People who work with him sense the gradual decline of Wynn’s vision, the narrowing path of light in which he lives. At meals, they watch him swallow handfuls of vitamins and herbs. They learn to greet him by announcing their names and touching his arm to identify their location. But they do not mention it.
Wynn’s diminishing eyesight is a matter of mystery around his company—something widely known but thinly understood, discussed in whispers and code.
“I’ve never asked him about his eyes,” says the political pollster Frank Luntz, who has worked for Wynn for many years. “I’m afraid.”
Chapter Seven
BRASS BALLS
He was kind of loud and a little bit in the pounding-his-own-chest department.
—BOYHOOD FRIEND OF STEVE WYNN
On New Year’s Day in 1994, Paul Meloro, who was thirty-one at the time, was alone processing film in the Mirage’s photo lab. When the lab phone rang sometime after lunch, the photographer put the receiver to his ear and heard a gruff voice say, “This is Steve Wynn. Send somebody down to the dolphin pool.”
The Mirage is one of the few places in the United States with a license from the National Marine Fisheries Service to keep dolphins. This is because Wynn took a trip to Hawaii while he was building the Mirage. There, he swam with dolphins at a resort. “He came back from that trip and said, ‘Well, add a dolphin pool to your list of things to do, Bobby,’” says Bobby Baldwin, who at the time was busy attending to the details of constructing the Mirage.
Animal rights activists protested, opposed to keeping dolphins in captivity in the Mojave Desert. “It took hundreds of people three years to get the licenses,” Baldwin says. Wynn arranged to be “tipped off” by federal officials about five maltreated bottle-nosed dolphins—four from Florida and one from Texas. He says he offered the owners $20,000 per dolphin. “If they took the deal, they had to sign a paper that they wouldn’t apply for another license,” Wynn says.
Sigma, Duchess, Merlin, Darla, and Banjo were flown into Las Vegas like any high roller: in chartered jets outfitted for their comfort. They were also just about as bad-tempered as any high roller on a losing streak.
Sigma arrived first, at around four in the morning in October 1990. She rolled off her sling, did one high-speed revolution around the small holding pool where she was intended to settle down for a few hours, and blasted straight through its steel gate at about 30 mph, exiting right into the Mirage’s 1.6-million-gallon, 26-foot-deep lagoon.
When Wynn arrived, he demanded to know what had happened. Wet-suited divers were dispatched to inspect the gate with flashlights. They found a frayed hole in the chain link that looked as though a large bullet had shot through. Sigma’s nose was scratched. “We learned as we went along,” says Baldwin.
When the babies started coming, Wynn learned that pregnant dolphins should be isolated. This required another pool. The budget nearly quadrupled to $14 million from $4 million.
Wynn had promised federal authorities that he would create a research center, and he brought in a trainer to make the nasty-tempered mammals more manageable. The Mirage dolphins eventually participated in so many research projects that they learned to lie still in the water for ultrasounds. They will urinate, defecate, and, if male, ejaculate on command.
On the far side of the dolphin pool, Wynn built a private getaway known among the dolphin habitat employees as “Steve’s Room.” There was a terrace with a table and phone and inside, a private bathroom and changing area. In a larger room, three walls were hung with photographs of Wynn swimming with the dolphins, and the fourth wall was open, its floor sloping into the water. This was where a wet-suited Wynn slipped into the water to swim with his dolphins.
Wynn spoke in baby talk to them. He watched them give birth through a glass partition. One year, when Darla’s baby died unexpectedly, he issued a touching obituary, which ran in the Las Vegas Review Journal. He had the baby dolphin buried in a child’s casket overlooking the seventeenth hole on the golf course at Shadow Creek.
So Paul Meloro, the Mirage staff photographer, hung up the phone that New Year’s Day in 1994 and ran. “If Steve Wynn calls, you drop everything and close the lab,” Meloro said years later when he was driving a taxicab in Las Vegas. He arrived at the pool to find Wynn and Michael Milken clad in wet suits. “They had an entourage. Typical Las Vegas—well dressed,” Meloro says.
Wynn wanted Meloro to take photographs of his friends as gifts. “I hung around for an hour and a half, shooting pictures,” Meloro says. Meloro says his photos captured the men frolicking with the dolphins, gliding in the water, whiling away a chilly afternoon in the Las Vegas winter.
Wynn had traveled a long road to that pool.
Utica, New York, in the 1950s was a town of leafy green elm trees and Italian immigrants whose streets rang with the mother language. About a quarter of Oneida County’s 264,401 residents told their census taker in 1959 that they’d been born in Italy. Most of Utica’s Jewish kids lived in the better-off middle-class neighborhood in south Utica known generally as “uptown.” That’s where the Wynn family lived when Steve Wynn was a teen, on a street called Bonnie Brae. The small Jewish population focused on its Jewish community center.
Mike Wynn, the Wynn family patriarch, ran bingo parlors in Utica, Syracuse, and Binghamton. Work kept him on the road. He was a good earner, according to townspeople, and his wife, Zelma Wynn, was a doting mother. Their spoiled son Steve wanted for little, other than maybe for more of his father’s time.
Mike Wynn was born Michael Weinberg, but it’s said he changed his name to disguise his Jewish heritage for a job. He was the son of a vaudeville performer who once played Valvino in an act called Valvino Lamore. Wynn says his grandfather’s act once got second billing to Al Jolson on Broadway.
This seems particularly fitting. It’s easy to assume that this grandfather’s vaudeville roots made the ancestral voyage to the infant Stephen Alan Wynn. “Maybe there’s a gene,” Steve Wynn says, nodding.
It was well known around town that Mike Wynn was a heavy gambler. It was also a common belief that the bingo joints he ran, much like those up and down the East Coast, were connected to organized crime. True or not, this was not especially notable in Utica, which served as a Prohibition conduit for Canadian booze.
“I knew that he was involved somehow in quote-unquote gambling. I think I probably heard that from my parents,” says Arthur Resnikoff, a childhood friend of Wynn’s who is now a San Francisco psychologist and management consultant. “It really wasn’t very pejorative. It was like, well, that’s what he did. We wouldn’t do that, but he did.”
Irving Resnikoff, Arthur’s father, owned a liquor store and was Steve Wynn’s scoutmaster. At age twelve, the boys rode in the back of a butcher’s stench-filled cattle truck on a Boy Scout newspaper collection drive. As far as Arthur Resnikoff could tell, “There wasn’t a lot of family life.” Maybe it was just that Wynn didn’t talk much about his folks. Resnikoff was surprised to learn, five decades later, that Steve had a younger brother, Kenneth, ten years his junior.
Wynn was [on] “the border of confidence and swagger and arrogance,” Resnikoff says. “I wouldn’t call him likeable at that point, but there was something about him that was attractive. He had a sense of humor, always a smile, a very optimistic, I-can-do-anything kind of guy.”
Wynn’s scout troop made ample use of the wooded Adirondack Mountains nearby. Mike Wynn joined them on a camping trip when the boys were twelve or thirteen. “It was a big deal,” Resnikoff says. Steve “was so proud that his father came on that trip.” Nearly the entire troop was Jewish, but Mike Wynn arrived with a whole side of bacon.
When Steve was ten, his dad took him to Las Vegas for a weird two-week sojourn. Mike Wynn was attempting—but would fail—to operate a bingo parlor on the second floor of the Silver Slipper casino. In its retelling, this story becomes a dramatic portent of Wynn’s future: Mike Wynn gambling at night while his son wanders through casinos in s
earch of him. A powerful yen to be a big shot in Las Vegas grows in the boy’s belly. And the Silver Slipper right across the street from the Desert Inn—a parcel of land that fifty years later would be called Wynn Las Vegas, despite his earlier claim that he wouldn’t put his name on a property.
At home, Wynn was rambunctious, according to his friends, and in the eighth grade was sent away to Manlius Academy military school, a place of crew cuts and discipline where he spent a great deal of his time avoiding being apprehended for various high jinks.
But summers were the magical opposite of Manlius: full of freedom at his family’s summer home on a lake in Old Forge, New York.
Old Forge is a postcard mountain village with a covered bridge and an old Tudor-style manse of a library: Mayberry in the Adirondacks. It’s a snowy wonderland in winter, and in summer a boating, hiking paradise dotted with lakes and camps. Wealthy East Coast families have summered there since the nineteenth century.
The Wynns’ vacation house was on a channel that ran into one of the region’s lakes. Wynn’s parents gave him a speedboat as a gift. Toby Daniels Fava, who was Toby Denmark in those days, recalls riding out on Wynn’s boat at the age of fourteen, no adults along. “We were all good kids,” she says. Wynn and some friends became accomplished enough to water-ski for fifteen miles through lakes and channels.
Wynn was “the kind of kid that if they built a ski jump, he had to jump highest,” says Wayne Blank, another boyhood friend, who now owns the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica, California. Back then, Stevie Wynn “was the center of attention,” Blank says. “He had the best boat. The ski jump was his.”
Those who knew Steve Wynn in Old Forge know a little piece of his soul. Many years later, in the 1990s, Blank took a drive along the north end of Lake Tahoe. His hired driver pointed out the sprawling mansions of billionaires who had lately been pushing out the neighborhood’s millionaires. “That’s Steve Wynn’s place,” the driver said as they passed one of these estates, “and it’s where the lake scene in The Godfather was filmed.”
A mile or so down the road, the hired car slid past the imposing gates of another Tahoe estate. Blank could just make out a plaque revealing the name: OLD FORGE.
Blank turned to his wife. “I don’t know where The Godfather was filmed,” he said, “but this is where Stevie Wynn lives.”
Wynn headed off to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he earned a degree that helped him stand out in Las Vegas. It was in English literature. During a vacation from Penn, Wynn met Elaine Pascal, a former Miss Miami Beach, on a blind date arranged and attended by their parents in the same city where she won her title. “He told me he was nineteen,” Elaine Wynn recalls. “He lied. He was nineteen in three months.”
Over the next few years, Wynn would lose his father during open-heart surgery, finish college, and take over running his dad’s bingo parlors with his new young wife, Elaine. Savvy, he even paid off his dad’s gambling debts to the likes of Charlie Meyerson, a big-time New York bookie.
By the time they’d made the leap to Las Vegas and opened the Mirage in 1989, Wynn was forty-seven years old, with two daughters and the same pretty blond wife. Well, not wife, exactly, as the two had divorced three years earlier. Steve Wynn by this time had honed a wide reputation as a Casanova. A former Mirage executive says the casino boss made little secret among his confidants that he kept keys to several hotel rooms for his personal use.
Still, theirs wasn’t much of a divorce. The Wynns continued to share their ranch house at 2020 Bannie Avenue in the Scotch Eighties, a respectable upper-class neighborhood not far from the Las Vegas Strip. Long before vintage kitchenware was fashionable, their yellow kitchen contained original appliances. “Their home was a home, it wasn’t a showpiece,” says Alan Feldman, the former Mirage spokesman.
The comedian Jerry Lewis resided in a five-bedroom home a couple of blocks away, in the same house where he lived until his death in 2017. Directly across the street lived a Nevada Supreme Court Justice. The Scotch Eighties would soon be abandoned for gated suburbs of mass-produced Tuscan dream homes.
In those days, wealthy casino types were moving into a gated golfing community called Spanish Trails. So, naturally, Wynn looked the other way. It was at this point in his career that Wynn began a troublesome habit. He bundled his personal life in with the publicly traded company. Wynn’s idea was to create a forested golf resort and build his dream house smack in the middle. While designing the Mirage, Wynn had the company buy up roughly 230 acres in one of the uglier parts of Clark County, North Las Vegas. The desert there looks bulldozed and industrial. It’s a hop and a skip to Nellis Air Force Base.
Elaine balked at the idea of moving to North Las Vegas. “It was out in the middle of nowhere,” she said. But Wynn teed up $45 million and named the place Shadow Creek.
To enter Shadow Creek now is to step beyond the proverbial looking glass. The drive out of Las Vegas proper passes by arid automotive repair shops and industrial detritus. Then there is the right turn from Losee Road onto Shadow Creek Drive and the stop at the guard shack. A long, high berm disguised as a hill blocks the view of another climate zone that exists beyond.
“Make me a North Carolina–North Georgia kind of course,” Wynn told Tom Fazio, the golf-course designer. Wynn’s eyesight was failing, so Fazio gave each golf hole “sides” to help define the target. Crews dug down into the desert floor and created hills alongside the fairways. The hills were planted with pine trees, each watered by its own personal drip nozzle. To avoid sun dazzle, which would hurt Wynn’s sensitive eyes, the tree line was brought right to the water’s edge, creating dark lagoons.
Wynn and Fazio installed 13,000 trees in three million cubic yards of soil that was hauled in and laid atop the desert floor. This transplanted pine forest left carpets of pine needles in thickets around Shadow Creek. It cooled the air and shaded the clubhouse, which could have been mistaken for a genteel Adirondack hideaway.
They also built a mile-long creek, added waterfalls, and planted wildflowers. It was all irrigated with wild abandon—that is, relative to the water deprivation that existed beyond the berm. All this created shady glens and a nesting habitat for Wynn’s imported wildlife. Eight wallabies from Australia lived alongside pheasants and African cranes, which looked so weird on a golf course, Wynn said, “they scared the golfers.” Wynn, an inveterate lover of animals, mothered them all, clucking and fussing. (“I’m just this side of PETA,” he once told me, referring to the animal rights group.)
Wynn was heartbroken when a wallaby named Speedy sat under the front wheel of a car and was crushed. “He died,” Wynn lamented. “I realized I couldn’t protect them and they couldn’t protect themselves.”
Some people joked—and in a way it’s true—that Shadow Creek was paid for by the now-late Ken Mizuno. Mizuno was a high-rolling Japanese gambler who flew into Las Vegas on his private DC-9, visiting the Mirage twenty-nine times between December 1989 and October 1991, according to Yakuza, a book about the Japanese underworld. He lost as much as $65 million at the Mirage, according to legal filings involved in his later bankruptcy. He left behind as much as $11 million in one visit.
Like Kerry Packer, Mizuno was a serious George—a big tipper. But it turned out that he was playing baccarat with money that he’d bilked from Japanese investors. He and his partners had sold 52,000 memberships in an unbuilt golf club outside of Tokyo that could accommodate only 1,830 members. His scheme collapsed, and he was eventually convicted in Japan of tax evasion and fraud.
Wynn believed Shadow Creek would spark more deluxe development in North Las Vegas. He bought enough land to buffer Shadow Creek and planned to develop further once the area took off. This proved to be one of Wynn’s bad bets, like the time he visited Laughlin, Nevada, and announced that he would build a Golden Nugget casino there because Laughlin reminded him of what Vegas was like forty years earlier.
Steve Wynn was Shadow Creek’s only official member. To enh
ance its mystery, he savvily barred photography and personally approved invitations to play. Lockers had magnetic plates for brass name tags, so a guest would arrive and find a personalized locker, possibly one next to Michael Jordan’s.
Soon after opening, the eighteen-hole course won awards as one of the world’s best new golf courses from Golf magazine and Golf Digest.
It was possible to play golf there without seeing another soul all day. But one never knew who might turn up. The boxer James “Buster” Douglas ran on the course to train for an ill-fated 1990 match with Evander Holyfield. Andre Agassi, a favorite son of Las Vegas, once played fifty-two holes of golf at Shadow Creek in one day, just in time to tell The New York Times all about it. Willie Nelson lost $55 to Kris Kristofferson there on a Father’s Day bet in 1991. They were in town performing at the Mirage along with Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash.
Wynn wielded Shadow Creek as a political tool. Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton played there. While campaigning to expand his casino empire into Connecticut, Wynn flew a contingent of local government officials from that state on the Mirage plane, squired them around Las Vegas, and toured them through Shadow Creek under the noses of the Connecticut press, which duly reported the glamorous tour in daily missives.
Wynn’s political reach was expanding to the national level. When he heard that President Clinton was considering a national gambling tax to finance welfare reform, Wynn telephoned Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, at home at eleven p.m. to complain as the U.S. representative dozed through the Academy Awards.
Wynn, who described himself as a moderate Democrat, continued his campaign with a visceral attack on the Democratic administration. “That’s the Clinton administration’s operating philosophy: ready, fire, aim,” Wynn quipped.
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