Good and bad from the weekend papers

I caught up this morning on the weekend papers, and this stuff is worth your eye:

* Howard Stutz of the R-J puts together the surprising detente between Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson, right down to the suggestion by Adelson that the epic rivals will soon dine together. Oh, to be a fly...

* Tom Gorman of the Sun has a most awesome Q-and-A with Sir Patrick Stewart on his plans to create a Vegas-set version of "The Merchant of Venice." It reminds me of the time I saw "Taming of the Shrew" staged as a Western starring Morgan Freeman and Tracey Ullman and put on by Joseph Papp in Central Park. (Side note: I once considered titling a podcast interview with Adelson as "The Merchant of Venice" but opted against doing so because because the play -- or at least the title character of Shylock -- is so notoriously anti-Semitic. I went with "Mr. Sands Man" instead.)

* J. Patrick Coolican, who has been refreshingly diversifying his columns from the monotony of politics that the Sun is addicted to, gives us a terrific piece on a 25-year-old kid living at Veer for $1,000 a month plus valet parker duties. Money quote to make Jim Murren, who pictured a different grade of humanity living in these units, cringe: "The amenities -- you can't beat 'em." Party on, dude!

* Adrienne Packer geeks out on data collected by an 81-year-old monorail obsessive who has empirically proven that, for the most part, it's faster and cheaper to walk from one casino to another than to ride the ill-placed transit system. What's more, the creative codger's analysis also indicates that the oft-cited panacea for the monorail's woes -- a link-up to McCarran -- won't work, either.

Of course, there are some jeers:

* Why does Sad Shermy still have a column in the newspaper he has legally imperiled and whose circulation he ruined? I'd much rather have seen them hold over ex-editor Thomas Mitchell's columns because at least they were (usually) original and smart meditations on a topic that doesn't get enough press, first amendment matters. Instead, we have Sad Shermy writing the same old predictable babble, only not as well or as thoughtfully as other conservative commentators who actually do some reporting.

* I adore the work of Adrienne Packer, so I hope she doesn't take this the wrong way, but the absence of any coverage of the passage and Sandoval signing of AB511, the bill that makes Nevada the first state to legalize DRIVERLESS CARS for road use, is simple dereliction. This is a major, major legislative and technological development. I understand why Carson City scribes would overlook it because they had the budget and everything else to cover, but transportation writers ought to be all over this. So should technology writers, but neither the R-J nor the Sun have one of any merit, a glaring problem. (I'm trying to get the link to my piece on this from the iPad-only The Daily.)

Check out this YouTube video on the driverless cars for background and some amazing visuals:

This could be real on the roads of Vegas a year from now, thanks to the law. Really.

* Steve Bornfeld of the R-J applied his typical staccato, sentence-fragment style to his coverage of the Daytime Emmy Awards in a piece that essentially chronicled the construct of the red carpet and the backstage post-win appearances. I do understand the instinct toward media navel-gazing (see this blog post or this whole blog!) and the desire to behave above and apart from the media silliness of such events. But in this particular case, he actually missed the story, which was how offended the audience and Emmy brass were that Oprah Winfrey did not show up for her own lengthy tribute. There was noticeable hostility in the Hilton theater as well as all over Twitter, and I'm pretty surprised that Oprah didn't just snubbed this crowd but also passed up a much-much-much-needed opportunity to plug her flailing network and its unwatched offerings. Didn't Oprah quit so she could focus on that? Also, why did they lie and pretend that Celine Dion was singing live from the Colosseum during the show when Celine's part was taped four days earlier? That sort of stuff would've made an interesting, Vegas-centric wrap-up.

* I'm completely puzzled that (a) this below is front page news, (b) that the paper misspelled the name of its own reporter of 426 years (It's Przybys, not Pyzybys, as it was corrected later online) and (c) that they ran with this thoroughly misleading headline:


What "history" was made? A California woman won a beauty pageant. She's not the first. She's not the last. She's not even all that interesting a woman, except she seems to have acquired a bit of Tudor lust thanks, probably, to Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. If there was some history made -- beyond the fact that every day is technically historic -- then John Pryzyzyzbys didn't tell us what that might've been.

* Journalists really must stop bitching, especially publicly on Twitter, about the quality of the free seats they get at various events. It truly embarrasses to them to behave so openly entitled, and it distracts from the quality of their coverage. Do they think their readers are sympathetic to the complaints of a group of people who seem to expect special treatment? This came up, too, during the opening of Celine's show at the Colosseum. The whiners' lack of self-awareness is kind of unbelievable.

* Finally, where the heck was the print coverage of the Starkey Hearing Foundation's mission to provide 100 underprivileged kids in Clark County with free hearing aids on Saturday? Those hearing aids cost probably $2,500 each, so that's $500,000 in donated, customized equipment alone, but more importantly there were some amazing and heartbreaking stories there. But never fear, I volunteered and I'll be columnizing about that this week for the Las Vegas Weekly. Also, because I know someone at KSNV, they did this:

Ailing Adelson's Woes Spelling Trouble For Newt?

The delightful Allison Hoffman, fiance to my close friend and former Vegas gaming scribe Adam Goldman, has a fascinating piece on TabletMag.Com today about Sheldon Adelson and how the SEC investigation into his Macau dealings could further damage the already moribund Newt Gingrich For President campaign. It's interesting stuff; Hoffman reports that Adelson has funneled $7 million into Gingrich's PAC but may not be willing to pony up much more until he's out of the woods legally and the stock has popped up a bit higher. That could be too late for the desperate and flailing Gingrich effort.

But two specific things caught my eye. First, Hoffman was in L.A. on Sunday because Gingrich was speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition fundraiser dinner at which Adelson was expected to appear to receive the Ronald Reagan (of course) Award. But he didn't show up:

His wife, Miriam, told the audience that he was fighting a bad flu—“He is really suffering, leaking from every corner of the eyes, his nose. Not his ears!”

First of all, eww. Secondly, ut oh. Adelson, 77, is not a well man, hasn't been for years. In my 2008 interview with him he first disclosed his leg circulatory disorder, and every time he's in public his eyes look as leaky as she described. Not to be morbid, but if I were a shareholder of Las Vegas Sands, I'd really want to know what the succession plan is. Maybe THIS is why Steve Wynn's being so nice to him.

On the other hand, Hoffman also pointed to something fascinating that shows Adelson can still, at least for now, be in the rarest of form. Last month, the man known by Jon Ralston as Gondolier Numero Uno, rang up the editor of New York's influential Jewish Week newspaper to blow his stack over some critical piece on Newt and the Jews. After he let off that steam, he provided a 30-minute interview that showed him as a careful observer of the GOP presidential sweepstakes. He likes Gingrich and Romney, thinks Tim Pawlenty could crack into the top tier but isn't there yet. And, of course, Barack Obama will destroy Israel and giggle while doing so.

But this is the part I loved:

Adelson said that contrary to some claims, Gingrich was not a hypocrite for leading the effort to impeach President Clinton at a time when, it was later learned, the congressman was having an affair with a House of Representatives staffer 23 years his junior – she is now his third wife.

“He wasn’t going after Clinton for having an affair but because he lied,” Adelson said, adding that Gingrich wasn’t president at the time.

Yeah. That's it.

No Vegas On Buffett's Giving List ... Yet?

Warren Buffett announced a list yesterday of 40 billionaires he's persuaded to sign a "Giving Pledge," a project in which he convinces the nation's wealthiest people to commit to give the majority of their wealth to charitable causes during their lifetimes.

It's a pretty cool list, and you can read it here. The crowd includes many well-known billionaires -- the Gates, George Lucas, Michael Bloomberg, Paul Allen, Barry Diller/Diane Von Furstenberg, Ron Perelman, T. Boone Pickens, a Rockefeller and Ted Turner -- and if you click on their names you can read their letters explaining the vow.

Not present: Anyone from Vegas or the casino industry. Well, unless some of these lesser-known billionaires live in Vegas quietly, anyway. That would include, off the top of my head, Steve Wynn, Elaine Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Phil Ruffin, Donald Trump, any Fertitta or Greenspun, Bill Boyd and Sheldon Adelson. One former southern Nevadan is there: eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who reportedly traded in his 45,000-square-foot Vegas manse in 2009 for something cozier in Hawaii. And Barron Hilton famously has the Flying M Ranch near Yerington, Nev., which is from where Steve Fossett flew and perished. Fossett's widow isn't on the list, either.

Of course, it doesn't mean anything. Most of the above are well-known givers without such a pledge. But something tells me Mrs. Wynn will be adding her name in due course. Just a hunch.

Show is UP: (S)Talking Brad Garrett

I think with this episode we've probably exhausted the Brad Garrett topic for now, but this was a really good interview -- he's a great conversationalist -- so check it out. Thanks to David McKee for guest co-hosting again, too. Check his out his blog. Click on the date below to listen or right-click to download and listen at your leisure or subscribe via iTunes or Zune.

July 12: (S)Talking Brad Garrett
SPECIAL: Brad Garrett's "Stalker" Speaks

The first line of his obituary will identify him as the put-upon brother in the classic sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond,” but before that role of a lifetime Brad Garrett was an accomplished stand-up comic who opened for Frank Sinatra, Julio Iglesias and many others. That’s why his decision to slap his name on the space at the Tropicana that has traditionally been a venue for comedians is less surprising than it appears at first. Garrett, who performed for the first two weeks at the club and promises to appear at least one weekend a month going forward, chats this hour about how he regards his quote-un-quote role of a lifetime, how awkwardness about his size led to his comedy career and how the liberal actor keeps the peace with his notoriously conservative former co-star, Patricia Heaton. Also, Brad and I dig into the question of whether he is being stalked.

In Banter: Lots of restaurant talk, the Harmon is stuck, Sheldon Adelson is defying expectations, the Main Event is still healthy, Dallas’ NFR/boxing gambit and the ATM companies want to help you lose more and faster.

Links to stuff discussed:

Yelp on Johnny Smalls, Julian Serrano, Nu Sanctuary, Ferraro’s andFirefly
Get tickets for Brad Garrett’s Comedy Club at the Tropicana
Guest host David McKee’s blog, Stiffs & Georges
VegasHappensHere.Com posts on Brad Garrett’s stalker situation
Our special episode with Garrett’s stalker
The Las Vegas Business Press’ Tony Illia on the Harmon stagnation
Steve’s NYT piece when the Harmon was shorn
WSJ piece on the Dallas stadium hoping to compete with Vegas
Stiffs & Georges on the various Sheldon Adelson stories and the Singapore place’s seeming success
Minus 5 is opening at Monte Carlo
Hash House A Go Go opening at M
Rock N Rita opened at Circus Circus
The Main Event of WSOP draws 7,319
Terrance Watanabe’s settlement with Harrah’s
The Jeff German piece about how RICH out-of-control gamblers should be stopped
The Arnold Knightly piece about whether average gamblers should be enabled by the ATM

When Gaming Execs Can't STFU

Here's this week's LVW col, which avid readers of this space recall from its draft form two days ago when it was posted for a couple of hours before I decided to expand it into a full column. Enjoy! -sf

Casino execs: Why all the hatin'?
Vegas collegiality only seems to work in times of plenty

By STEVE FRIESS

"There is an unwritten rule within the gaming industry: Don't disrupt another casino operator's grand opening."

Review-Journal gaming scribe Howard Stutz's Sunday column about the decision by Boyd Gaming to issue its Station counter-offer on Aria’s opening day contained this hilarious line. It’s not hilarious because Stutz is wrong. He’s totally right. It’s hilarious because he wrote about Boyd’s untoward acts of last week, when he easily could have been talking about Sheldon Adelson, Donald Trump, Phil Ruffin, Steve Wynn or even George Maloof.

As Stutz wrote, Boyd did themselves no favors dropping a bomb that would've been front-page news on a normal day last week. But at least Boyd didn't try to steal the spotlight the same way Adelson, Trump and Ruffin did. Consider:

* Adelson gave his onceish-a-year in-depth interview to Forbes' Matthew Miller on Aria's Opening Day. It's a fascinating exchange in which Adelson goes on about how important his Forbes billionaire's list ranking is in a manner I've never heard any mogul speak. And as for CityCenter? "Even though there is a lot of publicity about it, I haven't heard anyone who's seen it tell me it is going to be a winner. They have no strategy. They have no obvious plan. If they try to compete in the travel and tour business, they will cannibalize all their other properties, like the Bellagio. They don't have a convention space big enough to make an impact. So they built it without a strategy. How ill-advisable is that?"

* Trump: He went on "Larry King Live" on Aria Eve to declare CityCenter ugly, "an absolute catastrophe." Norm Clarke of the R-J theorized that Trump was reacting to MGM Mirage CEO Jim Murren's remark to me for my L.A. Weekly opus that the Trump tower in Vegas is hardly prime-time stuff. Either way, MGM Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman had probably the most hilarious comeback of the year, telling Norm of Trump, "I can hardly imagine anyone's opinion that matters less than his." That didn't sit well with Trump, who couldn't bear to give his competitor the last word. He dashed off a hand-written note to Norm, who published it on Saturday, that read: "The CityCenter is architecturally unappealing -- It will be the biggest bust in the history of real estate -- good concept but badly designed and really badly executed. Too bad."

* Ruffin: The owner of the Treasure Island is painted in another Forbes piece out this weekend as something of a savior of CityCenter for buying the resort from MGM Mirage when they were desperate for cash. Ruffin's happy to play that role, sure, but then he drops this completely buried bomb: "They have so many billions of dollars of debt on that project. They are going to have to make so much money every month just to service that debt. That's going to force the MGM guys to go through a lot of pain again, and they'll have to renegotiate their debt but probably also sell off another property or two. I've got at least $500 million in cash and loans I haven't drawn down. And I'd love to own the Bellagio or Mandalay Bay." Shame, really, that he's putting Gilley's in the TI when it would've been so great where the underperforming Conservatory is, you know? But maybe he could get Cirque du Soleil to give him a "Cold Beer, Dirty Girls"-themed show for Mandalay Bay?

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com

The New Dino Chronicles of Vegas

I'm not a big dinosaur guy, but yesterday's assignment for the Agence France-Presse to cover the attempted sale of the third-most-intact Tyrannosaurus Rex at a big natural artifacts auction put on by Bonhams & Butterfields at the Venetian was a surprisingly great deal of fun. The T. Rex, a female awkwardly named Samson, garnered a top bid of $3.6 million, but that wasn't enough so they didn't sell it.

Maybe it was the fact that it was my first assignment outing with my new iPhone since I've figured out the whole Twitter-Picture thing and so it was fun to show folks in real time via my Twitter feed images like this one of the cute kid vamping in front of the largest shark jaw ever found:

That didn't sell, by the way. The highest bid came in at around $550,000, but auctioneers decided that didn't hit the reserve price. There was a lot of that yesterday, reflecting that even millions-of-years-old fossils aren't immune to 2009's economic doldrums.

I met some colorful people. You think of expensive auction bidders as stuffy folks in suits or pantsuits probably representing some mysterious billionaire, but this guy...

...was just a rock musician named Damon Ranger of the Chicago-based band Blackbox who was considering buying something (but didn't) for the house in the $10k-$15k range.

This shlubby-looking fellow, however...

...is on the hook for about $1 million in total winning bids on a variety of items including the pair of tricertop-related dinosaurs behind him. He's Dr. Larry Lawson, 44, an oncologist from Big Lake, Alaska, quite near now-famous Wasilla. He claimed he's got a 501(c)3 non-profit called From The Vault that covers his collection of all sorts of dino-stuff because he opens it up to school groups, but he's got no website for it and I wasn't able to locate any such organization anywhere in the U.S., let alone Alaska, in the IRS's online database. Odd, that. At least this seems to confirm he's an oncologist.

Oh, and there was at least one mysterious billionaire, but he showed up in person with his wife:

That is, of course, Sheldon Adelson and wife Miriam in the front row with the appropriately numbered paddle No. 770 went on to buy about $142,000 worth of stuff, including blowing $67,000 on this:


It's a large opalescent ammonite from the late cretaceous period found in southern Alberta, Canada. They lived 71 million years ago and that color is natural. (Photo credit: Dolce Dreams blog).

Adelson was quite friendly. In fact, his wife initially gave me a no-comment, but as we chatted some more Sheldon actually said, "It's OK, he's been good to us." Which is funny because some on his PR team don't feel so warm about me. The couple explained they would put some of the items in their home -- "we bought some tchotchkes for the house" -- and for the Adelson high school they fund.

He seemed to be in terrific spirits, actually, and walking a lot better than the last time I saw him in person in January 2008. I noted to him that his stock is back up a bit -- it was below $2 in March but closed Friday at $16.13 -- to which he replied, "It's only beginning to rise again." He expressed pleasure in the upswing they're seeing in Macau and referenced his coming Hong Kong IPO.

With the T. Rex unsold and available for about $5 million, I wondered why Adelson didn't buy it. He had seen first-hand how popular an exhibit it was when it drew 15,000 to view the free auction preview in the Guggenheim space. My Las Vegas Weekly editor, Ken Miller, had fantasized about Samson staying in Vegas in this week's issue, in fact, and while I don't think Ken's idea of standing it next to the Welcome sign is feasible, I sure do think that someone should take note of the immense popularity not just of the preview but also of Sue, the most intact T. Rex ever found, which has drawn mobs for going on 10 years at Chicago's Field Museum.

I quizzed Adelson on why he didn't buy it and he said, bafflingly, "It's huge, where would I put something that big?" Seeing how we were just a doorway from the immense Venetian's Grand Hall, I thought of a few places. Seemed to me that he could easily draw a million people to pay $5 each to see the thing somewhere at the Venetian or Palazzo to cover the cost of buying it. He's a billionaire, though, and I'm not, so I stifled myself.

I do find it strange that I was the only reporter to cover the Adelson angle here. The Las Vegas Sun didn't, the L.A. Times didn't and the Associated Press didn't mainly because they oddly covered the auction fron Reno owing to the fact that the Vegas bureau no longer has staff on the weekends. (The R-J ran the AP story which means the largest local paper ceded a significant scientific and economic event to the wires only to end up with something written from 450 miles away.)

It's not as though Adelson was difficult to spot...

...or that he's that obscure a personality or business figure. He may have fallen from the lofty heights of 3rd richest American, but he's still the 26th wealthiest American and first richest Las Vegan, according to the latest Forbes list.

Yet my favorite was the Huffington Post, which long has boasted the most consistently banal, obvious, cliched coverage of Vegas of any major site on the Web. Here's a screenshot of their little preview of the auction:


The text there reads: "Only in Vegas would they... auction off dinosaur bones?"

Well, no. There have been dinosaur bone and fossil auctions all over the world since man started finding the things. But someone thought this counts as clever writing.

Weidner Responds, Sort Of

Former Las Vegas Sands COO William Weidner today shrugged off the attempt by LVS CEO Sheldon Adelson to lay the company's problems at his feet. The company's stock has fallen from $148 in Oct. 2007 to about $10 today. Construction has been stalled in Macau, Las Vegas and Pennsylvania while Adelson finds new financing packages, which he says he is this/close to sewing up.

In a May 22 interview with me, Adelson said:

"Would I have done anything different? Yes, I would’ve fired Bill Weidner a long time ago. He created a financing situation that was completely inappropriate. Now we’re getting financing that’s more appropriate. What I’d like to say, unequivocally, is it’s not a matter of the [Macau] market. The market is good, very good. You cannot change the culture of Chinese people and their love to challenge luck. If there’s some bumps in the road in terms of everything going 100 percent perfect. Our numbers have been going up and the [Macau peninsula, where casinos have long clustered and now include Sands Macao, Wynn Macau and MGM Mirage Macau] have been going down. [The Cotai Strip is] standing out as a separate must-see attraction in the city of Macau."

Weidner responded by noting that the trouble with the company's liquidity is that Adelson refused to sell off stock in early 2008 when the stock was still trading in near $100. Doing so would have provided plenty of cash for the company and averted the credit challenges, he said.

Other than that, Weidner didn't want to get into a public pissing match with Adelson. "Let him say whatever he wants to say," Weidner said. "It's ridiculous on its surface."

Adelson Wishes He'd Fired Weidner Sooner

I had an extremely brief -- maybe 10-minute -- interview Friday evening with Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson as I prepared my New York Times piece on the opening of the Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem. But gosh, what a 10-minute interview. He talked up the Bethlehem property, of course, but he also wandered into areas I hadn't even planned to discuss.

Most importantly, he was fresh off the plane from Macau and said he believes he may have the financing in place to restart construction of the resorts on the Cotai Strip and the hotel and shopping at the Bethlehem site by the end of 2009. With the Times' blessing -- owing to a shrinking business-section freelance budget -- I did an Agence France-Presse wire service story about this development.

Ah, but there was more. In March, longtime top lieutenant William Weidner, the chief operating officer, left the company. He says he quit; Adelson has said he fired him. This culminated an epic internal struggle against the backdrop of LVS' stock freefalling from an October 2007 high of $148 to a low of less than $2 earlier this year.

I asked Adelson whether he would have done anything differently in the past year or so and this was his wallop of an answer:

"Would I have done anything different? Yes, I would’ve fired Bill Weidner a long time ago. He created a financing situation that was completely inappropriate. Now we’re getting financing that’s more appropriate. What I’d like to say, unequivocally, is it’s not a matter of the [Macau] market. The market is good, very good. You cannot change the culture of Chinese people and their love to challenge luck. If there’s some bumps in the road in terms of everything going 100 percent perfect. Our numbers have been going up and the [Macau peninsula, where casinos have long clustered and now include Sands Macao, Wynn Macau and MGM Mirage Macau] have been going down. [The Cotai Strip is] standing out as a separate must-see attraction in the city of Macau."

Before I could even ask another question, Adelson was off and running again. Steve Wynn has lambasted LVS in Asia and MGM Mirage on the Strip, particularly on Jon Ralston's TV show, for overambitious plans that lacked proper financing. Adelson battled back on that one:

"I wish I had accelerated the construction [in Macau], not cut down on it. I hear that our competitors like Steve Wynn fault us by saying, 'Oh they went too far, too fast, and they never should have built so much.' In the meantime, what’s the bottom line of our company versus other companies? Even in the economic tsunami that we’re experiencing, we’re still doing better than other companies on a proportional basis. Much better."

It's hard to know exactly what he means here, but thanks to Hunter Hillegas at RateVegas.Com for providing me with some data from recent SEC filings for comparison's sake. He found that the Wynn Macau and Sands Macao had average daily room rates in the first quarter of 2009 of $268, higher than the $216 garnered by the Venetian Macao, which is Cotai. As for the revenue per room in the same period, Sands Macao got $260, Wynn Macau got $223 and Venetian Macao got $216. So on both measures, Adelson's own property on the Macau peninsula was doing better than his property on Cotai. In Vegas, Wynn-Encore got an average rate of $222, higher than Venetian's $209 and Palazzo's $221. So it's pretty close on that front but it's hard to see how Adelson claims a clear victory in any of these markets.

Adelson did say that the one project he does not expect to restart by year's end are the St. Regis luxury condos on the Strip that now stand half-built. Yet he said that could happen, too, if he can create a situation where the developer is also the lender so the buyers can get the credit to close that banks are reluctant to provide. (Photo left by Isaac Brekken for my NYT piece in March on the Vegas condo market.)

I asked Bill Lerner, the ex-Deutsche Bank gaming analyst who now has his own firm called Union Gaming Group, about this notion. He said it's not farfetched and he expects MGM Mirage to do the same with some of their condos at CityCenter.

"I think we’ll see that with some of the residential development in the Strip corridor where the protects are built or nearly built. The operator/developer will structure seller financing. Where’s the downside? If they move ahead and do something like that, it allows them to close and collect interest payments. It’s the best alternative given the current set of circumstances."

Lerner, incidentally, is quoted in my AFP piece speculating that LVS will sell off some assets or take on equity-sharing partners to finish the stalled projects.

Finally, Adelson again defended his approach and he brought up the fact that he put $1 billion of his own money into the company to keep it afloat.

"Unless somebody thinks completely ignorant of the facts, I think I made an educated and informed investment decision that was a good decision on our part that saved our company and now we live to fight another day. I took $1 billion out of my family’s piggy bank. How many people would do that?"

Not ever having that kind of wealth, I honestly cannot say.

Unions Heart Sands and Sheldon!

No, your eyes do not deceive you. Despite Las Vegas Sands and CEO Sheldon Adelson in particular being seen as Public Enemy No. 1 by the unions in Las Vegas, this was a full-page ad in the Express-Times in Bethlehem on Friday celebrating the opening of the casino there. (I had to scan in three parts and piece it together).

I asked LVS spokesman Ron Reese about this odd turn of events. He proudly reported that the Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem is "100 percent union built."

He said they used "some" union labor for building the hotels in Las Vegas. But he had a grin on his face that told me I was not wrong to find this all quite ironic. It was only earlier this month that litigation between LVS and the Culinary 226 in Las Vegas over issues related to the opening of Venetian in 1999 were finally fully ended. The Venetian-Palazzo is the largest non-union shop on the Strip and the halls of the Culinary's downtown offices are adorned with photos of massive protests against Adelson. I want to say there's even photos of people holding pickets in which Adelson has the devil's horns on him.

Yet in the Keystone State, they're 100 percent union built and proud of it! (The service workers are not union, though.) Not only that, but the company spent $743 million to build a casino in a jurisdiction where they'll have to hand over 55 percent of the gaming revenue to the state!?!

What does Bethlehem and Harrisburg have that Vegas and Carson City don't? Anyone?

This week's LVW col: Woo Restaurant

Here's this week's installment of "The Strip Sense" in Las Vegas Weekly. Enjoy. -sf

A Rock and a Chinese Place

The Woo family’s move to the Palazzo might not have been the best thing for all

By STEVE FRIESS

Sometime back in the 1990s, an eccentric fellow wanted to eat at a restaurant. He sent his advance team to scope out the place and its various exits, baffling the owners of the fine establishment.

“Is the president coming?” Theresa Woo remembered thinking.

No, no. It was just Sheldon Adelson, then the owner of the Sands Expo Center and the construction site that would become the Venetian. Even then, he was a peculiar presence, running with his bodyguards and concerned about perceived enemies lying in wait to kill him.

To Woo, Adelson and wife Miriam became just another well-known pair of clients at the Mayflower Cuisinier, the go-to spot for upscale Chinese food tucked away in a strip mall at Sahara and Decatur.

Yet as the years went on, the Adelsons and other Las Vegas Sands executives started dreaming of bringing the family-run operation to the Strip. And Rob Goldstein, the president of the Venetian, finally made the Woos an offer they couldn’t refuse: Las Vegas Sands would build them a $6 million space on the second floor of the under-construction Palazzo’s shopping area.

There was a catch, though. A tragic, weird, totally unnecessary catch. According to Woo, Goldstein required the family to close the Mayflower. And so, in January 2008, they did.

Woo Restaurant opened shortly thereafter. It’s beautiful and spacious, all dramatic high ceilings and bamboo and worm-eaten butternut. Oh, and, for most of the year that it has been open, hardly the jammed house the always-busy Mayflower was.

We’ll get back to that in a moment, but first you ought to know that there are few classic Vegas stories more charming than that of the Woo family. Ming See, Theresa’s mom, was 6 when her family fled the Chinese mainland for Hong Kong amid the Communist takeover. She met Henry Woo, had two of their three children and then moved to Vegas to become American citizens. Henry dealt cards; Ming See worked as a dishwasher at the Dunes.

Read the rest HERE

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?

Vegas' Wet -- and Silent!?!? -- 100

Beyond Howard Stutz' puzzling decision to allow an anonymous source to issue a potentially devastating allegation against U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, today's paper offered some other interesting bits worthy of comment. Ben Spillman's piece about a poker blogger detained and banned from the Cannery Casino intrigued me because the bottom line is that casinos are not within their lawful rights to force you to surrender or delete your photos. And Keith Rogers has a totally poachable piece about a Vegas man who may have finally found out, 65 years later and against all odds, how his father died during World War II.

But the most interesting topic was today's Wet 100 "expose." In a massive front-page story, reporter Henry Brean outed the alleged top 100 water users in Las Vegas that includes the list, the addresses and even aerial views of the single-family homes that guzzled the most in this drought-stricken town. Many are notables, including: eBay founder Pierre Omidyar (No. 2), Greenspun Media Group bosses Danny Greenspun (No. 3) and Brian Greenspun (No. 59), Station Casinos chief Frank Fertitta III (No. 4), Danny Gans (No. 5), Wal-Mart scion Nancy Walton Laurie (No. 9), Phil Ruffin (No. 16), various Wynns (Nos. 15 and 20), heavyweight champ Floyd Mayweather Jr. (No. 47), ex-LVS President Bill Weidner (No. 70), Sheldon Adelson (No. 79), and Don King (No. 96.) King, according to Brean, was tops in terms of usage per square foot. Surprisingly, Siegfried & Roy's lush Little Bavaria isn't on the list.

An eye-catching piece, to be sure, but it shockingly lacks one important element of good journalism: Brean evidently did not attempt to reach a single one of the homeowners whose names, addresses and water-usages are published. Nowhere in the nearly 2,000 words is there any indication that any of the people being shamed were offered a chance to comment. I understand the data came from government records, but government records can be incorrect. And outraged readers -- myself included -- had to be thinking, "What do these people have to say for themselves?"

What's funny is that the subheadline for this package reads, "Top 100 users consime enough water to supply 1,950 homes, but that's only half of the story." Right-o! The half of the story that is missing? The listees' side! Surely in 100 people, there were a few willing to explain, apologize or something. Instead, the only user given a chance to respond was a lady featured in her own little sidebar (which is not linked-to anywhere on the page of the main story, natch) because she apparently kept the bathtub in her mobile home running at full blast for years. She declined.

There's also a public safety concern here. Sheldon Adelson, for instance, was until recently the wealthiest Jewish man in the world and remains perhaps the largest private supporter of Israel. He employs a phalanx of security because he receives lots of death threats. The newspaper today listed what they claim to be his home address. Yet the county assessor's records say the property at that address is in the name of the Paul G Roberts Trust. Roberts is Adelson's lawyer. So it could be Adelson's property or it could be his lawyer's. So either a man who has sincere security reasons not to have his home address published has now been outed or the wrong person has been identified. Ick either way.

Could there be others here who do not live or even still own the property ascribed to them? Who's to know. Nobody asked any of them.

Wynn or Adelson want Frontier land?

[UPDATE: Howard Stutz, the only R-J reporter whose blog is worth a damn, has this up this morning about the Adelson-Elad thing. He's as dubious as the rest of us.]

Deutsche Bank gaming analyst Bill Lerner issued this analysis this morning in his regular emails:

Bloomberg has picked up an Israeli newspaper (‘The Marker') story which reports that Las Vegas Sands will swap shares for Elad's 35 acres on the Strip. This site is located directly across from Wynn's Encore. Wynn has previously indicated an interest in this land via a similarly described swap for shares, valued at a fraction of the $35m/acre that Elad paid. Perhaps LVS is being confused for WYNN by this Israeli paper. However, if LVS proceeds with this transaction, the company would be issuing more stock for future 'greenfield' development in an environment where it has been impossible to raise capital to complete their original development pipeline. Similar to its recent primary equity offering, this transaction as described would be further dilutive. Furthermore, LVS has contiguous land in what we call its 'toilet bowl' site, which is 18 acres behind its Venetian/Palazzo/Sands Expo center in Vegas, so in our view the Elad site makes strategically less sense.

Make of it what you will. I didn't find the Bloomberg story, but I did find this Reuters piece from two hours ago in which one of Elad's main partners denies any deal pending with Las Vegas Sands or Adelson. As Lerner says, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It also doesn't make any sense for Wynn, who has all that free land behind him on the golf course to develop, to go picking up the land across the street unless he really, really, really wants to control the view and the price was ridiculously cheap.

Gosh, there are an awful lot of moving parts on the Strip these days, aren't there?

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

Wynn v Adelson, Round 888 or So

The other day, Sheldon Adelson-(barely)-controlled Las Vegas Sands bemoaned Beijing's constricting of visas to Macau.

LVS President William Weidner, discussing the construction stoppage that has put 11,000 Macanese workers out of jobs, told the South China Morning Post:

"There have been some changes in the (Chinese) central government's attitude towards Macau. We don't think it's necessarily all that prudent to put more money in [the project] until we see how that attitude works its way out. ... Macau, because of what has happened, has kind of created for itself unfinished or semi-finished projects. I don't think we're alone in not completing developments."

Well, maybe not. But that didn't stop our good pal Steve Wynn, riding out the miserable world economic conditions with amazing resilience all things considered, from referring to the Chinese as having handled "practically everything beautifully" and having been "more than accommodating, more than understanding." He also told the Associated Press:

"The fact that the economy and the development and expansion of Macau occurred at such a rapid rate has created a great deal of stress on the community. The central government and the Macau government putting ... a slowdown in visitation was an attempt to give the community a chance to absorb the stuff that had been built. ... I think the market is wonderful in China. Macau has always been a tourist kind of place and it's broadened ... its appeal. And I think that's going to continue."

So I guess all of Adelson's sucking up to Beijing, insisting the Chinese mainlander's way of life is just peachy and that there's no such thing as gambling addiction in Asia didn't work out so well, eh?

Palazzo Saves LVS From Michelin Wipeout

The very prestigious 2009 Michelin Guide for Las Vegas comes out this week and the selections are posted online here. The three-star and two-star honorees are the same as 2008, with Joel Robuchon getting three and Alex, Guy Savoy and Picasso getting two.

There's some shake-up in one-star column, though. Remember, just getting one star from these folks means these places are amongst the smallest, most exclusive club of the finest eateries in all the world.

The one-star list includes Alize, Andre's, Aureole, Bradley Ogden, Daniel Boulud Brasserie, DJT, L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon, Le Cirque, Michael Mina, MiX, Nobu, Restaurant Charlie and Wing Lei. Dropped from last year's list was the Mesa Grill at Caesars Palace.

Newcomers include DJT and Restaurant Charlie. Both are interesting for different reasons. DJT at Trump International Towers is interesting because The Donald's personal chef, Joseph Isidori, has left and is "pursuing other opportunities," so I wonder if this rating reflects that significant personnel change. Spokeswoman Erin McCleskey told Norm Clarke in August: "Based on guest feedback, we have decided to modify the DJT experience to become more approachable and casual." That hardly sounds like a place striving for culinary masterwork anymore.

And Restaurant Charlie, which is Charlie Trotter's place at Palazzo, means that Las Vegas Sands got one. Last year, the absence of any of the Venetian's restaurants from the star list was conspicuous. I'm a little amazed that Palazzo, with such a huge new food lineup, could only muster one for this list.

Still, that's one more than last year. So now it's Wynn 4, Sheldon 1. Yes, I still count Picasso for Wynn. But hey, who's got two successful Broadway shows and who's got none, huh?

LVW Column: Is Adelson a closet lib?

Here's this week's Weekly column...

Not (quite) so right?

Sheldon Adelson has -- gasp! -- a little bit of liberal in him

By STEVE FRIESS

As the election cycle heats up and money flies in every direction for the political parties and their causes, several members of the media have branded our own Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson the right-wing version of financier George Soros.

The comparison is an easy one to make when you don’t dig much deeper than the superficial similarities. The Hungarian-born Soros is a known lefty billionaire who hands over shocking amounts of cash to MoveOn.org, to the Center for American Progress, to groups pushing marijuana legalization, physician-assisted suicide, abortion rights and gun control. Adelson, too, gives away eye-popping amounts of cash to certain conservative groups and is known to vehemently support many Republicans, including President George W. Bush and Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons.

Except here’s the big flaw in the analogy: Adelson is actually a liberal. No, really. He said so. I know because, last January while I was interviewing the CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corp. in advance of the opening of the Palazzo, he said so. We were talking about his efforts to build a casino in Massachusetts, and he spoke highly of his interactions with Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. When I remarked that the Democratic governor with strong ties to Barack Obama seemed an unlikely bedfellow for a man like Adelson, he pushed back.

“I’m a social liberal,” he told me. “I’m socially very liberal. Too liberal.”

Read the rest HERE

Vegas Podcast-a-Palooza Ramping Up!

We're getting a fresh blast of great PR in advance of the Vegas Podcast-a-Palooza today!

First comes an eerily timed -- gosh, how DOES that happen? -- Question of the Day that gives an overview of the Vegas podcast world on the Las Vegas Advisor website. And my friend and colleague Norm Clarke gave us a hand in today's Review-Journal column, which can be found here. (I believe the QoD is only available for free on Thursday, then it's part of the archive for LVA members.) And now Joe Brown from the Las Vegas Sun referenced us in his blog post earlier today as well!

Of course, YOU are our best promoters. And that's why you'll be rewarded for showing up! The Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority has provided 150 blinky Welcome To Las Vegas magnetic lapel pins for guests on a first-come, first-served basis. And we'll do a drawing during or after each show to give away prize packs that include donated Vegas.Com swag, copies of my books and some other stuff that's in "The Strip" prize vault from the Huntington Press warehouse. And after all three shows are done, Tim, Michele, Miles, me and Hunter will take questions from the audience.

For our part, in addition to our Carrot Top chat, we've got a fascinating piece of never-aired audio to share from a recent interview that contains an amazing Sheldon Adelson anecdote and tonight I shall be having my much-anticipated rapproachement dinner with a certain Vegas mogul so there will be that to dish about.

If you somehow don't know what this event is that I jammer on about, click here and see. There's still some talk that we might stream the event live and I'll update when I know if/when/how. And whatever we do will be in our feed sometime next week for sure.

Trump: "Best-Executed Version of The Worst-Considered Idea"

As promised, here's my Las Vegas Weekly column for July 17 on the oddity that is the Trump.

Trump-atross

The mogul's Strip tower is loaded with question marks

By STEVE FRIESS

I'm sitting at the lobby bar of the undeniably pretty Trump International Hotel on a Sunday evening about to tuck into a $21 burger and sip from an $8 pink-grapefruit soda. I didn’t mean to splurge on dinner here, but I popped in to take a look-see and realized that this was the only thing for me to do.

Which is, of course, the big problem here. The slender gold tower with the most famous name in real estate emblazoned atop it is a bafflement to all who consider its existence. It is also, by a large measure, the very last place most Las Vegas tourists should ever feel comfortable visiting.

In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that not only will the planned second tower never be built, but we in the media will also be writing many stories in coming years about the struggle of this property. It is the best-executed version of the worst-considered idea in Vegas today.

I’ll explain that in a moment, but consider the exchange I had when I pulled up. There’s no self-parking, and the valet woman looked me up and down when I stepped out of my vehicle. I was unshaven, wearing a gray T-shirt, ratty painter’s shorts and sandals, and I felt immediately as though I was violating some standard of decency. She was pleasant enough, but she also grilled me with a smile.

“Are you checking in?” she asked.

No.

“Are you meeting someone?”

No.

“Are you going to the spa?”

No. I assume she knew I wasn’t going to the fancy restaurant in those duds. “Just here to look around,” I said cheerily.

“You know there’s no casino here, right?”

Uh, yes. Can I have my valet ticket? Please?

Once inside, I was certainly impressed by the polished lobby with all its sparkly things and comfy sofas. But I was struck by how anti-Vegas the entire place is.

I know, I know. Exclusivity is this joint’s big selling point. But it doesn’t seem like they’re doing a whole lot of selling here. I met a Norwegian at the bar who was in on business and usually stays at the Wynn but decided to give the Trump a go because the room rates were more than a quarter lower than Wynn’s. He’s enjoyed himself here, he said, because “there’s almost nobody here, so the service is great, and it’s a lot quieter.”

That’s an endorsement, but an odd one. There are very few people who come to Las Vegas to get away from the hustle and bustle. Some come here for work and prefer to be shielded from it, true, but as Sheldon Adelson has so successfully proved, you must appeal to both conventioneers and vacation travelers in order to keep a steady occupancy level throughout the week and year.

Instead, what we have is a hotel-condo property that seems to actively discourage the casual visitor, which is, dare I say it, un-Vegasian.

Read the rest HERE.