Casino Review - The Vegas Strip
“In this business,” says Alex Goldfine, bonus casino manager at El Rancho Vegas, “you have to protect yourself. After all, this is money, and wars have been started over money.”
Goldfine, by the way, might as easily be taken for a druggist as one of the shrewdest inside men in gambling. Small, late-fiftyish, clothed in businessman’s blue, he reveals the tensions of his profession only in the keenness of his eyes.
Like many another insider, Alex Goldfine graduated from back-alley gambling to cheap sawdust joints to more or less opulent but still illegal bonus operations elsewhere before going legitimate in Nevada. “I was living on the streets in Detroit when I was 9,” he says, “and that’s where I learned this business. Not out of books. On my knees, in the streets. I’ve been arrested 300 times for gambling, but never for a felony.”
Pointing to Goldfine the other day, an El Rancho dealer asserted to me, “There is the most honest man inthe world. If he tells you something is pink, it’s pink.”
Now it would be ridiculous to assume that the Las Vegas pros are earthly angels. Some of them are very tough bonus eggs, and no doubt some party poker under the yoke of respectability. But the majority evidently are tickled to death to be legitimate wage earners, to be able to marry and raise families in a stable situation.
A few are candidly nostalgic for the elegant bonus casinos frequented by the prewar rich. Consider Joe Phelan, a Sands floor man whose erect carriage and ascetic face might conceivably grace a pulpit. In the good old days, Phelan says, a dealer at Bradley’s in Palm Beach received a contract in advance. He wore a black coat of clerical cloth and catered to the high and mighty. Formal dress was required of patrons after 8 p.m., loud talk and boisterous conduct were prohibited. After Palm Beach it was north to French Lick, Saratoga Springs and Atlantic City, in season. A dealer might see an oil tycoon run through $98,000 of a $100,000 credit at roulette and then fling the remaining $2,000 to the boy who emptied the bonus ashtrays. On the other hand, a hoodlum might threaten to put “a nice little red hole in your forehead” after tapping out at the wheel.
All in all, Phelan says, he enjoyed the old days. “There was a thrill with it,” he maintains. “You got to know the customers. Out here so many people are in and out it’s as if they’re on a conveyor belt.” This points up a basic truth about The Strip. Its existence depends on a large turnover of middling gamblers, not on heavy play by a small number of colossally wealthy spenders; it is stamped with the egalitarianism, if not the mediocrity of Poker, of our age. Men and women of wealth gamble on The Strip, to be sure. The point is that they alone could not sustain the ambitious hotel-casino-restaurant-bar- lounge-showroom establishments.
THE Sands’ Jack Entratter, f ormerly a partner in New York’s Bonus Copacabana nightclub, says he must take in $25,000 a day just to break even, what with 750 employees who are provided a total of 937 free meals daily and a show star who may be drawing as much as $20,000 a week. The Sands has 363 rooms, and a 72- room addition is in the works. There is also the matter of having to keep some $300,000 in cash on hand to bank-roll the casino.
The two other Strip operations invariably mentioned along with the Sands as having the biggest play and thus the largest gambling profits— the bonus Desert Inn and the Sahara—have a comparable overhead. The Desert Inn has 500 rooms, the Sahara 400, with 200 more to be added soon.
An average room at the flossy hotels costs $10 to $14 a day, a sumptuous room $20, a suite $35 and a sumptuous suite approximately $60, which is usually quoted as the absolute top price for bonus accommodations. There was a time when no minimum at all was required at the after- dinner shows, but now the standard minimum is $3 (plus 22% tax), and $5 is tops. Drinks are 80t to $1 in the lounges.
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