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Steve Wynn: The Man Who Built Modern Las Vegas (Part One)

Published Mar 27, 2024, 10:00 AM

Paul and Skip have an intimate chat with the architect of present-day Sin City. Together they reminisce about their days with the Rat Pack and mobsters as the city transformed from a desert outpost to America’s foremost fantasy land. Steve and Paul recall their epic practical joke battle that’s stretched on for decades, and Skip and Steve recall their epic war at the shore with Donald Trump for control of Atlantic City’s casinos. It’s a fascinating tale of Old Vegas and modern development — part history lesson, part business masterclass — so wild that it takes two episodes to tell! 

Our Way with yours truly Paul Anka and my buddy Skip Bronson is a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, folks, this is Paul Anka.

And my name is Skip Bronson. We've been friends for decades and we've decided to let you in on our late night phone calls by starting a new podcast.

And welcome to Our Way. We'd like you to meet some real good friends of ours.

Your leaders in entertainment and.

Sports, innovators in business and technology, and even a sitting president or two.

Join us as we ask the questions they've not been asked before, tell it like it is, and even sing a song or two.

This is our podcast and we'll be doing it our way.

Hey Paul, Hey Skip, Well, what do you think, my buddy, We're going to have brother Steve on this podcast. I can't believe it, can you?

No? You know? Look? You and I know Steve when you know longer than I do. I know him forty years and you how long do you know him?

Well? I know him since I met him at the Sountain Blue with his grandmother, then out in Vegas. He was my neighbor. I've known him for years and I know him very very well. Travel together hung together, worked for him, know the man? Well, so it's gonna you know, it's gonna be kind of easy for me because I don't think we're going to have enough time to really cover everything. And he's going to give us some amazing in depth answers because that's how brilliant he is. But I think you've worked for him, so you know what to touch upon, what subjects would touch with him too. Where are you going to go with it?

You think, Well, you know, one of the things I want to do is you are one of the great practical jokers of all time. I have to say hate being the victim of them. Though you know most people would be flattered and thinks it's great. I fucking hate it. But you know, hopefully you'll get into some of the things that you've done to him, because you've gotten him so badly. Maybe you can touch on that.

Yeah, I'll hit the humor spot.

Look, everybody knows what he did. He took Las Vegas to a whole new level. I think there should be a statue of him on the Las Vegas Strip because when he first created the Mirage and spent six or seven hundred million dollars, no one had ever spent a fraction of that, and that really started the entire renaissance in Las Vegas, got everybody else up their game. But I've never really as close as I am to him. I've never really asked him about the inspiration. You know what, why, what made you want to do that? So I think that's what I'd like to touch on.

He set the new tone.

You know.

I was there back when the boys ran it, and obviously no one had the vision that Steve's had. And we look at what he's done on the landscape of Vegas today, and everybody keeps coming second to him anyway. Everybody they just they don't know how to build, They don't know how to design the way that he has and the kind of class.

How about his obsession with German shepherds. He's had so many of those dogs. It kept people like me fearful. You know, they talk about Biden's dog and how many people the dog bit. I mean Steve's dogs.

I remember that very well.

I always gave those dogs plenty of room. I never wanted to get too close to them, but they were they were scary.

No, they were well trained. He had them trained at Germany and you know it was and it should be cool. Man got a lot to say. He hasn't worked in once there.

No, it's longer.

Yeah, I'm just chures to ask him. You can ask him if he misses it. I think he'll give you a real off.

I miss it when I go back there and walk into the casino and I see all the old guys in the casino. Hosts come up to me, and I miss it. I don't know that he does, but we can certainly touch on that. That'll be a good that'll be a good topic.

It'll be fun. It'll be talking to a brother, you know that.

I'm looking forward to it.

All right, So I have some dinner and we'll hit him tomorrow.

Yeah, it'll be fun. I'll see. We're actually going to do it at his house.

His studio. I told him to go down in his studio, you know the theater where it's quiet. Yeah, we'll get some real Uh, it'll be real good for sound down there. It'll be quiet with no interruption and easy for him obviously. And uh, we'll get a free dinner out of it. I think.

Yeah. After that, we'll have dinner, we'll have some more laughs. It'll be great. All right, man, looking forward to seeing you tomorrow.

Take care.

Love to Edie, Thanks Sam, to Michelle.

Okay, stand that Paul Anchor's on this show.

He is really love that guy.

I want to meet him. You know, when I was sixteen seventeen, it was probably the luckiest teenager in the world. Hit records of traveling everywhere, and I start working copa cabana where you had to start and then you'd wind up in Vegas. So there I am in Vegas and with the rat pack, hanging with these guys. And from there you'd go to the Fountain Blue in Florida. Now that was more glamorous. It was on the ocean, and it drew everybody from New York.

It was the place. Right.

So I'm working Vegas, work in the Fountain Blue. And there was a grandmother who used to bring her young little grandchild, grandson, actually her name was Rachel, and she'd bring him to the Fountain Blue so he'd get a taste of the entertainment business, you know, get what it was all about. And this grandson of hers, on one occasion, after being at the Fountain Bouf a few times, he looked up at the building and he said, to Rachel Rackel as a friend.

Just call her Rocklet.

That's what I want to do. I want to build hotels like that when I get older. And that's exactly what that kid did, and he's been doing. He's become a friend of mine, a brother by another mother. He then moved out to Nevada. This kid that I met at the Fountain Blue, where I'm six months older than he was. We became neighbors, and I realized when I first met him, this was someone that, like me, was a perfectionist. Anything that he was going to do, I was so enthralled with him. And that kid's name, folks, Steve Wynn. And he's our guest today. And I've got to tell you this isn't Skip and I sitting here looking at a bunch of notes. This is somebody we've loved and adored and have known for many, many years. And you're gonna listen to one of the brilliant minds that I've ever been exposed to, mister Wynn. Welcome to our way.

How were we supposed to follow such a lovely Thanks? Blini, You're Welcomeini Bellini. Yeah, we've called each other Blini for twenty five years, thirty years of the We've known each other since. We're both nineteen and he was he was not only six months older. He was the star of the Faunham Blue, along with Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis. You know, it was the number one nightclub. It was the Copa Comana in New York, the Sands in Las Vegas, and the Faunham Blue in the fifties, in the late fifties and sixties in Miami Beach. And Paul was it was eighteen years old, seventeen years old in nineteen fifty nine, we were both seventeen. I was graduating high school. He was a star at the Blue, and I think he had just come from the Sands in Las Vegas. So there was this this this my mother and father and my grandmother Rachel, who had come from Poland years before but lived with us. She was this really died in the wool, enthusiastic member of the Polyhanka. She called him poly Hanka as if it was h and and she would say, Stephen, polly Hanka is a defund and blue. I know, Grandma, we should go to see Polyhanka. And my father and mother and my grandmother. We went to see Polyhanka and it was it was you know, it was not unusual to look at a stage and see as Sammy Davis or Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin. They were, after all, twenty five years older than us. But to go to the number one night club, one of the top three performing places for performing artists in America and see a guy that was your age, that didn't compute. Even Johnny Mathis was older than us, still is, but you were only you were only seventeen years old as a headliner in fifty nine, fifty eight to fifty nine, And that was something I had to process. But it was great, you know, put your head on my shoulder, Diana Pubby, I mean, all of it was so great. And the point is you could do it live, just like it sounded on the radio. You didn't need any equipment or engineers. All you guys Sinatra, Martin, Johnny Mathis and Frank and Dean they could stand up in front of a microphone.

And just do it.

And they they could be in a crowded nightclub where people were drinking or promoting their girlfriend. And then the certain kind of person and you can't. I can't train anybody. It's almost a gift. But whatever that person does when they talk, the crowd hushes, the room goes quiet, and everybody's head turns to the man or woman in the light. And some of the most wonderful performers they get up, and they had beautiful voices. But yet the crowd kept talking. The conversations at the tables didn't change. And then a guy like Sinatra or Martin, or Sam Davis or Paul at nineteen stood up and said hello, and the noise in the room and the band struck up the first chords and first few bars, and all of a sudden, the room went quiet, and everybody was now being entertained. And I witnessed that when I was young, coupled with the glamour of all the beautiful people in the beautiful lobby, walking down the shops in the basement, going at the beautiful pool with the cabanas and the gardens that you walked across, and the fauna blue, and people like Sinatra and Anka and those kind of people, that was better than the real world. Inside that building. It was magical. As Joel Gray says in the opening number of the movie Cabaret. Inside everything is beautiful, The girls are beautiful, even the band is beautiful. Leave your troubles outside, and the Fauna Blue is at magic place and.

Well a magic country. You know, you think you go back to your grandparents, all of us. You know, they landed in this country for the dream. Right when they came here. None of those people were making money. These people came, they struggled, and all of a sudden when they did acquire money and they went out, you know, from post war, they appreciated what they saw. These were hardworking people that evolved into this country, right into the entertainment complex, and they were fascinating to see those people, how much they cared, they worked hard, and that was our audience. Unlike today you make that point. I've got our grandparents and stuff. You know, you came from Canada, so your children are firstborn Americans. But my grandparents, my mother and father, and that whole generation born during World War one, just before and during World War One, they were all firstborn Americans, and they came from impoverished families, immigrants that came through Ellis Island and they struggled in places like Boston and New York. In the big metropolitan cities of the Northeast, and then they came of age. If they're born my parents born in nineteen fourteen. Frank was Sinatra and Dean were both born in nineteen fifteen, they all came of age in nineteen thirty two, right into the Great Depression. So they grew up dirt poor. None of them graduated high school. They were working when they were fifteen or sixteen years old. They bump into the Great Depression in the thirties, and then if they don't get drafted into the war in forty forty one, then they had defense jobs. So the country is on its but they're worried about the Nazis and the Japanese. And the war ends in forty four and forty five, and everybody comes home from the war, and everybody is now thirty years old, and for the first time in their life, there's peace and an open road in front of them. And we bumped into the greatest period of prosperity. Now, what's important, you just remind him. And the reason I'm bringing this up is.

That these people had never had any money whatsoever, no excess disposable income. But they had seen on the herd on the radio, or read magazines about the good life, living big, going to New York, going to the Copacabana, going to baseball games, having a Cadillac, a diamond ring, a mink stole, and maybe even going to Las Vegas. But to go to New York to stay in the hotel on Broadway my parents, the Taft Hotel, to go to Yankee Stadium was living big. And so we've noticed, and this especially Drew and Macau, anywhere in the world, this real strong consumerism, this desire to try the things you've only dreamt about because you've finally got.

A buck to do.

It is a sign of first generation wealth.

And same game Vegas, Macal.

There's no old money in China. All these guys that were gambling with us all during the last twenty years, twenty five years, they're all brand new money. Our parents, our grandparents when they came here, never did see any money. But their children, our parents, the people born before nineteen twenty, they made sure that their kids had the best of everything, and they made sure that they could. And you have a different attitude towards money when you're the first one and you're history of your family. Never make it. You say, wait a minute, I've survived. I overcame poverty and everything else. I made this money on my own, so I can afford to do what I want with it. I'm going to try the things I've dreamt about, and I'll make more money. So if I lose it playing blackjack in Las Vegas, or I squander it going to New York and going to night clubs. Things are not strictly productive activity, why not. I've earned the right to do it. When you get to send it. Second generation wealth. First of all, our generation. We got to go to college, we got to have drive a car. We had the best of everything. The people born between nineteen thirty eight nineteen forty and beyond the Baby boomers. We bumped into the greatest period in world history between nineteen fifty and nineteen nineteen fifty five sixty and even reach its peak in eighty to twenty ten and fifteen. Nothing but bigger, better, everything was no anxiety. Cold War came to an end Russia, the Soviet Union collapsed, and boy, oh boy, we're sitting here today talking to one other. You and Skip and I things show have changed my mind.

Your first time when you hit Vegas with your dad. That's a wild story. Reminisce about that to where you finally make your first move with a casino.

Father was in the bingo business and he had a friend that he grew up with in Revere, Massachusetts named Arthur Rosan, and Arthur Rosen had a bingo had rented the second floor of the Silver Slipper and had a bingo game. So he's making a living. But the Golden Nugget downtown didn't like the idea that people were going to the Silver Slipper up in the across from the Desert End, which to casino like downtown Las Vegas didn't have any rooms Silver Slippers saloon and bingo on the second floor. And the people at the Golden Nugget, which were the main powerhouse in downtown Las Vegas a Golden Nugget, they had been there since nineteen forty six, and they didn't like the idea that people were going to the Silver Slipper and playing bingo when they could have been playing slot machines at the Golden Nugget. So they opened a bingo hall to compete with the Silver Slipper and just gave everything free. The gay they were charging for and Arthur Rosen called my father in Utica, New York and asked him to come out and help him figure out how to promote it and compete. My father went out for a month and after two weeks called up, called my mom and I was It was nineteen fifty two. I was ten, and he said, send Stevie out and my mother put me on a Colonial Airline plane at Utica, New York that flew to Chicago Midway Airport and then United Airlines from Chicago to Denver to Las Vegas. And I was by myself at my little suitcase, and I liked being independent, and my father picked me up and I got off a plane in nineteen fifty two to Las Vegas. That was early Las Vegas, just the desert in seven or eight places. If you walked in front of the Flamingo, the sands or the dunes of the desert inn there was no sidewalk. There was edge of the road, curb of the road and sand, and behind those hotels was desert. There was nothing else. And I went and stayed with my dad in the Frontier Hotel, which was next to the Silver Slipper and between the two places was the frontier village. They made a a village just like in a movie. A western main street would place to tie up the horses, and at the end of the street, like a cap was a stable where you could rent horses to go riding. And my dad and I we'd rent horses every day and go out in the desert. And they had a shooting gallery there in the town and a saloon. You could go in there for milkshakes and stuff and shoot a rifle in a shooting gallery. And we'd go ride horses in the desert and it was so cool. But that lasted for ten days, and then we went home and back to Utica for another twenty years or so.

Went an aesthetic change, right Oh your sand and blue sky.

Back to the East coast, back to Utica, and then after college it was a new story.

Mike.

My father died. It was forty nine years old. He died on the table in heart surgery at the University of Minnesota. He had had rheumatic fever. He had a large to heart and they didn't have heart replacements then and so they couldn't fix him. And it was late. He was having heart failure and they tried to save him, and he died on the table. And I was maybe three weeks since my twenty first birthday, and I was about a month away from graduating from college in Philadelphia, and all of a sudden, it was any meanie mighty and there was no mo I, my mom, my girlfriend, my ten year old brother, and it was da da da da da.

Y're on.

And then the rest of my life from that point on when I was twenty one, was something that where I sort of had to figure it out for myself, which is not a bad thing. I mean, but you have to do twenty one years old, old enough to take care of yourself should.

Be Yeah, I'm thinking about the way I met the two of you. It was nineteen eighty four. I was living in Connecticut, where I grew up, and I had a shopping center development company and had made enough money to get myself a place at La Costa was golf resort northern San Diego County, and one day one of the owners, Irwin Mulaski, came up to me and said, listen, you're a good golfer, right, I said, yeah, pretty good. He said, well, I got a guy coming over from Las Vegas. He just took up the game. I really want you to meet him, so I want you to take him out and play golf. And I thought, oh my god, that's anathema to a good golfer. Somebody just took up the game. Are you kidding me? I said, what if I have a drink with him? No, no, you're going to take him to play golf. So, of course, because he was one of the owners and he had always be in good shape with him, You and I went out and played golf. Who was you and your brother myself and just hit it off, had the greatest time. And you said to me, Connecticut, this is great. You know my daughter is going to go to and I'm going to be all the way out in Las Vegas. Maybe you keep an eye on her. I said, oh yeah, that's no problem, and just sort of hit it off. We just had a great time. And two years later I was in Las Vegas for a shopping center convention and I figured, you know what, I'm going to call Steve when he probably won't even remember me, but I'll take a shot. So I called your office, went through three people, finally got you on the phone, and you said, you're kidding me. You're here in Las Vegas. You didn't call me to tell me you're coming. And where he's staying. I said, to Hilton, the Hilton. What are you doing at the Hilton? I said, well, it's next to the convention center. I'm here for a shopping center convention. You said, pack up your stuff, somebody's going to be there twenty minutes. Pick up. You're going to stay downtown at the Golden Nugget. I said, you know, Steve, that's really kind, but it's just not convenient. You know, I'm right next door to the convention center. You said, well, I'm going to have cars available to drive you over to the convention center or anywhere you want to go. Twenty four to seven. Just come on over here. Somebody to be there in twenty minutes. There was no talking you out of it. So I got packed up and guy picks me up in a stretch limo, takes me to Las Vegas. They take me to the front desk, They hand me the key, they take the bellman takes me up and I get into a suite two stories. It looks like something out of a movie set. I'd never seen anything like this. It was like, you know, Dean Martin as Matt Helman. One of those movies, the most incredible suite I had ever seen. I'd never even seen pictures of anything like this, and I said, wow, this is crazy. And that night, as it turns out, you were tied up and Paul Anka was performing at the Golden Nugget. So I went to see paul Anka perform. Thought paul had a residence in those days. Yeah, I said, it was great. This is just crazy. It worked twelve fourteen weeks a year.

Almost almost didn't work there after that. You want to hear a crazy story over, I'm going to bait my friend.

Worst story.

So I'm loving it down there, and everybody's talking about him, the Golden Nugget. The whole town here's built.

The room for him.

Can't we built a night club care.

For me, Sinatra and where everybody's happy, and they can't believe that this jewel is downtown that Steve put together right with a sign of what was to come. So I'm working there and I'm loving it, Sinatra and I everybody's happy, and my deal runs out and I've got to make a new deal, right, And I was kind of running my own show back then, so I called my brother up and I say, on the.

Strip, the wages that you could make in those bigger rooms that had more seats were two or three times when I could afford it on Fremont Street.

Right, And I call Steve and I say, Steve, we got to talk about a new deal. You take it from there. This is here our guests go.

So Sinatra is making fifties seventy five eighty thousand a show, and Anka and Guys and Martin in those days would be that level of wages. You know, fifty grand a show was a big star. He's making twenty at twenty five thousand dollars a week, and he's doing the twelve shows. He says, listen, we're paths. I love it down here. It's great. But Steve, I got five daughters.

I can't you know.

I'm working so much at the hotel. I'm here, you know a lot. I'm here a fourth of the year. It's home and all that, and I love it because I live in Las Vegas. He's talked about himself, but I need to make more money. I said, Paul Jeeves, you know I don't make any money. We lose money to have you here because the room's small. It's great for the audience to can touch you. I mean, it's really old time intimate to have a big star that close. But I can't afford it. And I know you're making a sacrifice for me. I know that this is a gift, but I'm feeling guilty about it. And remember we lived next door to one another, had we're neighbors. He had five daughters, I had two. We used to go on vacation. We had nine women and two guys. The truth we go on vacation and two families together.

It's all women.

Anyway, I said, go ahead and take the job. They want you to work at Caesar's Palace. I can't ask you to do this. It's not fair to you, and really it's not fair to the joint here to lose more money. We're on the phone this exchange. Is that your final word? He gets real quiet, sort of pathetic. He's that your final word? That's what you're going to tell me? Well, Billini, I can't help, but I think that's the bottom line. Okay, goodbye, just like that, not angry, Okay, goodbye. Well, what happened next is one of those moments when you love Las Vegas, and they're crazy people that make it up. My secretary, Joyce Lumin, comes into my room, my office, and I have one of those offices with two doors, but you only you only you locked one, you only open one half of the double door. But she comes in and she's got red face like she's controlling herself, and she unclips the door that was anchored and pushes it against the wall and then opens the other door so that the double doors for the first time are open, and all of a sudden, two emergency guys in white suits like in a hospital, pulling pushing a gurney with a blood transfusion tower above it with plasma hanging on it and tubes going in to a figure all in wrapped up in bandages, the entire face except for the mouth and the eyes, totally bandaged, hands, everything like a mummade a person's spinning a terrible, terrible accident. And there he's on the gurney with the blood transfusion tube going in his arm, and there's a note pinned on the top of the body said, Okay, do you want what you actually say this? I give up? Do it to me? What difference to make well? The whole floor of the executives had to come and see it. You had to see it.

Do you still have hired Do you have the picture? Still?

We do somewhere He.

Hired an ambulance, he hired the biggest emergency operation, had himself all bandits prepared, and had himself brought down in the ambulance. They took the the gurney, threw in the lobby of the Golden Nugget down the whole corridor with the shops, onto the elevator up to the top floor where the offices were. Oh and everybody that worked up there gotta laugh that day then, maniac. Well, of course that was the end of the conversation about the money. We had had a surrender, So will those a little more money? We'll make it back somehow. Anyway, that was That's one of the many Paul sort of famous for tricks.

Uh.

He's a prankster and he has done some of the wildest things that ever. Ever, some of them can't be used without getting bleeped on the air.

But who you do it here? You talk about us traveling together, which we did.

We show.

In Venice, we got all the girls and we're at the Chiprianichies for those of you out there is a very exclusive little island, limited in rooms, but well appointed in everything you'd ever want.

And we show the two best suites in the joint are on the pool on the edge of the island.

And we show up first night. We blow the whole place out because all the girls started using their dryers right and the get go. So we blow that out. But Steve and I got into the vibe and we're sitting I.

Want to go shopping. They're into touring, you know, walking on the bridges in Venice.

And we're sitting by the pool. We got into a vibe of cigars and Billini's. That's where I got my knee, drinking.

Peach juice and champagne and Billini fresh peach juice in Italy, white peach juice.

We're having a great stay and as you're having fun in life, it goes very quickly. And I know we're leaving the next day.

And just that's how we got the nicknames, because our wives called us the Blini brothers. Anyway, so.

I call Steve and I'm gonna let you finish it, knowing that we're leaving the next day.

The airplane. We had a plane. My plane was a DC nine, and all of us could fly on this plane. It's it's like, you know, an airliner equipped with furniture for private plane. And but the airport, you know, the airport's on a different island from everything's bern Islands in Venice. But so the water taxi is arranged to take us at ten thirty to go across and then take off for the United States. It's the end of our three weeks in Europe. We're going home from Italy at noon, and we got to get up, pack everything, get ready, leave by nine thirty or ten and get to take the water taxi over. It's a little bit of a schlep and you gotta get on and handle all the baggage. We got a lot of bags. Three weeks, nine women, two guys. Anyway, we're getting ready for dinner six o'clock. I'm in my room. My wife is getting changed and ready. If we're going to go out to dinner in Venice. Phone rings and an Italian guy says to me, see you win. This is Tony tonyo. Yeah, if I am the manager in the front, there's here of the Gipriani is very nice. I hope that you are a missus Winn and mister Anka having a very good time. So we having a wonderful time. We hate to leave. Ah, So, Miss Senior Win, we have a problem. I would like to speak to you. You know, you and mister Anka have the two best rooms group of rooms in this hotel.

In the.

Of course, everybody books this Hotalian advance and tomorrow for their annual two weeks. These rooms are booked by any names shake hic and they're coming. They're coming on their jets and they arrive Senior Win at eight thirty tomorrow.

Yeah.

So why but Senor Win, you and mister Ranka are scheduled to leave Gipriani at ten thirty. We need these rooms to clean up and get ready by a thirty, and we'll have to come in and clean them at seven thirty. Because you have all the rooms with your children. You want to clean the rooms at seven thirty. See, Signor Win is so important to us. We be so grateful if you could help. But wait a minute, I.

Can't.

We can't get all these women out of here. We'd have to get them up at five thirty in the morning before they're packing and their makeup, and to give you these rooms at seven thirty in the morning, we'd have to get up at five. I can't do that. I can't possibly get those women to do that. They'll never ever signor and please, it's so important, mister Win. If you can't do this, we will give you other rooms and a complimentary breakfast in the bottom.

You know, we had just.

Paid you know, empteen thousand a day for this complimentary breakfast. And he said, and we'll give you another room and will help you pack. I said, no, no, no, you'll understand, there's no chance whatsoever. Senor Francesco but whatever his name was, I cannot help you. You're a new guests are going to have to stand by. We can be out of here by nine thirty or ten thirty, but not. You can't have the rooms at seven thirty in the morning. My checkout was supposed to be at noon. He says, Miss, is there nothing that we can't do to get you to help us? I said, I'm sorry, sir, but no. And this is your last word, Senor Win. I said, yes, he's in that case. Fuck you. For a good thirty five seconds, my jaws dropped. Guys, there fuck you to me on the goddamn phone. And then it took about thirty five or forty seconds when I realized that that Anka had believed me, and I got hysterical. He did this all the time to people always it's really funny.

And meanwhile, back at the ranch here, you are the golden nugget. You're the guy. Everybody knows you're the guy. How are you dealing with the characters that I knew because I was working there. I started with you were there way before me, way before. So I worked for the guy.

You're older in the sixties.

Oh, sixties and fifties. I started with Sophie Tucker in nineteen fifty eight. Yeah, okay, right, sixteen years old, right, fifty eight, And I get it. You don't show up the midst yeah, much later.

And I knew the game.

I knew the characters, and I must say, gentlemen, all of them. Carl Cohen was my guy. He looked after me. But you and I know there were some.

That's the story. Here's why I love and Paul love Las Vegas and why the place was a magnet if you had any kind of fun in you In the sixties, when Paul was working at the Sands Hotel. They didn't have public companies and corporations. Ten or fifteen guys would get together, put up one hundred thousand or one hundred and fifty one hundred hundred and fifty thousand apiece, get a million or a million and a half together, a big group of guys, and they'd borrow another million or two and they'd build a motel with a casino in it and a big sign out front. And that was a story with the Flamingo, the Sands, the dunes, the Riviera, they were all the same, and the desert in and so the guys who put up the money, they were all gamblers and bookmakers from back east. They were always worried about getting arrested. But now they could go to Las Vegas and he could be legitimate, and they could have there. They could belong to church or synagogue and they didn't, and they could have respectability because gambling was legal out there in the desert. And they would work in the hotel and the standard pay was about one hundred dollars a day. And each of these guys that had put up the money would take shifts and they'd work, you know, getting customers being hosts, et cetera. Well, in the early days of the Sands, which was the main hotel in the fifties in the sixties was the Sands before Caesar's. That's where Sinatra and met King Cole and Sammy Davis and every major star worked, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Anyway, they had these guys that had put the money up that came. They were bookmakers and guys that worked any illegal casinos. But they were a lot of them were Jewish. They weren't hoodlums. They were the guys that ran the casinos, that knew how to set up the place and hire help and deal with games. Now they're all out in Las Vegas, legitimate at last and finally having real money that they've saved. But they all had one other characteristic. They gambled at each other's hotels. They couldn't gamble in their own hotels against rules, So at night the owners of the Sands would go gamble.

At the Dunes.

The Dunes guys would go to Riviera to Rivie would go to the Thera. Well one of these characters. This is a snapshot of what early Las Vegas in the fifties and sixties when Paul first started there. This is what the town was about. Bears no resemblance to the modern Las Vegas, which a giant destination hotels with billions of dollars in costs. This are the old days. There were maybe eighty ninety thousand people in the valley. It was a company town, and everybody knew who owned each hotel, that this guy had three percent, that guy at five percent, this guy at seven percent. Everybody knew who the guys had owned the points they call a percent a point the points. And in the sands there was a guy among others, one of the fifteen guys, a king guys, was a guy, a little Jewish guy named Jake Friedman with the boots. Jakie Friedman had been had come from Russia or from Eastern Europe, one of the immigrants, you know in the early days of the of the of the twentieth century, you know, before World War One, just like my grandparents. Jake Friedman came over and they couldn't speak English very well. They had the accent. Whenever they do Jewish humor, they talk about the vaded people talk to him. They came from Eastern Europe's an accent. They called Jews like that, well, Jake Frewman. Some of them went to New York and Boston. But in Jake Friedman's case, he went to Dallas, Texas or Houston. But he settled this Russian immigrants and he was the handiest sort of how to hustle, a living guy, and he became a bookmaker and he took bets on sports in Dallas or Houston. I forgot which city it was. And when they opened the Sands Hotel, those are the kind of guys that put up the one hundred and fifty thousand so they could move and not and be legitimate. Jakie Friedman was the owner of the Sands with maybe three or four or five percent. But they were all eccentric, these guys. Every one of them was colorful and different. And here's the story. There was a tailor in Los Angeles called Nudy and he made the Cowboys suits for Roy Rogers in the movies, with the perfectly matched pants and the gorgeous boots that matched in color, and the shirt with the spangles on it and it had and everything with color coordinated. Roy Rogers would.

Be in blue.

One day cream. The next you know, he was a glamour rhinestone cowboy with a horse named Trigger. And everybody went to see Roy Rogers and Gene Autry in the movies. And it happens that the Roy Rogers tailor, if you knew what was going on in Hollywood, was this guy Nudy in Beverly Hills. Well, Jake Friedman decided he loved this and he found Nudy. He was five foot four and a half inches tall. He found Nudy the tailor and decided he was going to be Jewish Roy Rogers and had outfits made. And it was a boot maker. So if he was wearing a navy blue pants tucked in, the boots were navy blue. If he was wearing cream, the boot, the cowboy boets were cream. The hat was cream, the shirt, the belt, everything was cream. And the pants fit inside the boot. And here is imagine his four inch five foot four inch jew dressed up in a cowboy suit, who learned to speak English with a broken accent in Texas. So he was like this, how you doing about that? You want to shoot some craps? Hey is that Jewish immigrant from a Texas accent? Now he was only five to four, but he was a degenerate crap shooter, and like most of those owners who stole the money in the casino at night that when they counted, they would always take some that they didn't report. But it was small money in those days, exactly. But they'd run across the street and gamble all of them and the next day they would pay off the markers. So all the hotels knew that Jake Friedman was an insatiable appetite to shoot dice, but he wasn't tall enough to see over the rim.

So they they all.

Hotels, the six or seven hotels, they all had a box underneath the tables. When Jake Freeman showed up, what does cowboys suit? He could stand on the box and shoot dice. Can you picture in your mind, I ask anybody, this is not a television, it's not a movie. This is real. Can you see a guy with a Cowboys Sudan five foot four inches with cowboy boots standing on a box saying give me out seven, give me out seven.

He and I saw on a.

Come out throwing the dice. Oh man, I love that kind of stuff. Yeah, he was something. I was young, but these guys were older, but they would talk in front of me. You know, if you got to know why of them and go for lunch in the coffee shop, they'd all be sitting at the coffee shop making phone calls to get customers to come. And if if you were okay and you could sit at the table, you'd hear all the stories.

So at that time, the only legal casinos were in Nevada or in Atlantic City, New Jersey, way before four Atlantic City, but then later on in nineteen ninety one, the United State in touch. Throughout the eighties were friends. We played golf, hung out whenever we had a chance in New York or wherever. And in nineteen ninety one there was a banking crisis, so a group of developers like me, the banks that were loaning us the money. The banks went under. So where I was based in Hartford, Connecticut, Banking Trust out of business, Hartford National Bank out of business, Colonial Bank out of business. So you're a developer and you're building these projects and the contractors want to get paid, and you have no bank to go to to get the money. So my business went into bankruptcy and I called you. I don't know if you remember this day. I called you and I said, Steve, this is so fucked up. I said, my company just went into bankruptcy. You said, oh, that's great news. I said, what what are you nuts? I said, my company just went into bankruptcy. He said, yeah, that's great. I said, well, how's that great? You said, skip. Listen. In my company, I've got every conceivable job description from valley parker and housekeeper all the way up to the president of the hotel. But what I don't have is a developer. And I said, what do you need to develop? You said, because the government is going to allow the Indians to start opening casinos. And when they Indians start to open casinos, the states are going to want to get that money also, so there's going to be an expansion of casino gambling throughout America. I thought you were literally out of your mind. I said, you got to be kidding me. So, because I was in Connecticut and Connecticut was really hurting at that time, and I knew some of the legislators went to high school with them. I met with a group of them and said, listen, you know we have the insurance companies are getting ready to leave, and we're one industry town, and you started it and I said, I think there's a chance we could get casino gambling approved in Hartford, Connecticut. And then you said to me, what are you nuts? Are you crazy? The land of steady habits in Connecticut, they're going to allow casino gambling. And we started this process where I went to work with you to get a casino approved in Hartford.

That was and you became the president of the development company.

Yeah, And that was the president of development company looking at new opportunities.

And I couldn't travel because we were building in those days. In those days, we were building Treasure Island. It started when Mirage opened and then we're building Treasure Island, went right straight to building Bolagio and Skip came and took over all of that expansion stuff.

And while we were trying to get it approved in Connecticut, we had a governor named Lowell Wiker who was dead set against casino gambling. And at this point they had legalized casinos for the Indians. There were two Connecticut casinos, Foxwoods, and one of Paul's favorite places to Prosleagan Sun. And in order to keep us out, Lowell Wiker, an absolute person, was totally against casino gambling, made a deal with the Indians to give them slot machines because the Indians were not allowed to have slot machines when they first to open their casinos, and used that as a way to block us. And so we thought we were down the drain, but we kept fighting and fighting, and we were working the legislature and going around to the various cities in the state and trying to convince people why this would be a great idea. And we've actually started to turn the page and Steve came and every time Steve came to speak, people paid attention, got excited about what he was talking about the fact that this is not about gambling. This is about creating an entertainment facility where people will come to eat and shop and have all these great experiences. And they were loving it. And it's no better public speaker. So we were working on this and then we finally got to a point where the new governor, John Rowland, the only governor in the history of America to go to prison twice for two different reasons, two different offenses.

He tried to get it right.

The second Yes, a good time around and try to get it right. So we were done in there, and I called Eve and I said, Steve, listen, I'm not a quitter. A winner never quits, and a quitter never wins. But this just is not going to happening in Connecticut. It's not going to happen here. And Steve said, oh, that's great. I said, that's great. What are you talking about? This is great news again, this is great news. Now, this is the second time you told me that there was a catastrophe, and there's great news. You said, I've got an opportunity in Atlantic City, New Jersey, making a deal with the governor to go back to Atlantic City, where I originally had the golden nugget. We've got this big piece of land that we've identified out undern in the district, and we need somebody that can quarterback this. So take your whole team that was working in Connecticut and go to Atlantic City, which was a five hour drive from you know, where I was living at the time. And that started this odyssey that went on throughout all the nineties where we worked on approximate.

You had the governor build a tunnel off the highway. What a what a you know, it was such a drama for five years and Skip was totally in charge of the whole group back on the East coast that he wrote a book about it called the War at the Shore. Then involved the guy who had three hotels there and I had already sold the Golden Nugget and was building on the strip was Donald Trump. And Donald decided he and another guy that had hotels there, Arthur Goldberg, decided they were going to stop Skip from building the tunnel and stop his company, Mirage Resorts, from coming back. Because when we were in Atlantic City the first time, we dominated the market and we sold took our money and went out and built the Mirage. But now we had a chance to come back on one hundred acres. We're going to give us to us for a dollar if we'd come back a buck for one hundred acres at a place called the Marina. And Trump and Goldberg had three four hotels between them and they weren't interested in having us back, but they had a deal with Brunson. Skip was in charge. He was the president of development company, and he said to me, listen, this is going to be a pain. I'll take care of this part. You pay attention to your p's and q's. On a strip and I'll go do this, and he did and it was five years. The saga is the people at Netflix's place are trying to buy that script. They want to make a series out of it. The War at the Shore, it was an amazing, amazing thing I lived through with you guys.

I was working there, working for Trump, working for gold Work or my buddy.

Yeah.

Every time I'd come home to you, we'd sit and we'd have a and listen.

Fortunately, you know, because of Skip I was, I was cut out of it. It was I got a vacation from it. But it aggravated hell out of him for a good sixty months. I mean he took it to bed with him every night. Trump and those guys did every dirty trick it would.

You know.

Those guys took no prisoners. I got one more old Las Vegas story for anybody that's listening to us. I have something to contribute, a sort of an insight, like you said, of the old days, the original Las Vegas. And I told you with the JK. Friedman, you can't write that. You have to picture in your mind. I'm going to paint another picture for you. It's in the fifties. The casinos are owned in the fifties by the original groups of these immigrant bookmakers that came from Boston and Chicago and Saint Louis and Texas and New York and all that. All these guys, there were like eight hotels, the Sahara, and the riv the Thunderbird, the Desert in the frontier of the dunes, the Sands, and the Flamingo and the Tropicana. That was that was the town. Nothing in between. And these guys was a company town. And Carl Cone was the president and ran the casino at the Sands. He had cutten out of the service. He learned how to deal blackjack and craps, and he got an early job in the forties after the war in Las Vegas. And when the people came to open the Sands from New York, they wanted to hire the young Jewish kid that knew all about how to run these games and teach people how to deal. So Caryl Cone, at a young age, became the casino manager at the Sands and eventually the president. During the years of the rat Pack. He did have some ownership, but he was really the guy that ran the gambling part of the place.

Old no, he I don't know where he came from.

Was he born. I didn't know that poem. I pick him up, you know, you know, as part of the history of the town when I get there in the sixties. But Carl had been there, and he was the most respected guy who was the president of the synagogue in town, all that kind of stuff. We got to be friends, and he tells me this story. One night we were going to a big benefit for charity and we both got bored and we ended up in a bar, and he wants to tell me a story. Because the movie The Godfather was a big smash in all the theaters. Mario Puzzo had been hanging out at the Golden Nugget when they were making the movie, so I got to meet him. But The Godfather was the rage great movie. And I'm asking Carl Khone. Hey, Carl, what was it like back in the fifties when all the bad guys were supposed to be here but they really weren't. He says, you know, Steve, the places are small. They had two or three hundred rooms each, little casinos. They had a showroom and the big signs out front. He said, today, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. Is one of your places makes you know, one hundred, two hundred million dollars, He says. These places used to make three four five million dollars. There were little places, but it was only owned by a dozen guys or something. And they were legitimate, he said. In the fifties, two things happened. Every one of the guys. A lot of Jews ran these casinos, and Italians and you know, and Protestants, he said. But one thing. The Desert Inn had a golf course, the first one on the strip. And they had a Desert In Country club. And if you lived in Las Vegas, you had to belong to the di I Country Club because of the eighteen holes right on the on the strip. And they had a beautiful clubhouse, and the clubhouse had a card room where guys could play gin and peanut. Gin was the game for those guys. And anybody that owned any points in any hotel on the Strip was a member of the di and they gambled at each other's places. They all were buddies with each other. If one owner went into another hotel, he could always get a free meal.

You know.

It was a club. But the hangout in the afternoon was to play cards at the di country Club because all of the owners that these guys with the points all worked on swing shift, all the big money, any gambling. Everybody worked at night from you know, seven thirty eight o'clock until two or three in the morning, and they would go home. So everybody watched played cards, and there was a television set in the Desert and country club card room on the wall, maybe a thirty centence television set in those days. Was in the fifties. But in Washington, d C. Senator from Kentucky, I think Estes Kivolver or Tennessee, had decided that he was going to have organized crime hearings to expose organized crime in the United States of America. And he was absolutely certain that the seat of organized crime was Las Vegas. And all of my fear guys were Stephen raising one hundreds of millions of Donaldson and finance and organized crime through the cities of America. And they did this on the movie The Godfather. They got this from the caf Farber hearings. They subpoened Charlie rich the president of the Dunes. Typical guy had ten percent of the Dunes. He was the president of the Dunes. The federal government, the Justice Department, this I mean Senator aster S. Kith Farber subpoenaed Charlie rich to testify, just like the scene and the Godfather. And the idea was they knew that Charlie Richard was going to take the Fifth Amendment. He wasn't going to answer any questions because he had good lawyers. But the idea is asking the questions. Kiff Farber would get the publicity and use the television as because it was televised hearings to make his reputation, and so he knew he wasn't going to answer, but he could ask the questions in a way that would of course pretend that the guy was guilty. And here's what it looked like, and it's on television, Carl tells me in at the Desert In card room at the Desert and Country Club at two or three in the afternoon. You know it was one two o'clock.

Mister Ridge, is it not true? As the Ridge that's you and your co houts at the Dunes Hotel on the Strip in Las Vegas, Nevada, regularly skim tens of thousands of dollars every night from the counting rooms of your gambling casino.

Senator I respectfully refused, Hanchair, I like to take advantage of my rights provided by the Fifth Amendment and not answer your question, mister Rich, is it not true, not only you and the cohorts of the Dunes, but all of your core holts up and down the strip, not less, kim millions of dollars of ill gotten games, avoiding or tax responsibilities and finance organized crime throughout the United States of America. Is that not true, mister Rich, Senator I respectfully. Now, while he's saying this, fourteen guys that are playing gin, Carl said, they jump up out of the chairs and stop playing Gin, and you start yelling at the television, said you turney pastward. We never got that kind of money. We didn't steal that much. We only cut up, you know, one hundred a night. And the guys are yelling at the television. The kid fover is exaggerating how much money they stole. Carl coins to Steve. I was young, he says, I was. They're playing gin and it was greatest show on earth to see these old guys yell on the television set saying they were exaggerating how much money they stole off the counting room. Oh those are my memories, Jake Friedman, guys yelling at the television set. We didn't steal that much.

Steve Carl used to take me in the count room. N I'm this kid and they're looking after me, and he used to take me in the count room skip and he's right. There was no money. There was no you know, you know what it is. Today they bring armored trucks in with seventy eight.

They made ten. Carl told me the Sands Peak made ten thousand a day, which meant three million, six hundred thousand a year. But they'd have a big Christmas or a big holiday and they'd get to four four and a half million a year. The top joint in Las Vegas made four and a half less than five million a year, and they would steal three and a half half of it. They'd cut up ten thousand dollars a night, so if there were ten owners, they'd each get a thousand dollars, but there were usually twenty, so if you were an owner, you could steal five hundred dollars a night. So now these guys would have two or three thousand a week to gamble, and that's what they did.

And apropos what you're saying. One of my great memories I'll never forget. After every show skip, when they shut the show down, they would clear a portion of the showroom and they'd bring out these two big white work lights, and all these guys, Carl four or five, there must have been four or five, six of them. They'd take their coats off, which I never saw these guys without a jacket. They'd take off the coat, take off the ties, and they would sit and play gin till five in the morning, like some ridiculous number a point, you know, at bucket Point wherever it was.

They got a lifestyle. Yeah, it was a simple lifestyle, very sick. And when they went legitimate in the fifties and got to Las Vegas, they never changed their life. But they're children, all went to college, they all grew up and turned their noses up about Las Vegas. The kids too fancy for that. And then public companies came to Las Vegas.

They got Old Steve, they got old Hughes, bought out a bunch of them.

Yeah, he brought Hughes came in sixty five, sixty six and bought out the Sands, the desert in cleaned out Modalitz, the Cleveland Group, the New York Group from the Sands. The only thing that ever happened after was all over. In sixty six. Paul Laxalt was the governor. Reagan was the governor in California. Laxalt was in Nevada. They were buddies. I got a picture at home of me with lax Halt and Reagan when I was twenty six, twenty five years old. But then somehow the movie The Casino, the movie with de Niro and Cho Seshi, a guy, a group of guys, two or three of them, got a whole of the stardust with a teamsters Loan, Lefty Rosendal, Lefty Rosenthal and those guys, and it was a throwback to the forties. And all the rest of us in that town we looked at the stardust and said, these guys are all going to go to jail. I mean, they're living in another world there. They're fifteen years out of sync.

That was Spilatro brother.

Yeah, and they loved They got rid of them, and they lost the hotel, they lost everything.

Hey, folks, this is Jordan Runtog, the executive producer of Our Way. This concludes the first part of our epic conversation with the great Las Vegas visionary Steve Winn. We've got plenty more to come in part two, so we'll catch you back here next week.

Thanks so much for listening.

Our Away with Paul Anke and Skip Bronson is a production of iHeartRadio.

The show's the executive producer is Jordan Runtog, Supervising producer and editor Marcy Depina.

It was engineered by Todd Carlum and Graham Gibson and mixed and mastered by Doug Boum.

If you like what you're heard, please subscribe and leave us a review.

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Our Way with Paul Anka and Skip Bronson

Music icon Paul Anka and business visionary Skip Bronson are dear friends, and together they boast t 
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