Dave Schwartz Takes The Stand

[This post was updated at bottom with more information.]

I'm typing from inside Courtroom 14C where the Plaza v Plaza case over whether the Elad group may use the name for their property across from Wynn Las Vegas and who would be on the stand by Dave Schwartz from the Center for Gaming Studies at UNLV and the Vegas Gang podcast.

Having sat through days of very grim OJ witnesses being beaten up from every side, the thing that strikes me most is that Dave looks like he's having a terrific time up here.

Schwartz has established his credentials here as a gaming historian by holding up his various books for the jury. If he were smart, he would've pulled an Oprah and left one of each under each juror's chair! My favorite, incidentally, is Suburban Xanadu. I highly recommend it, although I cannot imagine why it's priced so high by Amazon.Com.

As I write, Dave is being shown a litany of advertisements from various periodicals over the years proving that the Plaza Hotel-Casino in downtown Vegas owned by Tamares Group has been going by some variation of Plaza for decades. He is, however, testifying for the DEFENSE that the Plaza has used variations of Plaza -- including the Union Plaza -- and thus they have not consistently used the trademark throughout their history.

UPDATE: The Tamares Group is now grilling Schwartz because for many years there have been large neon signs that just said "Plaza Hotel." Schwartz says the place was still commonly known as Union Plaza (see left) because of a huge looming marquee that said so. The lawyer also pointed to this piece Schwartz did for the Las Vegas Business Press in which the lawyer asserted Schwartz sided with the owners of the NYC edition of the Plaza as evidence he's a biased witness. It's worth noting, by the by, that a Google search of "Union Plaza" yields as its first entry ... the Plaza Hotel and Casino.