Oddly enough, Goldstein is one of the few guys willing to talk about Wynn on the record, and he does so only in the most general of terms. Wynn is known as a bully with a temper, and no one wants to risk crossing him.
“I’ve been sued by Steve five times,” says John L. Smith, the respected, mild-mannered columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “and I’d rather not make it six.”
It took repeated pleas to get Smith to finally meet for breakfast to talk about Wynn, and he was remarkably good-natured about Wynn’s attempts to suppress his unauthorized Wynn biography, “Running Scared: The Life and Treacherous Times of Las Vegas Casino King Steve Wynn.”
Wynn is especially sensitive about a Scotland Yard report from the early 1980s that declared him unfit to own casinos in England. When Smith called Wynn to discuss the report a decade later, “he threatened to sue me within 10 seconds of my broaching the subject.” Wynn was probably the most powerful man in Vegas at the time – he was derisively referred to as “Governor Wynn” – and his furor resulted in the column never running. (It became a chapter in “Running Scared.”)
Wynn’s subsequent libel suit – which was originally based, not on the book itself, but on the catalog copy describing the book – was fought by Wynn and publisher Lyle Stuart for six years, going all the way to the Nevada Supreme Court, with Wynn at one point vowing that Smith and his family would end up on the street.
It’s not the only time Wynn has tried to crush someone who refused to buy into the Steve Wynn Legend. His legal battles with rival Donald Trump are rife with spying, private investigators (Wynn likes to hire retired FBI agents), and the transcripts of conversations taped by recorders concealed in jockstraps.
When investigative reporter Robert Friedman showed up in Vegas two years ago to write a situs poker online profile for a men’s magazine, Wynn told him he didn’t like the “negative” people he was talking to and wouldn’t grant an interview. Friedman said, “How do you know who I’m talking to?” Wynn then Faxed a list of everyone Friedman had interviewed, scaring Friedman because “the list was totally accurate.”
“We’d rather not say anything publicly about Steve Wynn,” says one analyst at a Wall Street firm.
“He’s a visionary. Let’s leave it at that,” says another.
It’s not recorded who first used the V-word to describe Wynn, but once it became part of his bold-face gossip-column name, as in “Visionary Steve Wynn,” he started thinking of himself as a sort of modern-day King Tut destined to leave monuments to his brilliance in the desert.
Yet it’s widely acknowledged now that Bellagio was his downfall. The total cost of the property is estimated by Wall Street at $1.9 billion, and though it’s still possible for it to make money, the profit margin is so small that he would have been better off spending the same money to build four smaller casinos.
“I mean, who knows?” says Jason Ader of Bear Stearns. “Maybe the Bellagio will last a hundred years. Then maybe it’s a success.”
The Bellagio’s problem was that it didn’t develop enough new business. Long-time customers of the Mirage simply moved down the street, so that it amounted to shifting money from one pocket to the other.
Yet the official Steve Wynn hagiography goes something like this:
Steve built The Mirage, and the people came. And the rest of Vegas followed Steve to glory.
Five years later Steve was restless, so he built Treasure Island, and the people came to see his pirate ship, and Vegas emerged as a destination resort. And it was good.
And then Steve led his people to Bellagio, but God punished Steve by turning Bellagio into a golden calf, and Wall Street wept. For Steve was a Man Ahead of His Time.
The Bellagio has become one of the favorite gawking sites in town, but Wynn’s piece-de-resistance has such a rarefied theme that it is unrecognizable to the average tourist. (It’s a scaled-down version of Lake Como, the resort on the Italian-Swiss border where European old money has vacationed for generations.)
When it opened, its art collection alone was worth $100 million. (Wynn’s continuing obsession with art is odd in view of the fact that he was diagnosed in the 1980s with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative retinal eye disease that has brought him to the brink of total blindness.) The atmospheric prices in Bellagio’s shopping mall ($1,400 for a man’s shirt is not uncommon) made it seem just too opulent for anyone but a handful of the super-wealthy.
Yet somehow it worked. The cash flow was so high that, although it didn’t make much money, it certainly didn’t lose money. In 1999, one of the best gambling years ever, Mirage Resorts – Wynn’s holding company – gained about 2 percent. By contrast, MGM Grand earned 85 percent, and Park Place Entertainment a remarkable 97 percent.
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