Special Reissue: Terry Lanni in 2008

I'm racing out to an important lunch and interview, but we just re-posted our April 2008 conversation with the late Terry Lanni, the former MGM Mirage CEO. He has died at age 68. Listen here or right-click here to download it.

I don't have time to offer much in the way of thoughts, but check out the Review-Journal, the Sun, David McKee and Dave Schwartz's stuff.

The Strip's 2008 interview is fascinating to listen back to, a time when MGM was narrowing down their pick for architects for Atlantis 3000, the project planned for Sahara and the Strip, and was having trouble picking a name for what would become Aria. We discussed succession plans, Atlantic City and much more.

Here's one poignant bit, though. I was asking about the young new executives taking over Vegas and I asked, "Do these guys make you feel old or past tense in any way?" His reply:

Past tense. I’ve never thought of myself as past tense. I look in the mirror in the morning and I don’t see a 65-year-old. Maybe I should, but I don’t. Maybe I should have my eyes adjusted. No, I think it’s great. That’s what happens in life. You go through and next generation comes along and they’re going to have to learn some things from people such as me or people my age and then it’s their turn to take over and I’m gonna be the biggest cheerleader in the world for them.

Very, very good and classy man. Complicated legacy. More later.

This week's LVW col: Building Block

Here's this week's Las Vegas Weekly piece, to some extent a continuation of the thoughts from last week. Cheers!

Building block
More than a few did see this mess coming, and acted accordingly
By STEVE FRIESS

The competition was trying to be dignified, generous, sympathetic.

“Yes, I think it would be devastating to Las Vegas for MGM to fail,” said Jan Laverty Jones, senior vice president at Harrah’s and former Vegas mayor, to my question from last week’s column about whether MGM Mirage and CityCenter were the Nevada equivalent of an entity “too big to fail.” “But,” she added, “the question becomes, did MGM really get too big, or did the precipitous fall in the economy and consumer confidence cause the size of the project to be too big? Could anyone ever have expected this?”

That last question perked my ears up, because it was nearly verbatim something Phil Ruffin, the Kansas billionaire taking the Treasure Island off of MGM Mirage’s hands for $775 million, had said an hour earlier.

“This economy is so bad,” Ruffin said. “Who would have predicted any of this would happen?”

Well, here’s the thing: They did. Both of them and/or their corporations.

Okay, they didn’t anticipate the historic international implosion of the housing and credit markets. They didn’t know that Wall Street and Main Street would be brought to their knees by bizarre, unsustainable and falsely valued financial instruments or that, for the first time in anyone’s memory, a major economic disruption would turn once-impervious Las Vegas into a tourist ghost town and conventioneers’ national pariah.

So, no. Foreseeing this precise event coming to pass? Terry Lanni, Jim Murren, Kirk Kerkorian, Sheldon Adelson and the rest of the MGM Mirage and Las Vegas Sands leaderships are absolved of that.

But how about simply a serious slowdown? A saturation of the marketplace? A pause that refreshes?

Read the rest at this Las Vegas Weekly link.

Adelson's Details Man Walks, Too

Brad Stone, the man who took credit on my 2006 profile for VEGAS Magazine for convincing Sheldon Adelson to come up with a theme for what became The Venetian, quit today. He followed his boss, mentor and ex-president Bill Weidner out the door. In that VEGAS piece, Adelson called Stone "the world's most extraordinary and efficient operator." Now what would be cool would be for them to buy some of MGM's assets and go head-to-head with Sheldon Adelson.

With this news, I went back to find that story in my hard drive because VEGAS content isn't available online and I've never placed my stories for them in my SteveFriess.Com archive. But I thought there were some too-precious passages worth dredging up again for the occasion:

Weidner and Adelson were largely big-picture guys, the dealmakers, and while they’ve had their hands in on most everything along the way, these buildings -- the two Venetians, the Palazzo, the Sands Macau, which was the first American casino in Asia when it opened two years ago -- are dusted with Stone’s fingerprints from top to bottom.

“I walk down anywhere in this building,” says Stone as he sits in a four-bedroom high-roller suite at the Venetian, “and I can see every little decision that was made. I can stand anywhere in that lobby and point to 20 things that I had to make a decision on. Whether the thing is made out of marble, not out of marble, the color pattern, how the thing flows. One of my primary tasks in this job was getting this place built and designed and functional. There’s a lot of my guts in this place.”

[...snip...]

None other than current MGM Mirage CEO Terry Lanni, in his role at the time as head of Caesars World, hired the Weidner-Stone team to run Caesars Hotel-Casino in Atlantic City. After a couple of years, Stone was installed as the president of the Sands Hotel-Casino in Atlantic City, making him at 29 the youngest casino president.

“It was interesting sitting there in meetings with Donald Trump and Steve Wynn back then,” Stone recalls. “They were probably thinking, ‘Who’s this kid?’ "

[...snip...]

Stone climbed to executive vice president of that hotel’s parent company before being snatched in 1995 along with Weidner by Adelson to help him replace the Las Vegas Sands. (Adelson had purchased the Las Vegas property but never owned the Sands in Atlantic City, to which he continues today to lease the use of the name.)

Stone knew instantly that this wasn’t a typical Vegas redevelopment job; Adelson, who bought the Las Vegas Sands in 1989 and then built the Sands Convention Center and Expo, envisioned a Vegas resort catering to business travelers and conventioneers. Admits Stone: “When I first saw that, I thought he was nuts. At the time, everything here was about cheaper meals, the casino was the main revenue stream and the rooms were a marketing tool for the casino. But Sheldon knew there were a lot of ways to make money in this town besides slot machines.”

[...snip...]

While Stone regularly sings his boss’ praises, he also vociferously and legendarily squabbles with him in meetings. Adelson has a reputation for imperiousness, which is why “a lot of people are surprised at how aggressively we go at it with each other,” says Stone, who claims his most significant victory was when he and others convinced Adelson in the mid-1990s that the new casino needed a theme. “I’ve told him I appreciate the fact that I can be myself.”

Indeed, that no-wallflower style is precisely why Adelson calls Stone “one-of-a-kind” and “the world’s most extraordinary and efficient operator.”

“To say this guy is a yes man would provoke the most laughter,” Adelson said. “He has his opinions, and he doesn’t give up on them easily. There are times when we disagree quite strongly and, sometimes, I put my foot down because I have to make the decision. But he’s also spent billions of dollars.”

(For his part, Adelson insists he was always on board with having a theme. “Maybe he remembers one sentence I said at some point,” Adelson says.)

[...snip...]

“What I’m most proud of is what we’ve achieved as a group (at LVS). It’s really just a couple of guys. Sheldon, Bill, myself and (senior vice president) Rob Goldstein," Stone says. "We started from nothing 10 years ago and we now have the company that the markets value as the highest market cap of any gaming in the world. It’s really amazing.”

And so it was in the good ole days, three years ago. So the next question is, when's Goldstein going to give up on Adelson, too?

Of Lobotomies, Heart Attacks, and Fellatio

The Sunday papers were full of long pieces about how awful the economy is and who it's hurting now, which I find depressing and redundant so I passed them by. There were three bits of interest to discuss, though:

1. Poor Employees of Tom Mitchell. There was a sadly amusing and maddeningly clueless column by blog-hating R-J Editor Tom Mitchell explaining why the newspaper business is in such dire straits. True to form, he wanted to "offer some insight into the century-old business model for the modern daily newspaper" without seeing how ridiculous and paradoxical that phrase is. He does, in fact, still cling to a 100-year-old business model for a "modern" newspaper without ever acknowledging anywhere that that very century-old business model is going out the window in the new era. He describes his company's troubles as though it is merely being buffeted by the standard-issue problems of a slow economy, never once noticing that other important societal shifts are taking place that will never be undone even when the economy improves. He also continues to deliberately play fast and loose with data, referring to a tiny recent daily-newspaper circulation uptick while never admitting the paper's circulation is about the same as it was a decade ago and that his regime failed to capitalize at all on Las Vegas' record-setting population growth.

It depresses me because Mitchell and publisher Sherm Frederick will go on insisting as they run their newspaper into the ground that they are being harmed by forced beyond their control and take comfort in the fact that other major papers are struggling, too. Yet they have a singularly hideous and anti-user website that blares as breaking news such things as first-quarter football scores, they have bloggers who don't blog, they have video programming that can't be downloaded to any portable media device and their idea for cutting edge is to have a middle-aged weatherman read the news on a smartphone. They play victim of circumstance when, in fact, they are actively incompetent at using the Internet in a meaningful way that could put them in a position to capitalize once a viable Web-based business model develops. And besides the fact that I love newspapers and good journalism and want it to persist and thrive, I mostly worry that several fine journalists will end up jobless thanks to their bosses' myopia.

2. Viva Las Vegas for heart attacks: Parade Magazine ran an excerpt from a book by ex-Good Morning America executive producer Ben Sherwood in which he claims that the best place to have a heart attack is in a casino because everyone's watching and all the security personnel are trained at defribillating and CPR and stuff like that. That makes some sense, but Sherwood doesn't explain here the source of his contention that "the heart attack survival rate in Las Vegas is 53 percent." Does he mean at Strip casinos? Or citywide? He points to Seattle (16 percent) and Chicago (2 percent) as comparisons, but there isn't really any explanation as to why away from the casino floor Vegas heart attack victims would be any better off. It sure as hell ain't because our health care system's so terrific.

3. Not Howie Do It. Howard Stutz, the usually excellent gaming reporter for the R-J, had an off-day today. He did a lengthy piece on the departure of MGM Mirage CEO Terry Lanni that was full of nothing but praise for Lanni's tenure. Besides the question as to why this is worth a look now, nearly two months after Lanni left, there is nothing anywhere in the piece that examines Lanni's role in overleveredging this company into the challenges it currently faces. In fact, the troubled condition of the company at the time of Lanni's resignation is never mentioned and instead the focus is on the non-story about Lanni's phony MBA. That's odd; Lanni himself acknowledged that it seemed like a good time to go because the problems needed fresh eyes and new ideas. What's more, while everyone in the piece -- Gary Loveman, Bill Weidner, Jim Murren, Bill Boyd, Bill Bible, Dennis Neilander, Frank Fahrenkopf -- sang Lanni's praises, a tiny bit of balance could have easily been achieved by noting that Steve Wynn has been very critical lately of Lanni and others for making deals they shouldn't have. Wynn said as much to several news outlets in the rush surrounding the opening of Encore. And Wynn's not the only one who could have provided an alternative assessment of Lanni's tenure; someone on Wall Street easily could at least have been called upon to explain why the MGM stock had tanked so dramatically in Lanni's final year. Sure, most of Lanni's career was bountiful, but most of Alan Greenspan's career was bountiful, too, and we're all now taking a second look at that as well.

The Show is UP: Cirque's Top Guy

So we lied. Sort of. We're holding back the Cheech Marin interview for two weeks. Sorry! But, anyhow, Guy Laliberte should be entertaining enough and, if not, listening to Miles describe the weird Fitzgerald robbery caper sure is. Check it all out by clicking on the date to hear it or right-click to download the show and listen whenever you want. Or subscribe via iTunes here or via Zune here.

Nov. 18: Cirque's Top Guy

Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte, the former street performer who redefined the human circus into a worldwide entertainment phenomenon, just helped open the company’s sixth show on the Las Vegas Strip, Criss Angel Believe. He gave Steve 10 minutes the day of the show’s opening which, of course, meant Steve took 15. In this conversation, Laliberte defends the show and his alliance with the controversial Mindfreak illusionist, discusses the recent purchase of a large chunk of his company by Dubai and tells why there won’t be a Cirque show at Mandalay Bay … YET. Just a note, this interview was conducted outside so Laliberte could smoke, so there is some background noise.

In banter: Terry Lanni goes bye-bye, LVS lays off 11,000, MGM Mirage's CityCenter condo sales suck, Vegas may be shrinking, Wynn joins the S&P 500, Bob Maheu's awesome house and Jubilee! goes, uh, topful.

Links:

Cirque du Soleil’s website, where they sell tickets for all their shows, is here
The R-J’s Arnold Knightly’s report about the changing of the guard at MGM Mirage is here
MGM Mirage’s press release on its deal to build in Vietnam is here
The WSJ blog on Sheldon Adelson’s vanishing fortunes is here
A piece on Primm’s woes is here and a piece about Mesquite’s closure is here
The R-J’s coverage of Sheryl Crow and the Aliante opening is here
See a piece on Wynn’s joining the S&P 500 here
Read Steve’s blog commentary about Vegas shrinking here
Norm’s coverage of Jubilee! going topful is here
A piece on Vegas’ brief flirtation with lowering the gambling age to 18 is here
Take a virtual tour of Bob Maheu’s home on Steve’s blog here

Lanni Leaving On A Lark?

As has been widely reported, MGM Mirage CEO Terry Lanni is stepping down. It's a strange thing because it came about seemingly suddenly -- at least giving two weeks notice would seem to be odd for someone with another year-plus on his contract.

The Wall Street Journal has speculated that this may have something to do with the fact that their sources were leading them to a bombshell that Lanni's claim of an MBA from USC may have been fake. Lanni's online resume said so but USC has no record of his receiving the degree and Lanni's claim that he got an honorary MBA was refuted by the school. It seems they've only given out about five of those, the last one in 1933.

MGM Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman categorically denied that the MBA flap was the cause of Lanni's retirement and cited personal and family issues instead. I get the journalistic value in the MBA story and maybe it is relevant to why he is departing, but I can't imagine that it has any serious bearing on Lanni's standing with a company he's run for so long. It may have simply been yet another bit of stress on top of the economic challenges facing the company, the city and the industry. To wit, Lanni told Bloomberg today: "The economies are in a position that I’ve never seen before. Frankly, I think it’s a lot easier for a person in his 40s than a person in his 60s to comfortably deal with this."

I will say this. When I interviewed Lanni for my New York Times piece on the rising stars of young Vegas a scant seven months ago, Lanni gave absolutely no indication that he was going anywhere prior to the end of his contract in January 2010. You can hear that conversation on the April 17 episode of "The Strip," but here's a transcript of the relevant parts:

Friess: Do these [younger casino bosses] make you feel old or past tense in any way?

Lanni: Past tense. I’ve never thought of myself as past tense. You know I look in the mirror in the morning and I don’t see a 65 year old. Maybe I should, but I don’t. Maybe I should have my eyes adjusted. No, I think it’s great, that’s what happens in life, you go through and the next generation comes along and they’re going to hopefully learn a few things from people such as me or people my age and take over and I’m going to be the biggest cheerleader in the world when that happens.

Friess: Now you have a contract through 2010...

Lanni: No, it goes until the 3rd or 4th of January, 2010.

Friess: What happens then?

Lanni: I have no idea, that would be for the compensation committee and the board of directors to determine, but we always follow, religiously follow, the aspect of meeting with our board and discussing these matters. The good thing about our company – and I think this is probably more so than some of the other publicly traded companies in the industry and maybe some of the private ones – is that if I’m hit by a train, this company is going to do quite well. No one has to worry about do we have any successful potential successors in place. We have some very good people in our company who can fill that particular role. And that decision will be made at the appropriate time by the board of trustees and I will make my recommendation at that time and I think I know what that recommendation will be. And they’ll make the determination. I have no idea.

Friess: Is Jim Murren an heir apparent?

Lanni: I meet with our board annually and give them my views on what that succession at the right time will be and I honestly don’t think it’s appropriate to discuss it.

Of course, Jim Murren is the heir apparent. And seeing how he was the driving force behind CityCenter and the merger with Mandalay Resort Group, it's fairly unlikely that there'll be any significant change in direction for the company.

CA's Gay Marriage Fight In Nevada

I woke up a little earlier than usual today and the local papers were a faster read than even they usually are today, so when I spotted a piece on the website of The Advocate about Mormons bankrolling the campaign to ban gay marriage in California and Arizona, I had a little time to do a little looking around.

As you may or may not know, the California Supreme Court earlier this year decided that gays and straights both have the right to marry under the state's constitution. That kicked off an effort known as Prop 8, which would re-ban same-sex marriage. It is now, according to this report, among the most expensive campaigns ever waged over a social issue. The latest poll shows the pro-gay side with a nice lead, but that comes after two polls that found the opposite. Who really knows. In Arizona, there's also a ballot measure out there. I don't know where that stands, but it's not as big a deal only because same-sex marriage isn't already legal right now there.

But Nevada is packed to the gills with Mormons. Rich ones. And so I wondered whether they were giving much to the California effort to keep gays from matrimony.

Turns out, a lot. Nevadans so far have given $48,750 to the anti-gay side and $17,860 to the pro-gay side. That's almost 3-to-1 against the gays. It's also interesting to note that each side had 52 donors, so the anti-gay folks are just giving more.

The records on this on the California Secretary of State's website showed some substantial donations to the anti-gay side, including a $5,000 donation from the Coalition For the Protection of Marriage in Nevada, a group behind the successful efforts in 2000 and 2002 to pass an initiative that wrote into the state constitution that marriage is only for heterosexuals. Western States Dental Equipment in Las Vegas gave $2,300, a retired Henderson woman named Mauretia Peterson gave $3,000, The X-Factor Systems LLC in Henderson gave $5,000, the Paradise Group in Las Vegas gave $3,000, JK Management Inc. gave $2,000, orthodontist John Griffiths gave $2,000 and Equity Group Management gave $2,000.

The pro-gay side was more modest. The two largest donations were $3,000 each, one from Harrah's VP Michael Weaver and another from Ken Smith, former board president for Las Vegas' Gay and Lesbian Community Center. Gwen Migita, who heads up Harrah's diversity efforts, gave $250. None of the other well-known gay activists in the state have evidently given a dime, even though many of them continue to flood my email box with campaign literature germane to Prop 8. That's kind of odd. Otherwise, the only other donations of more than $1,000 came from Kol Entertainment Corp of America in Carson City and Jane A. Leyland a NASA research engineer in Reno.

Nobody from MGM Mirage's corporate brass gave so far as I can tell, but Bellagio's head carpenter, Tracy Stark, gave $100 to save same-sex marriage.

The California gay-marriage issue is of interest and concern outside the Golden State partly because Nevada casino interests have said they hoped to grab a piece of the gay honeymooning pie and, also, because California allows couples from other states to marry there. Massachusetts, the only other state with legal marriage, only recently started allowing that as well.

There do seem to be other matters of concern to officials from Nevada gaming interests going on in California this election cycle. Among them:

* Station Casinos gave a total of $101,733 to a long list of California politicians, which makes sense since they have stakes in the Thunder Valley casino near Sacramento. Oddly, they gave $10,000 to the Democratic State Central Committee of California under their corporate name and $4,900 to the state's Republican Party under the label of Ultimate Fighting Championship. Both are owned by the Fertitta family.

* Terry Lanni, MGM CEO, gave $1,000 to elect Democrat Mark Ridley-Thomas, currently a state senator, to become an L.A. County supervisor. That's random, but he does have a home in the L.A. area.

* Gary Jacobs, MGM Mirage Executive VP, gave $1,600 to support passage of Prop 2, which would require more humane treatment of farm animals. That's nice.

* Sierra Pacific, the public power company based in Reno that just merged with Nevada Power to become NV Energy, gave $43,600 to various California politicians.

Oh! And this cracked me up. Two Tahoe-area ski resorts gave substantial sums to the California Snow Political Committee. I didn't know precipitation required lobbyists. I Googled and was unable to figure out what they do. They're pro-snow? Someone's gotta be, huh?

MGM Mirage To Build In China's Armpit

MGM Mirage announced this morning a joint venture with a Chinese company to build a mixed use facility in Tianjin, a very industrial port city about an hour from Beijing. The plan includes two towers that includes a luxury hotel, residential units, a spa and, of course, convention space. Oh, and a 350-room MGM Grand Tianjin plus 50 SkyLofts and 60 residences.

What will definitely be missing? GAMING! The Chinese government won't allow it anywhere other than Macau, at least not yet. Hence we have the MGM Mirage's first step towards moving on globally from casinos. Remember, CEO Terry Lanni recently suggested they might split the company and have one arm focused on hospitality? This would seem like the first significant stop, which surprises me because I thought they'd build some more MGM Grands in the U.S. first.

But here's the real thing. I've been to Tianjin. It's a gross place. Awful. See? Polluted like Beijing, but no culture, no important historic monuments, nothing but an overcrowded port. The third biggest urban area in China, with 10.2 million people. Evidently the city is so low on the totem that, while the 2008 Olympics are being shared amongst several lovely northeastern Chinese cities including my favorite, Qingdao, (home of the Tsingtao brewery, yay!), Tianjin gets just one small role, some early-round soccer matches. I will admit that the Olympic stadium built there does look sensational -- in renderings.

I even have a Starbucks mug from Tianjin from which I am sipping my morning coffee. I love it. That's the best thing I can say about the town. The reason you've never heard of it is because there is nothing touristy about Tianjin. It would be like opening up in Trenton.

So why, why, why is MGM Mirage staking their first overseas non-gaming venture there? I don't mean to doubt the potential profits to be had and I suspect the city has offered an unbeatable tax deal given that this could put the place on the map for the West in a small way. But if they wanted to make a splash, why not Beijing or Shanghai or Xi'an first? Maybe even an MGM Grand Lhasa?

I'm sure they've done their market research and the level of development and investment isn't really that huge, especially at Chinese labor prices, but I'm just puzzled they couldn't come up with something more glamorous out of the gate.

Serve Us Up Some Fresh ARIA!

This is why you read this blog.

Way, way back on December 17, you read here the first inkling that the central 4,000-room hotel-casino of CityCenter might come to be known as ARIA. At the time, MGM Mirage Chief of Design and Construction Bobby Baldwin disclosed to me that it was a name the brass loved but that they couldn't wrestle free the trademarks.

Evidently, that logjam was broken sometime in the past seven weeks. As recently as late March, MGM Mirage Chairman and CEO Terry Lanni told me in an interview for The New York Times that we aired on "The Strip" on April 17 that naming the hotel was "one of the most frustrating things" he'd dealt with in his career.

I guess in the three weeks between when I spoke to Lanni and when we posted that interview, the matter was resolved. It's not unprecedented; Steve Wynn bought the name "Mirage" from more than one proprietor in Vegas including from what then became known as the Glass Pool Inn.

As the screenshot of the trademark filing above shows, they got their wish on April 11. Some further digging showed that as of April 15, MGM Mirage took ownership of the Internet domain name AriaVegas.com and AriaLV.Com. On May 1, they grabbed AriaHotelCasino.Com. I spoke today with the owner of AriaLasVegas.com, a Las Vegas man who bought the domain on Sept. 29, 2007. That's pretty prescient timing. He wouldn't discuss it his negotiations right now or how he might have known that it was a name under consideration.

I don't know if that logo above is in any way related to the resort's logo. I doubt it.

I asked Alan Feldman, the MGM spokesman, about the process. Why Aria?

"Interestingly enough, Aria was one of those names that came up early in the process. For a little while, we were focused on creating a new name, a new word. But the thing about Aria was, we kept coming back to it."

Like anything else in Vegas, it'll take some getting used to but is certainly workable. Remember how we scratched our heads at "Love"? Now it fits. Or THEhotel? Oh, wait. That one's still stupid.

My favorite Vegas name? Zumanity. I don't even like the show. I just like the name. What's yours?

Splitting MGM Mirage?

According to this Dow Jones report, Terry Lanni said on a conference call today that the company may someday be split in two, with the hotel operations under one roof and the casino operations under another. There's no timetable and mostly it sounds like frustration about how Wall Street is devaluing the entire company based on some gaming revenue drops.

Still, it's an interesting idea because MGM Mirage has long been talking about building non-casino resorts around the world. This could be a first step.

The Show Is UP: Land O Lanni

This week's podcast, featuring Terry Lanni, is now UP! Click here to hear it, right-click here to download it and here to subscribe in iTunes.

You know a recession is pretty bad when it’s felt even in Las Vegas. Terry Lanni, the CEO of MGM Mirage, spoke to Steve about these challenging economic times, about which of the young moguls of Vegas he admires and about the seemingly epic struggle to name the Cesar Pelli-designed hotel at CityCenter. Cesar's Palace, anyone? Plus, strong listener reaction to the letter about Vegas going to hell.

In Banter: MGM layoffs, Harrah's dumps the R-J, Christina Binkley ducks the trivia showdown, mobile billboards under the microscope, Steve goes to Scores and the potential for a Criss Angel nightmare for Cirque grows.

Links:

The R-J on the MGM Mirage employment cuts is here
Steve’s NYT piece and blog post on the Harrah’s-RJ issue is here
RateVegas.Com’s challenge to me and Christina Binkley is here
Read about the Las Vegas Monorail’s good news is here
Read about the Harrah’s name change is here
The Sun’s piece on the mobile-billboard issue is here
Steve’s Newsweek piece on salt-water pools is here
See Kool-Aid on Family Guy on YouTube here

URGENT: THE STRIP IS AT 6 PM PT TONIGHT

Miles has to do the late news all week, so he's ducking out to do the show at 6 p.m. PT to do the show. So come on down to LVROCKS.COM and join the live chat. The show is likely to go through to about 7:15 or so, and to accommodate Miles' need to get back to work we'll do all the interactive parts of the show first and THEN play this week's interview.

Who with, you ask? Oh. Terry Lanni, the MGM Mirage CEO. Sadly, this conversation occurred before the announcement of the company's layoffs yesterday, but he nonetheless had some comments about the recession, about the young moguls of Vegas and about why naming that CityCenter hotel is such a painus in the anus.

Oh! And get a head start on our next two-week trivia question. Take a very, very good look at this map below. Now e-mail us at TheStripPodcast [at] aol.com and list all the mistakes you can find on it. Define mistakes however you wish. Whoever finds the most wins. We'll draw if there's a tie. (Click on the map to make it bigger.)


See y'all later. Otherwise, download the podcast, k?

My Last Words On Binkley's Book...

...I think. Probably. You never know.

Here's this week's Weekly col. It includes reaction from Wynn, Lanni and Adelson as well as reaction to reaction from Christina Binkley herself. And I must say publicly what I told her privately, that her willingness to be open and responsive to even her harshest critics is proof that she behaves as she wishes, as a journalist, to be treated. The Las Vegas Sun editors could learn a thing or two from that. It's called class and professional courtesy.


The Strip Sense: She said, They Said
Vegas moguls react to WSJ scribe’s latest tome
by Steve Friess

Last week, I detailed a disturbing list of factual mistakes in Winner Takes All, the book by Christina Binkley of the Wall Street Journal about the past decade or so of wheeling and dealing that created the Las Vegas Strip as we know it.

Binkley’s book deserves special scrutiny because of who she is—the longtime gaming-beat writer for one of the world’s most important newspapers—as well as what she wrote. In the book, she portrays Wynn Resorts CEO Steve Wynn as both visionary and petty, MGM Mirage CEO Terry Lanni as somewhat detached and Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson as irrelevant and invisible.

Binkley has said in interviews that Wynn is sore about her depiction of the buyout of Mirage Resorts as an unfriendly merger. (To my reading, Binkley actually just lays out the facts as she’s gathered them in that case and lets readers decide.) But Wynn himself told me the piece that sticks in his craw most is a passage in which she reports that Wynn became angry over the $25 million price of something, prompting his German shepherd to “menace” the seller, Dino Fusco, with a threatened bite to the crotch. Wynn got the price down to $15 million.

“Dino and I talked twice this week, and he’s furious about this,” Wynn said. Fusco, Wynn said, insisted he said neither that there had been a rant nor that the dog had threatened him. “In the space of two minutes, you have a story that is twisted so much. And that may live somewhere forever. And it makes you wonder when you read history how much of history is bullshit.”

Binkley told me she has Fusco on a recorded interview and that he hasn’t retracted the tale to her in subsequent conversations. “But I can imagine he didn’t want to tell Steve Wynn that,” she wrote me in an e-mail. “No one, particularly an investment banker, wants to be on the receiving end of Steve Wynn’s fury.”

Indeed, Wynn is livid over the book, which describes his using Mirage Resorts funds recklessly and nickel-and-diming MGM Mirage over their purchase of his Shadow Creek home as well as intimating he’s a liposuctioned Lothario.

READ THE REST HERE

Another day, another feud

David McKee seems like a nice fellow. He's certainly a good blogger over at the Las Vegas Advisor's spiffy new site. I even have it bookmarked. And he even quoted me in a piece he wrote a long while back about the Broadway-to-Vegas trend for Las Vegas CityLife. Plus, he contributes nicely to RateVegas.Com's VegasGang podcast. Check it out.

So I had fairly warm feelings about the guy. Well, I did until some of readers pointed me to this really offensive, totally out-of-line comment he wrote in the comments section of said blog last night. A poster had questioned how McKee could be such a fan of "Winner Takes All" by Christina Binkley after having read the extensive list of factual mistakes I set forth in last week's Las Vegas Weekly column. And this was his baffling response:

"Eh, if memory serves, Friess found some ticky-tack goofs (like the "Gans/Ganz" discrepancy) and made a federal case of them. Steve Wynn is Friess' bread-and-butter guest on "The Strip Podcast"; Wynn has made his displeasure with "Winner Takes All" known and ... you do the math."

Now, there ought to be a code amongst Vegas bloggers, but there isn't. And since McKee opted to write this on his open forum, I thought I'd respond on mine.

Dear David:

How about not "going on memory" but instead actually reading what I wrote?

In my USA Today review of Binkley's book, I praised it extensively and specifically noted her even-handed portrayal of Wynn in all his contradictions: "Wynn, developer of the Mirage, Bellagio and Wynn Las Vegas, is seen as filled with contradictory traits. In anecdote after anecdote, Binkley illustrates his magnanimity, egotism, eloquence, weirdness, humor, insecurity, pettiness. The fact she had terrific access to him did not tilt her evenhanded portrayal. At times, she is deliciously dishy in a way that is unlikely to get another interview, as when she implies Wynn had cosmetic surgery."

Even in my Weekly commentary, I also had nice things to say about the book overall and still recommend(ed) it. But the fact is that there were an unforgivable list of very serious -- not "ticky/tack" (what does that mean, anyhow?) factual errors that I find inconceivable from coming from a Wall Street Journal writer. Any two or three of these mistakes would have had her benched at many of the papers you and I have written for. (Well, if you've written for the Las Vegas Sun, perhaps not. They don't seem to mind.)

Binkley invented at least one phone call, pretends that airplanes can land at airports they can't, has people as parties to deals they didn't make. And since the book came out and this list was published, there have been a long list of further mistakes that have been brought to my attention.

She also seems to have crafted a book entirely around not detached news judgment but who gave her access. I have very little problem -- in fact I was delighted -- by her portrayal of Wynn. He's complicated and her rendering is also complicated. But her ignoring of Adelson? Her minimizing of Lanni? Her infusing Loveman with responsibilities and accomplishments that weren't his alone? I was much more indignant about her treatment of other Vegas figures. When she's on the topic of Wynn, her work largely sings -- even with errors so baffling and careless that they must force the in-the-know reader to wonder about the accuracy of other parts of the tome.

Yet what's most offensive is this weird implication that I'm a lackey for anybody, much less Steve Wynn. Do you actually read my work and listen to our show? Do you know how many times I have been on the receiving end of Wynn's ire? Sometimes our interviews are cordial, often he finds me obnoxious. C'est la vie.

Listeners and readers have often thought that perhaps Wynn just likes my spunk, likes being challenged. That could explain how we met in the first place; I wrote a scathing review of the new Wynn resort for the Chicago Tribune and he called not to bawl me out but to invite me to let him show me the hotel himself. OK, he bawled me out, too. But after a two-hour discussion in which I defended myself point by point, he decided to give me the walk-about. Something tells me that wouldn't have happened if I had cowered and quivered before him.

For the record, I obtained a copy of WTA in December, but it was an uncorrected galley proof and I believed it proper to give Binkley the fix to correct many of the glaring errors in the final product. But she didn't. Then I had to wait for my USAT review to run before I could expand on it in my Weekly column. So that explains my timing, not some errand being run on behalf of a pooh-bah. I've taken guff from the GalleyCat blog for that approach, to which I've responded. And so it goes.

But you make it sound as if Wynn called me up and said, "Stevie boy, ya gotta go after this broad." Are you serious? Or are words just that cheap? I do give Wynn -- and Adelson and Lanni -- a chance to respond to the book in tomorrow's Weekly column, but then I give Binkley the last word as well.

I expect non-media people to "do the math" as you say. They're unaware of how journalists actually operate and aren't expected to do their research before they make off-handed remarks.

You, Mr. McKee, are a lot better than that. I do encourage folks to read your blog. It's excellent and clearly takes a lot of work. I just wish you'd taken an extra millisecond to think about what you were saying about a colleague before you insulted my reputation.

Best,
Steve

P.S. And yes, I did enjoy "Double Or Nothing" by Tom Breitling. It was a surprisingly well-written rendering of an interesting and specific Vegas tale. It isn't anything more than it purports to be, a subjective memoir, and is benefits from lower expectations. As opposed to Binkley's effort, which is harmed by the extremely high expectations we rightfully have for a journalist of her stature.

Harrah's Rio Tower Problem

Often it is stated that the local newspapers lay off the casino giants because, of course, the Strip is everyone's bread and butter in Vegas. If some crime pops up and then seems to vanish from the news, the local media is usually accused by outsiders (and some insiders) of covering up, as if Gary Loveman or Terry Lanni can call Thomas Mitchell at the R-J and have coverage killed.

The R-J's output this week proves the lie in that. The paper's probe of safety inspection violations actually managed to get local officials to force Harrah's to shut down six rooms in the Rio's Ipanema Tower because it seems the hotel may not have obtained proper permits for its 2005 remodel job.

Six rooms in a tower of 1,448 may not seem like much. But county inspectors are saying they're finding evidence that the hotel company didn't seal holes drilled in concrete properly. It sounds like the county is going to be crawling around the tower for months now, given that they're saying they'll need to check every single room.

The question I have is: Clearly the media is not covering for the gaming company. But why is the county allowing the entire tower to remain open if they suspect safety issues throughout?

Bravo to reporter Joan Whitely for her boffo work on this.