Double or Nothing: How Two Friends Risked It All to Buy One of Las Vegas' Legendary Casinos (16 page)

Every week it got more and more surreal. But my mouth went dry when we got word that, based on the direction of the show, Tony Bennett would not take part in it. When I called the producers in outrage they said they didn't care, because they really didn't want Tony anyway!

This was over the borderline. You can imagine how I felt as I walked over to tell Tim. “Are you ready for this?” His hand went to his forehead and his lip curled in preparation for the worst. I don't even remember his response because I was in such a rage myself. The show was not only eclipsing our Vintage Vegas image. It was undermining our entire business strategy. If word got out that Tony and Danny wanted nothing to do with us, we were cooked.

My days were filled with phone calls to Perry, Danny Bennett, and the show's producers. “Look,” Danny said, “you and Tim are what we want to be connected with—not the TV show.” I had to convince him to stay on board. I had to get assurances from Burnett's people that Tony would be featured in an episode and treated with respect. In the process, Burnett agreed to send his crew back to Vegas to reshoot what was left of the show at no small expense. But you can't go back and reshoot reality—even when a lot of it has been concocted in the first place. Tim just couldn't put on the same shirt and suit and be seamlessly spliced back into a scene that happened months before—espe
cially after losing ten pounds. Anyone looking carefully at the show could see that.

Finally, toward the end of August, the show's final episode mercifully came to an end. We'd planned a boys' vacation in Europe with some friends around that time—our first break after seven months of relentless work. I don't know what I was thinking when I asked Jaime to join us. Well, I do know what I was thinking. I thought that if I could just get Tim and Jaime together for an extended period where they could really get a chance to know each other, they might be able to blend. I was the point guard on the basketball court, remember, and bringing people together is what I do.

Jaime could see what was coming and asked me to reconsider. But I was stubborn and selfish. To Tim, I might as well have ruined his vacation before it even started. In fact, I did, though ironically the trip also brought about his favorite moment in the Jaime experience.

The details of the incident vary depending on who's telling the story. The disparity is small, though, only 1 percent. Everyone is in agreement on the other 99.

We flew off on vacation through Los Angeles. On the plane from Vegas to L.A., Tim claims that Jaime made a comment about how difficult it can be for her to go through LAX with all the paparazzi, autograph seekers, and fans that simply want to come over to wish her well. Great, he's thinking, I finally get a few days off, and I've got to take a trip with Elizabeth Taylor. The way he tells the story, he's rolling his eyes as she explains why she's going to put on a hat and sunglasses before we walk through LAX in the hope that she doesn't inconvenience the rest of us.

Jaime claims she never said anything like that to Tim. She says that under no circumstances would she ever say anything
like that to Tim because she knew that Tim didn't like her, and she would never have given him that ammunition. She says she talked to me about it in private and wonders if I might have passed it on to Tim.

I certainly remember Jaime asking me to factor in extra time at airports when I traveled with her. Her upbringing in the South had ingrained in her a hospitality that made it impossible for her to refuse an autograph request. It's not like she was tackled by the masses as we approached our flights. Back then, she had a nice-sized MTV-generation audience. Point is, she was superpolite to anyone who approached her. I saw it play out over and again. It does take time to sign all those autographs. That said, I don't recall her mentioning the paparazzi and autograph seekers to Tim on the plane ride toward LAX. I'm not saying it didn't happen. I'm not saying it did. All I'm saying is that I didn't hear it.

Anyway, there's no doubt that Jaime put on her sunglasses and hat when the plane landed in an attempt to be inconspicuous. And there's no doubt as Tim puckered his lips, took a deep breath, and looked to the sky that he thought Jaime was trying to be conspicuously inconspicuous to
attract
attention.

As we went to retrieve our bags, several college-aged kids started running toward us. Tim's eyes started rolling.
Oh, geeeeez, here we go.

Only they were racing toward Tim and me. They recognized us from the reality show and they wanted
our
autographs.

“Autographs?” Tim crowed. “Sure, guys! Absolutely! How about a picture?”

Then, one of the guys turned hopefully toward Jaime, handed her a camera, and asked her to take the shot.

As Tim put his arms around the guys and smiled, there is no denying that he was in his glory. If for some inexplicable
reason Jaime couldn't see exactly how much Tim was savoring the moment, he made it linger.

“Let's get another one!”

About the only time Tim ever agreed with Jaime Pressly came after the guys had gone their way, when he turned to her and said, “You know, Jaime, I see what you mean about LAX.”

There have been those who've theorized that Tim wanted to blow up the relationship by making the trip as lousy for Jaime and me as he felt himself. It certainly wasn't pleasant for Jaime, or for me. But it was my fault for putting us all in that situation. When you try to force something that isn't working, you're bound to make it rough on everybody.

I remember coming back to Vegas and pounding my fist on the steering wheel of my car, wondering why the hell nobody understood what I wanted. I simply couldn't fathom that
I
was the one who didn't understand. As Tim and I returned to The Nugget, the tension between us looked for every possible outlet, and the slightest mistake or miscommunication set off an argument. After he was convinced by poker champion Johnny Chan to purchase Snow Lotus Blossom tea gifts for our Asian customers, I was dumbfounded to discover that at $180 apiece the bill came to $60,000. The fifty thousand rubber bands with The Golden Nugget logo he'd ordered as money holders weren't nearly as expensive. But when you're not communicating properly, an unforeseen item like that can make you shout, “What the hell?” Soon you're screaming about something that you would have laughed over in another time.

Which is why Perry Rogers keeps that photo of Paul McCartney and John Lennon in his office to remind him: Don't fuck it up. Pay constant attention to your partnership. Snow Lotus Blossoms and rubber bands may not seem like
much, but you never know what might begin to make everything unravel.

It would be another seven months before Tim was really at the end of his rope, and we had a blowup on our next vacation when we went to see Andre play tennis in Dubai. Andre stepped between us and explained everything he'd learned from his marriage and divorce with the actress Brooke Shields. He told me about the allure and façade of Hollywood, the misunderstandings and the pain, and how it led him to become a stronger person and find Steffi Graf. Well, you can't see what's right for you until you understand what isn't. I stopped arguing with Tim after my conversation with Andre. I was seeing reality.

Jaime was too. She was tired of trying to battle against Tim and force a relationship with someone who was stubborn and selfish, much too different, and would barely come to visit her. We were finally able to unlock horns and go on our way to find what was best for each of us.

One night I couldn't sleep and wandered out on my balcony overlooking The Strip as Vegas blue announced the end of one day and the beginning of another. I sat there wondering if I could possibly be lucky enough to find a woman who I loved and who loved me and who could balance a life with my best friend and my work. Lorenzo and Frank had each found that woman and that balance. Such a woman seemed a long way off as that night turned to morning. What I didn't realize was that my best friend would let me know when I found her.

Only now can I see how right Andre was. Everything that happened during that time was leading me straight to the woman who'd become the love of my life. Just as everything that happened in her life was leading her to me.

But the breakup with Jaime didn't happen until after Dubai, and Dubai was still a long way off when Tim and I returned
home from that trip to Europe. The tension was ever present and mounting, and the distance between us was greater than at any time since the day we'd met.

Which meant it was certainly not the best of times for a guy to come into our casino and start beating the shit out of Tim and me for more than $8 million.

T
here were insiders who called Mr. Royalty's $25 million roll over the course of a year the most amazing they'd ever seen. It even surpassed The Run, the legendary winning streak notched by a Greek immigrant named Archie Karas. Archie pulled into town in 1992 with $50, got a loan from a friend, beat fifteen of the world's greatest poker players, then used a craps table at Binion's Horseshoe to multiply his take to more than $20 million.

Like Archie's run, Mr. Royalty's played out over time. It took a while before I got a grip on exactly what was happening. I wasn't sitting ringside the first couple of times Mr. Royalty came through the lobby bobbing and weaving as if he were entering the ring for a heavyweight championship fight. Sometimes Mr. Royalty arrived after midnight when I wasn't around. So I didn't even see him as a man. I first noticed him as a parenthesis on the Daily Operating Report.

Every morning a copy of the DOR would be e-mailed to my computer. The DOR would list in neat columns every department in the hotel, show a financial accounting for how it had done the day before, how that day measured up to the same day a year earlier, how we were doing up to that point in the month, and how that figure compared to its corresponding number the year before. It told me how many rooms we'd booked, how our restaurants did, how many tickets were sold at the showroom, how much cash flowed through our sports book, and just about anything else that had happened under our roof during the last twenty-four hours so long as it could be crunched into a number.

The DOR was generally very good news during early fall of 2004. In nearly every area, it showed consistent growth. In some areas, phenomenal improvement. Ed Borgato once looked at a chart showing our sports book revenues up 1,300 percent and thought the figure was a typo. It wasn't. It was Tim's open-up-the-limits strategy at work.

But I could also see in every DOR the emotional distance between Tim and me. After the tension of the European trip, we both burrowed into our work. Our jobs were the only place where we could escape from our frustrations with each other. We both tried to work out our differences by working harder. Even though we remained at an emotional distance, our work came together and the hotel blossomed.

Our rooms were booked, and our restaurants were filled. We found a dynamite nightclub act in impressionist Gordie Brown. We'd learned our lesson from the reality TV show and kept our television presence focused on our core customer with the poker challenge on NBC and a deal for the World Series of Blackjack on the Game Show Network. The future couldn't have been brighter. Tony Bennett was coming back. Country singer Randy
Travis signed on to perform when the rodeo was in town. Julio Iglesias put us on his calendar. We started looking into buying adjacent property and drawing up expansion plans.

All this positive energy burst off the DOR—with the exception of one line halfway down the page on the left-hand column. That's where I noticed a parenthesis. A parenthesis meant that the corresponding department had lost money the night before. Seeing $500,000 in parenthesis halfway down the page meant that a half-million bucks had been lost on table games.

“Oh, man,” I'd say to myself. “We took a hit last night.”

I started noticing this parenthesis halfway down the page more and more often. You can only say “we took a hit last night” for so long. After the fourth or fifth time, you say, “What the fuck?”

Gaming was the last place I was going to challenge Tim's expertise. But finally I brought it up.

“I know, I know,” he nodded. “Listen, the worm's gonna turn.” It was one of his favorite expressions.
The worm's gonna turn.

But the more these parentheses kept appearing, the more I began to notice a change on the faces of our senior management team. I was wiser now than I was back in the days of Travelscape. When I saw the tightness in their lips, I remembered what had happened to Mr. Incredible's hello when he felt uncomfortable about our impending deal with Barry Diller. When Edward Muncey's response to “How you doin', Edward?” changed from “
In-
credible!” to “Okay
,
” something was very wrong.

Our senior execs had been accustomed to working at MGM Mirage, where the odds were tightly coiled with very low risk to The House. They weren't used to seeing that parenthesis, and it bothered them big time.

“Make 'em eat like birds and shit like elephants,” has always
been the motto for running a successful casino. Much of our management team had never seen such volatile swings. They began to freak out when a few lucky players trampled the joint like elephants and didn't shit at all. After a while you could almost sense the execs whispering behind closed doors. When one of them pulled me aside and asked about our recurring losses at the tables, there was only one way I knew how to respond.

“Don't worry,” I said. “The worm's gonna turn.”

But Mr. Royalty was only heating up. And we weren't attracting enough big players who were losing enough to offset the damage Mr. Royalty was inflicting. If there'd been a lot of million-dollar players on the floor every time Mr. Royalty swaggered in, he wouldn't have mattered that much. The math would have taken care of itself. But one guy going for a knockout on every bet he made left you exposed to the unexpected when he got hot. Who could predict how far his luck might go? Just like in boxing, the punch that knocks you out is the one you don't see coming.

Soon everyone was aware when Mr. Royalty came through the lobby bobbing and weaving for another title fight, and then exiting with sacks of our money as if the championship belt were around his waist.

“You know what we're doing here?” asked an exasperated senior exec. “
We
are actually gambling!”

One day, after Mr. Royalty had walked off with another half million, I confronted Tim.

“Maybe we should stop taking his action,” I said. “This just doesn't make sense. How could this happen?”

“The worm's gonna turn, Tom.”

“Tim, he's beaten us for $4 million. That's half of our third-quarter profit.”

“Trust me, Tom. The worm
always
turns.”

“Look, everything else is going great. Every room was booked last night. There was a wait at every one of our restaurants. You know what they're saying about Gordie Brown? When you walk out of our showroom, your cheekbones are sore from laughter. We put all this together and then we pick up the DOR in the morning and find out we've
lost
money? What if he keeps coming and wins $25 million? It just doesn't make sense. No matter how hard everybody works, no matter how successful we are, are we really gonna give this guy a chance to take us down?”

Tim paused, but not for long. “So let me get this straight, Tom. Are you telling me that the laws of probability don't exist at The Golden Nugget?”

I saw a number in the parenthesis. Tim had different calculations running through his head.

“Look, Tom, the numbers say he'll lose. You know that like you know your name. He
will
lose. The numbers guarantee it. If he keeps playing, he
will
ultimately lose. He might
win more
before he loses. And he might lose it somewhere else. But for sure, if he keeps playing, he will lose. Do you want him to lose in
our
joint so we can get our money back? Or do you want him to lose the money he's already taken from us in
somebody else's
joint?”

What sounded safe to me—let's back off—sounded painfully risky to Tim. If we didn't give Mr. Royalty the limits and the game he wanted, he might not come back. Then we could never get our money back—not to mention Mr. Royalty's. That was the worst scenario for Tim. That made us a loser when we'd had the best of it. Tim wasn't an upper management guy. Every decision in his life was made so that he would never be an upper management guy. He was a gambler. The marrow running through his bones told Tim to stay in the game.

To Tim, it all boiled down to guts. And everything that would subsequently happen between him and Mr. Royalty can be traced back to that word. Guts. There's a story from Tim's childhood that helps explain it all, a story about a card game that took place nearly twenty years before Mr. Royalty walked through our doors. The name of that card game is Guts. It's a long story because it takes some time to describe the rules of the game. So bear with me. You'll see how it all comes together down the road.

Guts is like poker. Only it's played with two cards. A lot of kids in high school were scared of playing cards with Tim because of his reputation as a hustler. Guts was a good way for Tim to entice people into a game. Since the ante was only a quarter, the other kids felt comfortable when they heard Tim say, “Hey, it's only a 25 cent game.”

While it was true that the ante remained 25 cents no matter how many times the cards were dealt, once you had a seat at the table, it didn't take long to see that you could win or lose big money.

Here's how. Everybody starts a game of Guts by throwing a quarter into the pot. Each player is dealt two cards faced down. The dealer also deals a dummy hand and sets those two cards in the center of the table. The worst hand anyone could possibly have is a 2 and a 3. The best hand is a pair of aces. To give you a gauge of risk, a pair of 2s gives you a reasonably good shot at winning.

Everybody looks at their cards and has to make a choice. Either you're in or you're out. If you're out, you've lost your quarter and you wait for the next game. If you're in, the game moves clockwise like a game of poker.

First, the remaining players try to beat each other. But the winner among the players doesn't automatically collect the
pot. The person with the winning hand then has to take on the dummy hand. If he beats the dummy hand, he collects the pot. But if he loses, he has to
double
the pot. And not only that, anybody who stayed in and lost has to double the pot.

So you can see how quickly the pot can grow. Let's say the pot is at $5 and two players stay in. One of them loses to the other. And then the winner loses to the dummy hand. That means both players have lost, and they each have to double the pot. Each of them puts up $10. This means the pot will be $25 before everybody antes up 25 cents for the next hand.

There were about six guys playing on the night this particular game of Guts took place. One of the guys, the way Tim describes him, was like the Tom Breitling of Bishop Gorman High School. Nicest guy in the world, but square as a box. He was everybody's friend, and peer pressure pushed him into the game. His name is Mike Demman.

The game was way over Mike's head, and on this night it was way over everybody's head. Nobody was winning, and the pot built up quickly. Once it got into the hundreds, everybody started playing conservatively because the money on the table was more than just about anybody had.

Nobody was staying in the game. It was easier to throw down your cards, toss in another quarter, and pray for two aces. But nobody got
any
good cards, the pot kept building, and it got to be two o'clock in the morning.

Finally, with $800 in the pot, the cards were dealt and it came time for Mike Demman to decide if he was in or out. Tension filled his face and everyone could see it.

“Oh, man,” His voice was tortured. “I don't know what to do.”

He was completely sincere, and everyone could feel his agony. He wasn't the type of guy to bluff. Even if he could, it
didn't matter. There's little bluffing in Guts because the dummy hand is waiting to be played. You can't trick the dummy hand out of the game.

Finally, Mike Demman decided. “Damn!” He threw down his cards. “I'm out.”

Everybody else went out, too. Naturally, everybody was curious about Mike's hand. So they asked him to turn over his cards.

Two jacks.

Tim went berserk. “What! Are you crazy! How could you not stay in?”

Everybody piled on.

“You pussy!”

“How could you go out!”

“What the fuck is the matter with you?”

Then the dummy cards were turned over.

Once Mike saw he would've won the pot, his humiliation turned to devastation. At that point, everybody
really
let him have it. Tim was beside himself.

“Two jacks! Two jacks! What were you thinkin'? Why would you even need to think? It's impossible to lose!”

Mike Demman left the table and ran outside.

Tim felt bad for him. He really liked Mike, and if anybody was going to win the pot besides himself, he would've liked for Mike to win it.

Winning an $800 pot at two in the morning would have been a huge moment in the life of a square in the tenth grade.

So Tim went outside to talk to Mike. When he got there, he found Mike Demman crying.

“What do you mean it was impossible that I could lose?” Mike said. “Someone else could have had queens, kings, or aces. Don't you understand? If I'd lost, I would've owed $1,600.
And I don't have $1,600!”

“Nobody has $1,600!” Tim said. “That's not the point! You could've asked me to lend you the money. If I didn't have it, you could've tried to get it somewhere else. But two jacks in a game of Guts
,
you
gotta
stay in.”

Well, if you haven't gotten the point by this point. That's
Tim.

But
that
Tim didn't have any responsibility on his shoulders. That Tim didn't have to worry about making decisions on a $215 million property that would impact a lot of people. That Tim could just be Tim.

Now, he was my partner. Every decision he made had an impact on my life and affected investments made by Perry, Andre, and Chuck Mathewson. Every decision he made had an impact on the jobs of The Nugget senior execs planning to send their kids to college. Every decision he made rippled from our personal assistant, Zach, all the way out to Reinaldo the window washer.