Double or Nothing: How Two Friends Risked It All to Buy One of Las Vegas' Legendary Casinos (3 page)

To Tim and Frank, this was a no-brainer. Leonard didn't have a chance. He hadn't fought in three years and was sure to be rusty. Plus, he was moving up in weight to fight a naturally bigger and stronger man. What's more, Hagler was a beast in the gym and definitely figured to be sky high for the fight.

The outcome seemed so clear to Tim and Little Frank that they overlooked the fundamental rule of bookmaking. In a perfect world, the bookmaker balances bets on both sides and makes his money from a percentage of all the action.

Tim and Frank were so sure that Hagler was going to win they refused to take any bets on him. If you wanted to bet the fight with Tim and Frank, you had to put your money on Leonard.

That gives you a little insight on Tim.
If you think you've got the best of it, take dead aim and hold onto your balls.
But it also gives you a little insight on Lorenzo.

Lorenzo never made a bet with Tim and Frank. Never. But his ears perked up as he sat in English class listening to Tim rant on and on about how Leonard was going to be demolished.

Lorenzo had been to a lot of the big fights. He loved Leonard's style and thought his speed and footwork would confuse and fluster Hagler.

“Okay,” Lorenzo said. “I'll bet $100 on Leonard.”

It was the equivalent of a high school kid putting up a thousand bucks today.

“I'll give you 7-1,” Tim shot back.

“I want a parlay,” Lorenzo said. “I also want Leonard by decision.”

“A parlay on Leonard! You've got to be kidding me! I'll give you 11-1!”

The fight took place on a Monday night. Payoff days at Bishop Gorman were always Fridays. If you'd done business with Tim and Little Frank in the past and were deemed a valued customer, you didn't have to put up any money in advance. But if you hadn't bet with them and they didn't know your credit history, then you might be asked to put up the cash in advance.

There was a lot of new action on Leonard, and so Tim and
Little Frank took in a lot of cash before the fight. They then turned around and used
that
money to bet on Hagler—along with just about every other dime they owned.

The evening was electric, and Tim and Little Frank had seats somewhere in the rafters. From way up in row ZZ, though, it was hard to see exactly what was going on. Leonard had turned back the clock. For the first four rounds he flashed around the ring as if he were in his prime, darting in to land combinations and escaping pretty much unscathed.

Maybe Lorenzo understood that Hagler was the type of fighter who always won the rematches big—but who had trouble figuring out his opponents the first time around. Anyway, it was pretty clear by the start of the fifth round that there were only two ways for Hagler to win. He had to take seven of the next eight rounds on the judges' scorecards or score a knockout.

Hagler began to impose his will in round five. Tim's hopes swelled in six, seven, and eight. Then came the ninth round—a classic—with the two fighters trading toe-to-toe. Hagler was landing with authority, but Leonard's flurries were like fireworks that lifted the crowd to its feet. As the bell sounded to end the round, an “oh, shit” feeling began to spread through Tim's belly.

Hagler pushed forward in the final rounds and drew closer and closer. Leonard seemed exhausted and out of answers as the clock wound down. It was tight. Nobody could know how the judges would score it. But everyone knew what the outcome would have been if the fight had gone one more round. If Hagler had just had a little more time…

The decision and the championship went to Leonard.

Tim and Frank were high school kids who'd lost every penny they owned and were now twenty grand in the hole.

Nobody at school thought they'd show up the next day and
certainly not on Friday. But there wasn't much compassion. The code was clear. Anyone who won a bet from Tim and Little Frank knew they would be paid in full, just as they knew they had to pay off their own losses. There was a rumor that the biggest kid in the class, Bert, made visits to anyone who didn't pay off their debts to Tim and Little Frank. The story was that Bert had been brought into the operation as muscle, and that he'd get half of what he could shake out of any debtors. It was pure bullshit, but Tim and Little Frank never denied it because it made the collection process go much smoother.

The stakes were high. If Tim and Frank couldn't pay off their bets, no matter what happened down the road, that's the way they'd be marked for the rest of their lives. They'd have broken the code. In a town that from its inception grew up outside the law, all a man has is his word.

As soon as the decision was announced, both Tim and Little Frank (now a prominent lawyer, by the way) realized there was only one way to get that kind of money, and they headed straight for the Barbary Coast.

There was a big postfight party at the hotel. The Barbary Coast had taken a beating on the fight, too. But a party is a party. Little Frank and Tim waited around all night trying to get up the nerve to bring up their predicament to Big Frank. At four o'clock in the morning, they sat down in the coffee shop for some Chinese food and explained the situation.

Big Frank understood, and he backed them. It's moments like those that explain why Tim Poster is the most loyal friend a guy could ever find.

He showed up at school a few hours later in the same clothes without a wink of sleep.

It certainly would have been understandable if Tim had
prefaced his payoffs that Friday with “you lucky son-of-a-bitch.” The fight was razor close and the decision controversial. But that's not how he settled up.

“Everybody loves a winner,” he sang with a smile as he counted out the cash. “Remember, baseball season is right around the corner.”

By the end of baseball season, Tim and Little Frank had paid Big Frank back every cent.

 

There are tons of stories from Tim's childhood. I could go on all day. But that might give you the impression that Tim was a stereotypical bookie. And that would paint a shallow picture of an American original. Yeah, you could see him as a baby Joe Pesci in a mob movie. But he was also like the mathematician in
A Beautiful Mind
who could grasp a blackboard full of numbers in an instant. Plus, he had an amazing work ethic.

There's an old expression that goes “Personality is what you see and character is what you are.” It's easy to see the guy with the sports beeper and the cash. But not many people get close enough to see all the qualities inside Tim. Only a few have gotten a true glimpse of his mind or his work ethic. Didn't matter whether he was valet parking or answering the phones at a room reservation service while he was in high school. Any coworker who wanted a day off to take out his girlfriend or a night off to check out the lap dancers knew he could always call Tim to fill in.

Tim's job booking hotel room reservations over the phone was the seed that led to our travel business. It didn't take a mind like Tim's very long to compute just how lucrative the reservation business could be. He'd take a call for a weekend room reservation. The rate at the Sahara was, say, $50 a night. That put
the cost for the two nights at $100. Tim then called the Sahara and booked the room. After the room was used and paid for, the Sahara sent 10 or 15 percent—a check for $10 or $15—back to the company that employed Tim.

The reservations were all recorded on sheets. On the nights that Tim closed the office, it was his job to total the numbers. “Man,” he'd tell himself. “That's a lot of money for just answering the phone.”

Later, at USC, Tim took an entrepreneurial class in which he was asked to invent a business and then devise a plan to show how it could prosper. It was the work of an entire semester. Tim came up with a model for a hotel booking business that had the potential to be much more profitable than the one he already knew was lucrative.

In Tim's model, the merchant model, he'd go directly to the Sahara and ask for a block of rooms at a wholesale rate. He'd get that same $50 room at the Sahara, say, for $40. Then, when a person called up for a weekend reservation, Tim would charge the guy's credit card $100 for the same two nights. So Tim's profit was roughly $20 for the same transaction.

There were additional benefits to the merchant model. Tim would be charging the customer making the reservation by credit card on the day of the call—even if the person didn't use the room until three months down the road. So Tim was holding the money for those three months before he got a bill from the Sahara, a bill that he might not pay until a few weeks after it arrived.

The genius behind this model is that everybody wins. The Sahara's happy because it's filling up rooms without having to spend more on marketing. The customer has the convenience of one-stop shopping at prices lower than he'd get directly from
the hotel. And Tim's model not only generated a better profit, but it also generated interest on the money he was holding.

As his junior year wound down, Tim figured he could actually pull his plan off. But he'd already lined up a summer job in finance with the L.A. office of a Wall Street firm called Kidder Peabody. In a strange way, this is where luck came in.

Tim started the summer job running errands for an executive, but showed up one morning to find the executive's office completely empty. The executive had vanished in the middle of the night. Tim blinked and wondered if he was in the right place.

When he asked what was going on, he realized that nobody knew who he was. He'd just started. Nobody else in the office had really noticed him. Finally, he found out that the executive had left for another firm. Before leaving in darkness, the exec had passed on a good word about Tim to the managing director.

The managing director called Tim in for a meeting and told him to leave his phone number, that the firm would call him as soon as a similar opening developed.

Tim had to make a decision. Stay in L.A. and wait? Or go back to Vegas? He still had three semesters to go before he graduated. He had virtually no money outside of what was in his pocket. No checking account. No office. And if he started a company, he'd only have three months to get the business up and running before heading back to school.

He zipped out letters to the sales departments of thirty hotels in Las Vegas, explaining the creation of his business and asking them if he could get blocks of rooms at wholesale rates. Then he stood with this batch of letters outside a mailbox on Jefferson and Figueroa at the entrance to USC without the slightest clue what would happen if he dropped them in.

When you've got nothing, he reminded himself, you've got nothing to lose. He tossed the envelopes in the slot.

He returned to Vegas and finagled an office that was big enough for a desk, a phone, a chair, and a pillow. He set up an 800 number. Then one day he found a contract in the mail from a hotel called the San Remo (now Hooters) that offered him a block of rooms and asked for a $500 deposit. He walked over and paid in cash. His friendship with Lorenzo got him some rooms at the Palace Station owned by the Fertittas with nothing down.

Once again, his timing couldn't have been more perfect. He opened his business during the summer of 1990. Only half a year earlier, in November of 1989, a man-made volcano erupted over The Strip in front of a hotel called the Mirage. Steam, water, and flames blasted 40 feet in the air to the amazement of thousands of onlookers. The Mirage was the brainchild of Steve Wynn. Las Vegas had never seen anything like it, and the tourism industry erupted, as well.

“Looking back,” Tim would say, “starting the reservation business at that time was like being the guy who paid $24 to the Indians for Manhattan.”

All Tim needed to do to catch the overflow of demand was to make his company known—and he knew just how to do it. While at USC, he often read the Calendar section in the Sunday
Los Angeles Times
. It mostly covered the local arts scene, concerts, movies, and shows, but it also contained a section about Las Vegas. Every hotel in Vegas advertised in it.

Tim sketched out an ad that read:

 

LAS VEGAS HOTEL RESERVATIONS

LOWEST RATES

ONE CALL DOES IT ALL

 

Then he amplified his 800 number as large as could be fit in a tiny two-inch by four-inch box.

He only had rooms at two hotels to offer, but he knew he'd figure out a way to work around his limitations once the phone started ringing. His real problem was that he'd exhausted his bankroll on the office, and the account exec for the
Los Angeles Times
who'd stopped by to meet him wanted $3,250 for the ad contract up front.

“I don't have my checks with me,” Tim told the guy. “I'll have to FedEx you one.”

The guy told Tim the check had to get to the
Times
by Thursday in order for the ad to appear in the Sunday paper.

Tim took dead aim and held onto his balls.

He figured if he FedExed a check on Wednesday for afternoon delivery, it would arrive in Los Angeles just on time—late Thursday.

But it would be too late for the newspaper to get the check to the bank before it closed that day. Which meant it would get to the newspaper's bank on Friday, and arrive at Tim's bank on Monday at the earliest. Basically, Tim would have to generate $3,250 in revenue on Sunday, his first day of business, to cover the check. If his first check to the
L.A. Times
bounced, well, as Tim would say, finito.

When Tim walked into his office early Sunday morning, the phone was ringing. Not only that, but his Radio Shack answering system had a ton of messages on it. Tim tried to keep up with the demand all day. If people requested any hotel other than the Sam Remo or Palace Station, he told them that unfortunately it was sold out on that date. Or else he quoted a ridiculously high price that he knew the customers wouldn't go for—which allowed him to steer them toward the San Remo or Palace Station. If people insisted on staying at the Flamingo, he booked
the reservation himself for the 10 percent travel agent fee. He cleared out his answering machine and took calls until almost 10:00
PM
.