Prologue—The Greed and the Fear

Part One: Whale Hunters
1. All in a Night's Work
2. From Salina to Caesars
3. Storming Barron's Joint
4. Turning the System on Its Head
5. The Office Orangutans
6. Telemarketing the Marks

Part Two: Harpoons
7. Rolling Dead Chips
8. Wine, Women, and Song
9. The Furniture of Love
10. Condom City

Part Three: Whales
11. "A Friend of the Devil is a Friend of Mine"
12. Alone in the Casino, Just Me and My Machine-o
13. From Pathological to Professional
14. The Fall of a Gambler, the Rise of a Host
15. It's a Small World After All
16. High-Rolling Tycoons, Superstars, and Women
17. Where Are They Now?

Epilogue—Greed and Fear Redux

Index

All in a Night's Work

Steve Cyr (pronounced seer) is standing at the back of the Joint, the Hard Rock casino's chic concert hall. He's rocking out to the wailing guitars and pounding drums of a makeshift band consisting of a blackjack high roller and three of his musician friends. It's been a dream of this player, Jeff Armstrong, to perform at the Joint, and Cyr sold the idea to the Hard Rock bosses. In return, Armstrong will spend a couple of hours at the tables betting $10,000 a hand. But for now, he's up on stage, opening for the Fabulous Thunderbirds.
Cyr's cell phone rings. He answers, listens, then speaks. "Okay, I'm on my way. I'll be there in five minutes. Hold tight." He pauses, then says, "Relax, Kirsti! Who's the man, baby? I'll handle it."
He hurries down toward the stage and gives a thumbs-up to Mr. A. (A casino guy addresses his player by the first initial of his last name. Calling him by his first name is too familiar, while using his full last name could, inadvertently, compromise his privacy.) Cyr signals that he's got to run, but he'll be back in a while. Then he blows through the casino and out the front door, where his silver Trans Am sits at the curb, as if he's the only car owner who happened to drive to the 600-room Hard Rock that Saturday night. He dukes off a ten-spot to the parking attendant in the valet cubicle, who hands him his keys. He hops in the car and peels out for points north.
This little errand is a favor for Mr. B, the multimillionaire owner of a Midwest foundry and a frequent megaroller at the Las Vegas Hilton. Mr. B likes to stay in the Conrad Villa, one of three penthouse suites on the 30th floor of the 3,174-room resort.
Cyr screeches up to the Hilton's porte cochere, tosses his keys to the valet, rushes into the casino lobby, and storms the VIP Services office. "Mister B! Great to see you again! Hi, hi," he greets Mr. B's stunning girlfriend, and the girlfriend's stunning girlfriend, standing on either side of the gambler.
"Cyr—what the hell kind of bullshit are you pulling this time?" Mr. B launches into a tirade. "Not only do I not get my Villa, but there isn't a single suite in this whole fucking hotel? You're gonna put the three of us in a room? With one bed? I'm going to the Mirage!"
"Wait a minute, Mister B. C'mon now," Cyr cajoles, taking the short balding 60-year-old steel man by the elbow and maneuvering him out of earshot. The superhost's shrug, directed toward the statuesque early-thirtysomething women, says it all: Hey, what can you do? Shit happens.
Suddenly, Mr. B sputters, "You mean to tell me that there's not another room in the whole hotel? Not even one with two queen beds?"
Cyr mumbles something.
"The hell you say! Not another room in the whole friggin' city?"
Cyr hangs his head and shuffles his feet.
Mr. B is apoplectic. "No way! Not one night, not one minute! Fuck the hotel room, fuck the Hilton, fuck Las Vegas, and fuck you!"
After a suitable amount of fawning and wheedling and laying it on with a trowel, Cyr manages to calm Mr. B and talk him into just one night in the room, with the promise that he can have the Conrad Villa tomorrow and for the rest of his stay and for the rest of his life. Mr. B grabs the key from Kirsti, the gorgeous young VIP hostess, then marches out in a huff, barely pausing to collect the two women.
Cyr watches them go, then turns to Kirsti, whose wide eyes and quivering lips betray her panic over the thought of getting fired for screwing up Mr. B's reservation. He smiles and asks, "Think he'll get lucky?"
Kirsti's countenance goes blank, then slowly rearranges into a smirk as she realizes that the whole scene was a set-up straight out of a cheap script for the standard opening of a bad porn video, the one where the one man maneuvers the two women into the one bed.
Steve Cyr has done his job.

Telemarketing the Marks
Not even death stops a single-minded host like Cyr. He goes after the widow.
"Hello, is this Mrs. C?"
"Yes."
"Hi, this is Steve Cyr from the Las Vegas Hilton. Is Mr. C at home?"
"Uh, no, he isn't."
"I used to work at the Desert Inn and I knew Mr. C over there. It's been a couple of years since we've seen you or your husband."
"Well, John died eighteen months ago."
"Oh! I'm so sorry to hear that, Mrs. C. John was such a great guy. I enjoyed being his host every time he came to town."
Cyr doesn't know John from Adam. It's an old lead he got from somewhere, a phone number he's finally getting around to following up on. He's bluffing, coming right off the top of his head. "He was one of my favorite players. You used to come out to Vegas with him, as I recall, didn't you?"
"I certainly did. John never went anywhere without me."
"And you used to like to play the hundred-dollar slots, didn't you, Mrs. C?" Cyr takes a shot in the dark to see if she's a player.
"Well, honey, the hundred-dollar slots were a little rich for my blood, but I did get a thrill out of the twenty-five dollar machines."
Bingo.
"Do you still come out to Las Vegas?"
"I haven't since the funeral, but you know what? My girlfriends and I were just talking about taking a trip out there ..."
"Well, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna fax one of my business cards to you."
If she doesn't have a fax number, Cyr might FedEx a single business card. He wants to get something in their hands right away, within the hour; later today's too late; tomorrow it's lost. He wants to fax Mrs. C the paperwork to sign, then have her fax it back, all while the two of them are still on the phone.
"And I'm gonna book a reservation for you for three weeks from this Friday. That should be enough time to make your plans, shouldn't it? When you get my card, call me back and we'll get all your girlfriends set up too. How's that sound?"
"That's very thoughtful of you, young man."
"Least I can do for John. I sure am sorry to hear about him, Mrs. C. But we'll take good care of you in his memory."

The Furniture of Love
In the early surly days of Las Vegas, high-roller suites were basically unknown. Hotel rooms were a long way down the pecking order in the Las Vegas scheme of things. The first resort-casinos—El Rancho Vegas, Last Frontier, Flamingo, Desert Inn, Sands, Sahara—had barely 1,000 rooms among them. Tourists and passers-through might rent one for a night or two from the clerk behind a tiny front desk, but most rooms were controlled by the casino bosses, kept available for players and the boys, as well as the boys' buddies, the boys' families, the boys' girlfriends, and even a few juiced-in squares. The rooms were so low in priority that one old-timer remembers being comped at the Sands for his honeymoon—into a room with twin beds.
The hotels were built with a few suites. They had a sitting area or an extra bedroom to appeal to superstar headliners like Frank Sinatra or VIP visitors like Senator Jack Kennedy. But no one had yet thought of using them as bait to lure the fish.
In those days, as far as the bosses were concerned, Las Vegas hotel rooms were nothing more than places to sleep, shower, and do it—all in as brief a period of time as possible. They were designed specifically not to be comfortable and relaxing. The average room lacked a radio, TV, or clock, and there was no room service. Case in point: Into the late '80s, Circus Circus decorated its digs with orange shag carpeting, pink walls defaced by clown murals, red bedspreads and towels, and extra-loud air-conditioners, all aimed at driving guests back into the madhouse casino.
The high rollers back then had $5,000 credit lines and fired it up with $100 bets. Small change today, but back then the table maximums weren't much higher. For years, the upper-limit bet at the Stardust was $200. At the Desert Inn, Sands, Tropicana, and Flamingo, it was $500. (If you wanted to play for higher stakes, there was only one place to go: Binion's Horseshoe, where your first bet, even if it was a quarter-million dollars, was your max bet.) Even Caesars, which had a reputation as the high-roller capital of Las Vegas and therefore of the world and was the first casino to go to a $1,000 maximum, required a full meeting of the operations honchos to approve a player's request to up the highest bet on a single number at roulette from $50 to $100.
On the other hand, every comp but fancy suites was within the grasp of all but the lowliest pukes. When the boys ran things, there were no electronic data files to check average bets or time played, no comp equivalencies, no lifetime-loss records. If a boss knew your name and you bought in for $2,500 and played for an hour or two making $50 bets, you'd be all set up. The Big Five complimentaries—room, food, booze, show, and girl—were yours for the asking. And you requisitioned them right in the pit. In those days, the pit and shift bosses doubled as the hosts. (It was when these same guys shed their boss responsibilities that the first dedicated casino marketing executives came into existence.) They'd write a comp ticket to take to the front desk where you'd get the key to a room. Or they'd bring a key right to your table.
The room itself was just that—standard-issue hotel accommodations. As long as there was a bed, a shower, and an air-conditioner, no one gave it a second thought.
In the early '60s, the Flamingo underwent a change of ownership. A group of Miami hotel operators bought Bugsy's old joint and flew in a planeload of preferred guests from the Fountainbleau and other luxury Miami hotels for the grand-reopening party. The junket had been born. Soon, planeloads of gamblers who qualified for free airfare, room, food, and beverage by putting up $5,000 to $10,000 to play with were arriving at the Flamingo, Dunes, Sands, and other premium Strip casinos on a twice-weekly basis. These cosmopolitan players were used to fancier places to sleep, and in 1962, when the Flamingo underwent its first expansion—a four-story "tower" complete with elevator—the entire first floor was given over to 16 high-roller suites, Las Vegas' first.
The suites were all one-bedrooms, but the big attractions were individual swimming pools in fenced backyards for privacy and, of all things, Japanese houseboys (which presaged butlers 35 years later). But because most junket gamblers came solo, without their wives or girlfriends, they were asked to share the suites, two to a room. The road from there to where we are now was long and winding, but the era of using bigger and better accommodations to cater to high rollers had been inaugurated.
As usual in Las Vegas, the other hotels followed suit(e). In the mid-'60s, the Stardust remodeled a two-story hotel wing and introduced bi-level suites with spiral staircases. Unlocking doors enlarged certain suites to two and even three bedrooms. The original MGM Grand (now Bally's) opened in 1972 with nearly 3,000 rooms (largest in the world at the time; today it's the 13th largest just in Las Vegas), with one floor of 1,000- to 2,000-square-foot suites and two floors of oversized connecting rooms that could pass for makeshift suites in a pinch.
Penthouse suites were introduced in the late '70s by Caesars Palace, which had by then assumed the mantle of Big Fishville, bringing in the heaviest hitters in the world. The 600-room Olympic Tower was built in 1979 for an unheard-of $50 million; the whole hotel-casino had been built, 13 years earlier, for half that cost (today, the same $50 million will finance a small casino expansion with, perhaps, a fast-food court). The Olympic Tower boasted 10 two-story two- to four-bedroom suites, complete with floor-to-ceiling picture windows, round beds, mirrors on the ceiling, sunken tubs, and wet bars—the height of high rollerdom at that time.
As late as the late '70s, Las Vegas casinos continued the 50-year custom of marketing exclusively, except for select high rollers, to a domestic clientele of tour and travel visitors. The earliest international travelers to Las Vegas were the Japanese, who began coming in after a bright young executive from Japan Air Lines put together the Asian penchant for gambling with big long-distance jetliners and came up with Tokyo-to-Las Vegas 747-sized planeloads. These weren't Asian whales, to be sure; the Japanese tour groups mostly played the slots, since they didn't have to speak English to do so. But they began to raise occupancy rates all along the Strip. Even then, there was no active marketing involved. One former Flamingo executive remembers meeting with JAL in San Francisco to thank them for their business—"I didn't even have to go all the way over there to Japan."
Around that time, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority began opening international marketing offices. They weren't the first—Hilton had a one-man branch office in Hong Kong in the early '70s to try to keep its baccarat room busy—but it signaled Las Vegas' intention to market to overseas travelers and big players in earnest. Meanwhile, Caesars, under the stewardship of Terry Lanni, began to develop and refine international marketing to superwealthy gamblers who expected a level of luxury and service otherwise on a par with New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong, and the like, utterly unknown in dumpy pre-Mirage Las Vegas.
Despite these efforts, up through the mid-'80s, Caesars' suites maintained the outdated look of overwrought boudoirs straight from a Hollywood soap opera, full of pastel walls, linoleum floors, formica counters, and brass-plated fixtures. It didn't matter. Caesars retained its monopoly on the whale business. Anyone with a lot of money who came to Las Vegas, from anywhere in the world, went to Caesars. It was one of the most famous hotels on Earth. It had a reputation for unbridled, unmitigated, unparalleled opulence. It was the Casino of Casinos. It was a large part of the reason that Steve Wynn felt he had to spend $650 million (roughly $649 million more than he had) to build a joint next door.

Lifestyles of the rich in Vegas!
But not just any run-of-the-mill rich. We're talking super-rich gamblers—who can bet from $50,000 to $200,000 a pop, hand after hand, hour after hour, day after day.
The private jets. The stretch-SUV limos. The penthouse villas. The show-up money and rebates on losses. The shopping sprees and trips abroad and—yes—the girls. The huge swings. The dirty tricks.
The wild stories—till now shrouded in secrecy and mystery—are revealed in Whale Hunt in the Desert, as seen through the eyes of the only casino superhost ever to tell all!