, a 48-story all-suite hotel and convention center, and a three-acre swimming pool.
In addition, there have been reports that he’s cutting a poker online terpercaya deal with Mohammed al Fayed to establish a Harrods of London on the site. The whole project would be, in Wynn’s words, “the single most wonderful resort in the history of Las Vegas.”
Yet he still hasn’t broken ground on the casino, and rumors have started to swirl. He has the money one day, he doesn’t have it the next. He’s partnering with Asians one month, and the Asians are gone the next. Since announcing Le Reve he’s also been licensed to build a casino in Macau, the island near Hong Kong where China hopes to create a Far Eastern Las Vegas, but that project, too, seems on again, off again.
Why is Vegas so fascinated with this one man? Because, the myth goes, Steve Wynn is the visionary who saved Vegas.
When a Wall Street brokerage firm puts out a report on the gambling industry, it always includes a “History of Las Vegas” time line. It doesn’t begin in 1905, when the railroad incorporated the town, or in 1931, when State Assemblyman Phil Tobin of rural Humboldt County pushed through the Wide-Open Gambling Act. It starts in 1989, the year Wynn used Michael Milken-backed junk bonds to open the Mirage.
At $750 million, the Mirage was the most expensive casino in history and needed a million a day in cash flow to break even. It not only got the million, but Caesar’s Palace next door – until then the premier gambling resort in the world – had an 80 percent drop in income in 1990.
Wynn was a lifelong hustler from upstate New York who had moved from running his dad’s bingo halls in Utica to distributing meat to Vegas casinos to owning a piece of the Golden Nugget downtown to becoming a real estate speculator. (He got rich on a land flip, selling a small parcel Caesar’s needed for expansion.) And now he had broken through to become the biggest dog in the yard.
“In 1987 and 1988 people were writing Las Vegas off,” says Rob Goldstein, president of The Venetian. “There had been no new casino built since the 1970s. Places that looked like the Riviera and the Sahara – that was the Strip. There were no new hotels. The last one was MGM – now Bally’s – in 1972. The town had stopped. Wynn was clearly the guy who bet the money. Then Kirk Kerkorian came along. Those two guys spawned the Mirage, Excalibur, New York New York, MGM Grand, Luxor, Venetian, Treasure Island. Suddenly there were tens of thousands of jobs.”
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