Double or Nothing: How Two Friends Risked It All to Buy One of Las Vegas' Legendary Casinos (2 page)
Authors: Tom Breitling,Cal Fussman
Tags: #===GRANDE===, #-OVERDRIVE-, #General, #Business, #Businessmen, #Biography & Autobiography, #-TAGGED-, #Games, #Nevada, #Casinos - Nevada - Las Vegas, #Las Vegas, #Golden Nugget (Las Vegas; Nev.), #Casinos, #Gambling, #-shared tor-
There's a story Johnny D. likes to tell about a guy who cashed his Social Security check and went to play blackjack at Treasure Island. This was back in the day when Steve Wynn was running it. The guy had no shoes and only two teeth, and he ran his Social Security check up to more than $1.2 million. When Steve got word, he offered the guy a suite, tried to get him into the shower so the guy wouldn't offend the other players, and even offered him money for a book contract.
Steve knew he couldn't buy publicity like that. Guy cashes his Social Security check and turns it into a million bucks. Where? Treasure Island. The way Johnny D. tells it, Steve wanted the guy to stop right there.
Steve knew what was going to happen if he didn't cut the guy off. But the guy wouldn't settle up. “Who do you think you are, telling me to stop?” the guy shot back. “What are you, scared?”
It wasn't long before he'd lost it all.
Now, if Tim and I owned a large corporation that had a fleet of hotels, we might learn how to exercise that kind of influence. The million that Mr. Royalty had taken from us in less than an hour would be meaningless. Money would be surging into our business through celebrity-chef restaurants, the sale of jewels, designer clothes, and hundreds of other sources.
But Tim and I weren't a big corporation. We were two guys standing up to the pounding of Mr. Royalty's luckâand the worst part about the beating was it was splitting us apart.
We'd become so close over the years we could finish each other's sentences. But after Mr. Royalty had started on his tear, I didn't even have to open my mouth. “I know, Tom, I know,” Tim would say before I could even get a word out.
Eleven in a row. Twelve. Thirteen.
As hard as it was to take, it was hard to argue with Tim. The casino was his worldânot mine. And I certainly understood his thinking.
“Look, Tom,” he explained. “The odds are on our side, and nobody beats the math. All I know is he'll blow the money. It may not be today. It may not be tomorrow. It may not be next week. But in time, he
will
blow the money. And he won't blow it at The Nugget if we don't let him play. We've got the best of it. And if we've got the best of it, why take a small shot? If I think I'm getting the best of it, hey, I'm betting as much as I can. It's a ballsy proposition here. It's gonna be a roller coaster ride. But we don't have a public company to answer to. It's just you and me. As long as we can pay our interest payments, who gives a shit? In the long run, we'll get all the money. In the short run, we'll just have to hold onto our balls and stick it out. We just have to keep him at the table.”
Fourteen in a row. Fifteen.
The yellow, white, and blue mountain climbed over Mr. Royalty's belly. How much longer could this go on? How much longer could we let it go on with more than a hundred thousand on each roll?
Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen.
I felt like I was going to puke.
Nineteen. Twenty.
Twenty-one.
What the�
The odds of a roller at craps going twenty-two straight are 7,869,881-1
Sonavabitch!
On the twenty-third roll, Mr. Royalty crapped out. Even accounting for his losing bets on the last roll, he had to be up more than two million. But now that his streak had been broken, maybe luck would start to swing our way.
I stared at the monitors. What was going on? Mr. Royalty was no longer asking for the dice. He wanted to cash out.
I was too stunned to think. Wherever he was, Tim had to be going crazy. When you're The House, there's only one thing worse than losing like that: That's wondering if the guy who just beat you out of two million bucks will leave and head straight for another casinoâwhere he'll proceed to lose
your
money.
Mr. Royalty walked over to the cage to collect. He'd come into the casino with cash wrapped in plastic directly from the U.S. Mint. And he wanted to leave with money wrapped by the U.S. Mint.
Johnny D. met him at the cage and watched as two Golden Nugget shopping bags were filled with green bricks.
We always monitored our big players as they headed out the doors. We needed to make sure there were no hiccups. We needed to make sure that Mr. Royalty wasn't confronted on the
way out by anybody who'd watched him rake in the chips. We wanted to make sure the doormen and valet parkers treated him well. And we wanted to get an idea if he was headed to another casino or driving toward home.
We watched Mr. Royalty walk out the door. As Johnny D. would say, “Got his load and hit the road.”
In less than two weeks, Mr. Royalty had beaten us for nearly $8.5million.
I headed up to Tim's office feeling like frazzled brakes that couldn't stop the wheels of an out-of-control car. Look, I wanted to tell him, the hotel is sold out. The casino is jammed packed. Every restaurant has a wait. We've pulled it off! And tomorrow morning we're going to get the numbers and find out we got killed. What are we doing?
But telling Tim to take back the best gamble in town was like telling Tim not to be
Tim.
On top of that, if we did take the special odds away from Mr. Royalty, we risked driving him off, never seeing our money again, and having him humiliate us all over town. “Ahhh, The Nugget's too scared to take my bets,” would be Mr. Royalty's cherry on top.
Did we want to go through all that? Or did we want to let him back in and pray he didn't swamp us?
Tim was sitting behind his desk in front of an ashtray of dead cigarettes. His tie was loose, and he was staring at the ceiling. A fresh cigarette burned in his hand. Through the smoke curling in the air, I could read a sign on the wall, a sign that he loved, a sign that said:
NO ACT OF KINDNESS SHALL GO UNPUNISHED
.
Nobody wants to see a friend looking so alone.
Tim got up and grabbed his coat.
“I've gotta go,” he said.
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An upper management meeting was scheduled for 10:00
AM
the next morning to reevaluate our strategy on extending huge limits. Mr. Royalty was on a run that ultimately beat up not only Las Vegas but casinos as far south as San Diego and as far north as Indiana for more than $25 million. You can talk all the theory and percentages you want. We were losing real money. If Mr. Royalty wasn't stopping at any other casino but The Nugget,
we
could've taken the entire $25 million beating. And who knew when it was going to end.
The meeting was about to start. No Tim.
Calls put through to his office weren't being returned. He wasn't answering his home phone. He wasn't picking up his cell.
I figured he needed time to recover. I figured he'd catch up on the details with Johnny D. over lunch. I knew it was painful for him, much more complex than simply taking an $8 million beating. He knew in his bones he was right. He knew he just had to ride it out. Maybe he wanted to be by himself because riding it out alone made it easier.
I didn't think like a gambler. And he had to be feeling some guilt over how the beating was tearing me apart.
Lunchtime came and went. Johnny D. hadn't seen Tim. The more people couldn't find him, the more they called me.
“Hey, Tom, where's Tim?”
“Where's Tim?”
“Where's Tim?”
“Where's Tim?”
“Where's Tim?”
I couldn't tell if I was frustrated or nervous.
Finally, I took the elevator up to the Steve Wynn Suite where Tim occasionally spent the night. I slipped my master
key into the lock, opened the door, and stepped into a haze of smoke. Cans of Red Bull energy drinks were scattered around the room. Ashtrays were full. There was Timâlying under the covers in bed. He hadn't shaved. His clothes were wrinkled. He looked like he hadn't slept in weeks.
In that moment, all of the money and the limits and the strategy went right out the window.
I pulled a chair up to the edge of the bed. “Are you all right?” I asked.
What followed wasn't exactly a golden moment in our friendship.
But maybe you've got to go through moments like that to make a friendship golden in the first place.
N
ow, of course, Tim has a very different memory of the afternoon after twenty-two straight.
“What are you, crazy? I was fine.”
“Tim, you weren't returning any calls.”
“I'd just lost more than $8 million! Who would I want to talk to?”
“Tim, the haze in that room was so thick it was like walking into an opium den.”
“So I've been known to smoke a cigarette or two.”
“Tim, you were shaking.”
“Get out of here! If I lost every cent that I have, I don't think I'd shake.”
“Timâ”
“Tom, you are such a square from Barnsville. All we needed was more time.”
“Tim, you know thâ”
“Look, I'm the gambler here. So now you're makin' me out to be Mary Poppins.”
And that's what makes Tim
Tim
.
When you get down to basics, nothing about Tim Poster has changed since the day I met him.
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It was the fall of 1989. Nobody had mobile phones back then. Nobody I knew, anyway, and certainly no college students. Maybe executives of huge corporations did. And Tim.
He was a junior at the University of Southern California. And he drove down I-5 from USC to USDâthe University of San Diegoâto visit a high school buddy.
His buddy, Lorenzo Fertitta, was my college roommate.
It's a running joke that I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the director of housing at USD for assigning me to a room with Lorenzo and setting the wheels of my partnership with Tim in motion. But that's a little off base. Lorenzo and I were assigned to the same dorm. We decided to room with each other off campus in our junior year. One thing's for sure. It's impossible to know where life would have taken me if I'd never met Lorenzo.
The Fertitta family owns Station Casinos in Las Vegas. For me, just meeting somebody with a background like Lorenzo's was an eye-opener. But nothing I'd seen during a few visits to his home could have prepared me for Tim.
Meeting Tim was like stepping into a James Caan movie. Tim held this big, black brick-of-a-phone to his ear as he paced back and forth blurting out the lines of Sunday's football games. I'm not sure if he even noticed me. It was as if his entire existence was hanging in the balance between “Pittsburgh minus 6” and “Denver plus 7.”
The instant that really stuck with me, though, came an hour
later when we sat down for lunch at this little Italian restaurant called Sardina's. I was looking at the menu the way a student with $500 spending money for the entire semester looks at a menu. When I saw a sandwich in one column connected to an $8 price tag in the other, I got nervous.
“Hey, let me get this,” Tim said.
And I knew. I knew he could tell by the way I was looking at the menu that I didn't have much money. But there was something about his offer that was so genuine it was impossible for me to feel awkward.
It's hard to explain that moment. Sure, the bond I'd developed with Lorenzo over two years made me open to Tim. And how could anyone meeting this guy
not
be curious? But from that moment on, something inside me trusted him.
“You get the next one.” Tim said, which is exactly what he said the
next
time a waiter put down the check.
What I didn't realize at the time was that Tim didn't have much money himself. Whatever he had, he carried in his pocket. And whatever was in his pocket, he was going to spendâbecause he was confident he'd fill up his pocket again.
Booking games came as natural to Tim as making ketchup to a Heinz. My family watched football games on Sunday and rooted for the Vikings. Tim's family reached for the Doritos and screamed for the point spread.
So much of everything that's happened to us can be traced to timing. It goes back years before we met, when a law was passed allowing casinos in Nevada to open sports books. Anybody entering a casino these days sees sports books with cushy seats and drink holders, a feast of giant screens and flashing scoreboards. It's hard to imagine that these parlors didn't exist back in the â60s. In those days, casinos were only able to offer table games and slots.
The law permitting these sports books brought Tim's family from Pittsburgh to Vegas in 1975. His Uncle Jack was one of the best odds makers in town. And he got Tim's dad a job with the sports book at the Stardust. Tim's family had little money. But Uncle Jack was connected.
Those early days gave Tim the impression that anything was possible in Las Vegas. While Tim's mom and dad looked for a place to settle, the family stayed in a room comped by the Sands Hotel. Among Tim's first memories of Vegas is going down to the coffee shop as a six-year-old, meeting Eddie the host, and asking if it were okay to get some breakfast. Eddie would call over to the person in charge, hold up his right arm, and point at Tim. It meant hold the check. The meal was free. That magical sensation never left Tim. When he picked up the phone in his room, asked for pancakes, and twenty minutes later a guy rolled them in on a cart, he felt like the most important first grader in the world.
He saw the name Dean Martin on billboards, heard the name over the television news, and the next thing he knew Deano was lifting him up and putting a $100 bill in his hand.
It took Tim a little while to realize it wasn't
Dean
Martin who'd handed him the C-note, but
Bob
Martin. And a little longer to realize what a legend Bob Martin was in his own right.
Bob was one of the great sports bookies of all time. To this day, Tim can recite the wisdom Bob passed down over the years in a gravel voice that was flavored by nonfiltered Camels and pours of Jack Daniel's. “If you think you've got the best of it,” Bob would say, “take dead aim and hold onto your balls.”
That's how a man came to wear $900 silk shirts in Las Vegas.
“If you lose, learn to shrug your shoulders and say, âI'm still gonna have the same breakfast tomorrow.'”
But above all, “Don't ever forget the single most thrilling thing in the world is to gamble and win. And the second most is to gamble and lose.”
Uncle Jack's buddies added other gems like “Have a couple of thousand in your pocket at all times. When you get up in the morning to take a piss, bring your bankroll to the bathroom just in case something happens along the way.”
Tim inhaled these mottos until they were his own. His entire world was framed by gambling. A great Sunday morning as a boy meant a trip to the buffet at The Golden Nugget with his parents after mass. A sad Friday night meant that a family vacation to Disneyland had been canceled without a word because his dad had lost a big bet. When Tim's dad left home, his Uncle Jack and Uncle Jimmy stepped in to help raise him. They continued his education with stories about the famed restaurateur Joe “The Pig” Pignatello, who learned how to cook from Al Capone's mother and was a personal chef to Sam Giancana and Frank Sinatra. Joe was a degenerate gambler who'd scratch out the prices on the fancy menus at his joint and scribble in higher ones to compensate for unfortunate rolls of the dice.
It was only natural that Tim would become best buddies with a kid named Frank Toti, whose dad, Big Frank, ran the Barbary Coast. Big Frank would take the two boys up on the catwalks above the casino where men with binoculars spied on the blackjack players to see if they were counting cards. This was back in the day before the cameras were honed.
“How do you count cards?” Tim asked.
“It's not that hard,” Big Frank said. “I can show you.”
“Really?”
It was an education that you couldn't get at Bishop Gorman High School. But the school offered something else that was truly amazing. It's almost impossible to believe the connections available to a kid who simply walked through the doors of Bishop Gorman in 1983.
In a single classroom you could find:
Lorenzo Fertitta, who'd become one of the principal owners of fifteen casinos as the vice-chairman and president of Station Casinos, who would also go on to own the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and whose older brother, Frank, would guide the family empire with him.
Tim Poster, who'd come up with the concept for a travel-booking company that would take off with the Internet and be bought by Expedia for more than $100 million.
And Perry Rogers, whose best friend was Andre Agassi, and who'd come to make multimillion-dollar deals down the road as an agent representing his childhood buddy and basketball star Shaquille O'Neal.
You know how Perry met Tim? He sat behind him as a freshman in social studies class simply because Tim's last name starts with a
p
and Perry's begins with an
r
. Six minutes into the first class, Tim turned to Perry and said, “Hey, buddy, you got 25 bucks?”
“What?” Perry asked.
“Look,” Tim said. “The Showboat has this contest. Takes $50 to enter. You pick every NFL game for the whole season. If you have the best record at the end of the year, you win a house. I got $25. But I don't got $50. You got 25 bucks?”
“Yeah,” Perry said, “I got 25 bucks.”
So they went in together. They got beaten up pretty good that first week, and winning the top prize was out of the ques
tion. So Tim said, “I've got an idea: Let's shoot for Fiddle in the Middle!” That was the prize awarded to anyone who could compile a record at the end of the season that was exactly .500.
They didn't win that, either. But the consolation prize was the biggest of all. They got to know each other, and after more than twenty years and some million-dollar deals together, Perry is still shaking his head and smiling at the memory of Fiddle in the Middle.
It wasn't long before everybody at Bishop Gorman knew Tim. Tim and Little Frank became the school bookies. There was nothing at all clandestine about the operation. “Hey, what's the line on Baltimore?” other kids would shout as Tim and Little Frank walked the halls or ate in the cafeteria. There were even teachers who bet with them. If this is hard to fathom, you've got to remember that gambling is legal in Las Vegas. It's in the air. At graduation services in the school chapel, casino chips are welcome in the collection plate.
Sure, you're supposed to be 21 to bet. But Tim couldn't help it if he felt 37 when he was 14. And Little Frank had gotten a pretty good education in public relations at the Barbary Coast. The two were thoughtful enough to pass along a book of comp tickets for the restaurants at the Barbary Coast to the dean of students “just in case it comes in handy.”
Occasionally, a kid would lose his lunch money for a week to Tim and Little Frank, and his mother would go into the dean of students to complain. So the dean would call Tim and Little Frank into his office for a chat to keep them in line and get an idea who was betting what. Tim and Little Frank would pass on a tidbit of information, and the conversation would degenerate to laughter. “What?” the dean of students would say. “Curt Magleby bet the
Cubs
?”
Cubs games were one of the most frequently bet because there were no lights at Wrigley Field back then, and the games started in the afternoon. The two-hour time difference allowed Tim to get in the first action of the day at 11:00
AM
. It was hot stuff back then to have a sports pager. In those days a pager was the size of a pack of cigarettes, and it cost about $400 a month to access the constant updates. But classes had a little more juice with the beeper announcing every run scored and change of inning.
Apparently, one teacher was not at all amused. Mr. Ward taught business just before lunchâexactly the time the games at Wrigley Field started. “I know you've got one of those damn beeper things,” he said as Tim approached the classroom one day. “Do you have it on you now?”
“What are you talking about?” Tim shot back. With all due respect to honesty, no self-respecting bookie was going to surrender his beeper to his fourth-period business teacher.
“
You
know what I'm talking about,” Ward said. “If you have it on you now, I want it. You are not to bring it into my classroom! And if you do bring it into my classroom, I'm kicking you out!”
Tim had it safely tucked away in his pants and clicked off. He was home free. “I have no idea what you're talking about,” he said.
The class started and as soon as the first pitch was thrown at Wrigley Field, the service confirmed the starting pitchers with a beep, beep, beep
.
An “oh, shit” feeling spread through Tim's belly. It
wasn't
clicked off.
“Poster!” Mr. Ward howled. “You're out of here!”
Tim made the long walk to the dean's office.
“Dean, you gotta bail me out here,” he said. “Ward wants me out for good. Somehow, you've got to square this up.”
The dean of students deftly arranged for Tim's return to class. Perhaps he had a sense of Tim's potential. Though he had no concept of the money being run through Tim and Frank's notebooks during Tim's senior year. If he'd seen what was going on during the run-up to the night Sugar Ray Leonard challenged Marvelous Marvin Hagler for the world middleweight championship at Caesars Palace, the dean would've gasped.
When you talk to people who were in Vegas back in 1987, they remember it as the last great fight of the city's golden age of boxing.
Leonard had won an Olympic gold medal. His blend of dazzling speed, power, matinee idol looks, and charisma had made him the sport's biggest star by the early '80s. And his reputation as one of the greats at 147 pounds was sealed when he came from behind with one eye battered shut to win by technical knockout over Tommy Hearns in the fourteenth round of one of the best fights ever. Shortly afterward, though, he suffered a detached retina and retired.
In the meantime, Marvelous Marvin Hagler stormed through the middleweight division. He was bald-headed, ripped, and fierceâa relentless warrior. He hadn't lost a fight in eleven years and seemed to be at the height of his powers when Leonard decided to come out of retirement to challenge him at 160 pounds.