It was Manny’s fighting skill that would endear him even more to Kirk and Jean in the months after their first encounter. Manny happened to be walking past the Riviera Hotel one afternoon when he noticed someone in the window of the cocktail lounge waving urgently for his attention. It was Jean Kerkorian.
Moments later Manny was at her side. Jean, in obvious distress, had been having lunch alone while waiting for Kirk in the lounge. She pointed to two men at the bar a few steps away. They were young, drunk, and lewd. “Manny, they’re bothering me,” she whispered. One of them still sat facing Jean, his legs splayed, zipping and unzipping his fly and leering at her.
Both men were bigger than Manny. In Iran he had fought as a featherweight. More than a decade later, he was still a lightweight compared to the pair of six-footers. Manny stood five foot five. Maybe. But he wheeled around to confront them. He got their attention shadowboxing as he approached—firing off a lightning-fast sequence of menacing jabs that eventually stopped just short of their startled faces.
“Turn your ass around and zip up,” he barked.
Then, lowering his voice, he warned the men in a cold and convincing tone, “I’m going to knock the shit out of you. I will put you on the floor and you will crawl out of here with ten thousand dollars in dental expenses.” The drunks zipped up and scrambled for the nearest exit.
Jean asked Manny to stay until Kirk could join them. A short time later, she was calm and relaxed when her husband arrived. Kirk’s seething anger over his wife’s rude treatment by those strangers was matched by his enormous gratitude to Manny—gratitude that would last a lifetime.
Kirk would later take Manny aside. He was hardly a boastful man. Friends and competitors alike invariably described him as humble and gracious. But after his new Armenian friend rescued Jean at the Riviera lounge, Kirk shared the rarest of insights into his own very private ambitions, “Manny, I’m going to be a big man in this town, and you’re always going to have a good job.”
For his part, Manny honored their friendship by naming his next child after Kirk: Andre Kirk Agassi. The baby that came home from the hospital to find a tennis ball dangling over his crib would grow up to make tennis history bearing the middle name of his father’s Armenian friend.
Kirk’s Armenian connections were growing in his aviation business, too. After selling Trans International Airlines to Studebaker in 1962, he was introduced to an enterprising young stock trader from Fresno with an eye on Kirk’s fat portfolio of Studebaker stock. George Mason, whose grandfather had changed the family name from Elmassian, sent one of his cousins as an emissary to get an audience with Kirk.
The cousin happened to be the most famous Kerkorian of that day—Gary Kerkorian (no relation to Kirk), an All-American football quarterback who took Stanford to the Rose Bowl in 1952. He later played for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Colts. Gary was already a friendly acquaintance of Kirk’s after they met during a 1960 gathering of Armenians in Los Angeles. Kirk agreed, of course, to meet with Gary’s cousin George Mason.
Mason at age thirty-two was a very busy man. In Fresno, he represented the San Francisco trading firm Schwabacher and Company, was a night school law student, and published a weekly English-language Armenian newspaper called the California Courier. But after prematurely advising Schwabacher executives about his personal connection to the Studebaker stockholder, Mason was chagrined to learn that his boss had made a personal call on Kirk. George was getting “big footed.”
In a follow-up wire, boss Albert Schwabacher described his contact with Kirk: “Just had a friendly chat. He’s a very nice fellow. Spoke highly of you. We’ll take it from here.”
Mason hadn’t even met Kirk yet, but he was already getting shoved aside. He also was behind with Schwabacher accountants—taking salary advances against yet-to-be-earned commissions. Mason chose a bold response. He immediately called Kirk, invoked the name of cousin Gary Kerkorian, and said he wanted to handle Kirk’s Studebaker stocks.
Always open to doing business with friends—if the business seemed like a good idea—Kirk asked how the brokerage relationship would work. He wasn’t eager to make trips to Fresno delivering paperwork every time he sold a block of stock.
“Absolutely not,” Mason reassured him. “All you have to do is put the order in through me.” Stock certificates and transaction paperwork could all be exchanged at the office in San Francisco near where Kirk maintained a residence.
“Then I’ll tell you right now, that’s the way I’ll do it.”
Mason could finally breathe again. Kirk’s reputation as a businessman who kept his word was already well established, enough to further embolden Mason. He immediately wired his head office on Market Street: “Spoke to my friend, Kirk, and he assures me that he will let us handle the business through me at this office. I’ll take it from here.”
The call to Kirk had taken only a few minutes, but through that brief exchange George (Elmassian) Mason had picked up more than an investment client. He had just gained lifetime admission to the Kerkorian inner circle.
Kirk’s sale of Studebaker stock began in 1963. It had to be handled . . . delicately.
He summoned Mason to San Francisco where the broker checked in to the elegant Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill. When his room phone rang the next morning, it was still dark in San Francisco, but Kirk was already downstairs waiting in the hotel coffee shop. The New York Stock Exchange was about to open on the East Coast, and Kirk’s goal was to cash in more than a hundred and twenty thousand shares of Studebaker. And it had to be accomplished without inciting a sudden sell-off that could send share prices plunging.
On the phone in a room overlooking the city, Mason placed orders in small increments—a few thousand in one hour, another ten thousand a little later. Prices fluctuated in the low-to-midseven-dollar range with each sale authorized by a nod from Kirk. The plan was working, but it was a very slow process. Mason returned to Fresno, and Kirk had business in Los Angeles, but each day they resumed phone contact for three-way conversations with the trading floor in New York. Nearly two weeks after the sell-off began, Kirk still had thirty-five thousand shares left. The trading specialist Mason had been using at the NYSE offered to buy the remaining lot for a lump sum.
“Dump it all,” Kirk said.
Mason had no idea what Kirk had in mind, but he figured his new client must be getting ready to make some sort of major move. One thing was clear by the end of the year: Kirk had cashed out of Studebaker just in time.
The carmaker was in free fall. It was on track to lose $16 million in calendar year 1963—and that was despite the fact that TIA and several other nonautomotive subsidiaries were all profitable. In December the struggling company announced it was closing its South Bend plant, eliminating thousands of jobs, and moving all Studebaker car production to Canada.
Kirk’s boss, Sherwood Egbert, who was also undergoing debilitating cancer surgeries, was ousted as president and replaced by a senior bean counter and former bookkeeper, Byers A. Burlingame. Behind the scenes Burlingame had authorized quiet inquiries with potential buyers of the company’s various subsidiaries. He was especially eager to get out of the airfreight and charter business.
Frank Sinatra and Barron Hilton, the son of hotel mogul Conrad Hilton, were approached as potential buyers of TIA. Nothing came of those efforts, but talks with Robert Six, founder of Continental Airlines, were getting serious when Kirk intervened. He refused to approve any merger or takeover involving Continental, a unionized airline, complaining that it would have cost most of his nonunion TIA employees their accrued seniority.
“I can’t do that,” Kirk protested to the Studebaker board of directors. He insisted that TIA crews be protected. “They’ve come this far with me, and I can’t sell them out that way.”
He offered instead to buy it back. Besides, his original deal with Studebaker included an approval-of-purchaser clause. Kirk flew to Indiana and launched negotiations with Burlingame. The new president h
ad just started selling off everything from idled factory machinery to corporate subsidiaries in a desperate campaign to slash Studebaker debt. Kirk left South Bend with a $150,000 option to buy back TIA for $2.5 million cash.
With Studebaker in its death throes, it was a good deal for everyone. However, Kirk still needed Walter Sharp and Bank of America to finance the deal with a $2 million loan. It was granted only after a split vote of the skeptical loan committee and after Kirk put up every piece of property he owned as collateral. Kirk was once again flirting with financial ruin. He covered the rest of the cash deal with most of his personal savings.
By September 1964, after less than two years under Studebaker control, Trans International was back under the direct ownership of Kirk with his managing partner, Glenn Cramer. They promised to expand TIA service and make it even more profitable.
The year 1964 would be a year of many landmarks for Kirk. He had negotiated his Las Vegas lease deal with Jay Sarno for the Caesars Palace land only days after his mother, Lily, had died in January. That fall, just as press reports announced his repurchase of TIA, Kirk had to bury his father, Ahron. The Kerkorian siblings naturally assumed their roles as family elders. But it was Kirk, the youngest, on whom they all relied for financial and familial leadership.
He remained especially close to sister Rose, the diminutive and blunt-spoken mother of two, who idolized her little brother. Her ex-husband had complained in divorce filings that he had always suffered by comparison to Kirk. During Kirk’s extended residence in Las Vegas, he bought Rose a home on the Las Vegas Country Club’s eleventh tee, not far from his own. She filled it with an enormous doll collection. It seemed a poignant response to her deprived childhood.
“We didn’t have toys like children do now,” she said, recalling having few playthings aside from “chickens and ducks.”3
In Las Vegas she played at the roulette wheel and slots with decidedly mixed results. Once when she double-downed at the blackjack table in an almost certain losing situation, her friend Gene Kilroy exclaimed: “Rose, what are you doing!” She replied with a shrug, “I’m giving my brother some of his money back.”4
Since their teen years Rose had always been Kirk’s confidante and sounding board, one of the few people he trusted with his secrets—personal or professional. She had been Kirk’s first partner in Los Angeles Air Service. And she knew before anyone, even before Kirk’s Armenian broker in Fresno, that a much bigger wager was coming.
Kirk was ready to open TIA to Wall Street investors—his nearly two-decade-old charter business would be the first supplemental airline ever taken public.
Trans International Airlines—now with a pair of DC-8 Jet Traders, two Constellations, and assorted other planes in its relatively small fleet—was barely known outside the aviation industry. Still, it was well run. Profits and revenue were steadily growing. And it paid its bills.
In San Francisco, Albert Schwabacher agreed to consider underwriting TIA’s public offering. But after careful consideration, he finally told Mason, “Well, George, probably not.”
Mason hated bringing such bad news, but Kirk seemed indifferent. He said that another brokerage was interested, too. Mason studied Kirk’s poker face. Not a clue. He was pretty sure that claim was an exaggeration. Nonetheless, Mason seized the opening and rushed back to gain Schwabacher’s hasty reconsideration. It worked. In April 1965, TIA stock went on the market.
And investors yawned.
It was, at best, a modest beginning. TIA stock opened at $10.375 per share, dropped to $10, and didn’t move for weeks. In occasional spurts of trading, it sold in a narrow range—up or down no more than a dollar from its original offering.
One of TIA’s earliest investors was a precocious recent high school graduate from Encino named Mike Milken. He was at the time working for an investor before starting college at Berkeley and had met Kirk through business associates of the boy’s family. Milken’s father was a prominent accountant and financial adviser in the San Fernando Valley.5
But what finally started moving the stock were Kirk’s Armenian connections.
Kirk had already been getting a lot of press attention in the pages of Mason’s California Courier. The airline-owning Armenian may as well have owned a fleet of flying carpets. To the Courier’s readers, Kirk was an Armenian celebrity nearly on a par with J. C. Agajanian, the race car owner and designer whose team had two years earlier won its third Indianapolis 500.
Mason promoted TIA stock sales to fellow Armenians he knew through the newspaper. It was as if the entire Armenian community was getting an inside tip about a sure thing. It was hardly that, but favorable word spread. Armenians started buying. After two quarters of sluggish sales, a surge in the third quarter was almost entirely Armenian driven. Stock prices doubled, then tripled. TIA business boomed, making Mason look like a prophet. TIA stocks split two for one. One Armenian farmer from Fresno—who like so many other San Joaquin Valley Armenians invested in Kerkorian’s airline—named a farm he bought with those profits the “TIA Ranch.”
In a matter of months, Kirk had paid off the $2 million bank loan with which he had bought back TIA from Studebaker. Kirk himself was now sitting on stock worth more than $66 million, a vast fortune by any measure. And no one was more surprised than he was.
“I thought after the war, ‘God, if only I could get up to having fifty thousand, that would be great.’ Then it was a hundred thousand. It just kept going,” Kirk would recall.
“A lot of people ask me, ‘Did you have any idea that you would do this?’ The answer is: Absolutely zero!”6
II
The Making of a Billionaire
“When you’re a self-made man you start very early in life . . . You get a drive that’s a little different, maybe a little stronger, than somebody who inherited.”
—Kirk Kerkorian
13
Trouble with Mobsters
December 29, 1966
Las Vegas, Nevada
On a chill winter day the somber crowd filing into St. John the Baptist Greek Orthodox Church could have just stepped from the pages of a Damon Runyon tale or the cast of Guys and Dolls. It was a mix of swells in silk blend suits, down-and-outs with holes in their soles, reformed rumrunners, unreformed bookies, blackjack dealers, bar girls, celebrities, politicians, mobsters, newspaper reporters, casino owners, cops, and croupiers—in other words, a cross section of Las Vegas society.
With the exception of a couple FBI agents filming the parade of arrivals from an unmarked car across the street, everyone there was paying respects to the memory of one Nicholas Dandolos, better known on the Strip and around the world as the professional gambler “Nick the Greek.”1
Kirk was there, too. He hated funerals, but he had a reserved seat for this one. He was a pallbearer. He also helped pay for the ceremony and the burial plot. A lot of people had chipped in to rescue Nick’s earthly remains from a pauper’s grave and provide him a royal send-off.
Years earlier, long before the massive heart attack that killed him at age eighty-three, Nick Dandolos had gone bust. It was a familiar end for lifelong gamblers. He died living alone in a small Beverly Hills apartment—the kind of lonely existence in the end that no one plans for or even cares to contemplate. But everyone in the town where he gambled had a soft spot for the old man.
In many ways, Nick the Greek could have been a role model for Kirk. Both men were gentlemen gamblers—suave, gracious, and good-looking. Both were generous tippers. Both faced winning and losing with the same serene demeanor. Both regarded money with a certain indifference. It was a stake, not the measure of a man’s character or genuine worth. Or, as Nick would say whether collecting winnings or shrugging off a loss, “It’s only money.”2
Nick also set an example performing random acts of charity,3 details of which he routinely kept secret. He shared little about his personal life, even with his most trusted friends. No one ever knew where Nick got the millions of dollars he ultimately lost at th
e tables, no one, including the other pallbearers like casino owner Benny Binion. And Binion once asked. “He wouldn’t tell me!”4 Kirk, of course, considered the question impolite.
The standing-room-only crowd of mourners gave proof to the notion that the dearly departed had touched many lives. And over the years, much of his private benevolence had become known. He had funded businesses for hundreds of friends, sent dozens of kids to college, and donated more than half a million dollars to local charities. Everyone remembered how he preached the wisdom of Plato and Aristotle and further endeared himself with good-natured pranks and jokes. “He was a kinky old guy,” recalled Binion with affection. “He’d put a snake in your pocket and ask you for a match.”5
Hank Greenspun, editor and publisher of the Las Vegas Sun and another designated pallbearer, eulogized Nick with soaring oratory as a courageous risk taker comparable, he suggested, to the Founding Fathers. He went on to characterize leaders of the American Revolution as “noble gamblers,” to defend gambling in general as a metaphor for free enterprise, and he called Nick the Greek one of the great assets of postwar Las Vegas.6
According to the publisher, Nick had once been “the reigning king of gamblers.” Now, the king was dead, and his realm was looking for new royalty.
If gambling royalty needed a luxury residence, it was getting a new $25 million palace on the Strip. Nineteen sixty-six was the year that Caesars Palace moved from the drawing boards to its construction site on Kirk’s property. Work started with plenty of naysayers critical of its projected daily overhead ($40,000), its debt load, its location, and its design. Its unprecedented operating costs meant that Caesars would have to attract the highest of high rollers, the biggest of big players from far and wide and definitely from out of town. It could not expect to survive on local action or the nickel slot players rolling in on a Greyhound.
The Gambler Page 10