Prologue
ACCORDING TO LEGEND, proceeds from a Chinese lottery game called Pak Kop Piu, which translates to white pigeon ticket, financed construction of the Great Wall in the third century B.C. The Chinese who immigrated to the United States in the mid-19th century to work in the gold and silver mines and labor on railroad construction crews brought with them the ancient lottery. Though it was against the law in most parts of this country, the game was more or less tolerated as long as the Chinese kept it in their part of town.
During the Great Depression, when traditional jobs were difficult (if not impossible) to find, Warren Vogel, an American of Scandinavian descent, kept the wolves away from his door by operating a game patterned after the Chinese lottery. As all forms of gambling were illegal in Montana, where Warren was born and raised and lived, he ran his lottery clandestinely in the back rooms of grocery and hardware stores. Vogel moved the game frequently from town to town, most of the time managing to stay just a step or two ahead of the law.
When he took his game to Great Falls, Warren met and fell in love with Miriam, a beautiful dark-haired waitress who worked in the coffee shop next door to the town’s only movie theater. They married within the month, just before he moved the lottery to Billings. In a span of two years, Vogel’s wife gave birth to two daughters—Nightingayle and Robyn.
Gambling was legalized in Nevada on March 21, 1931, the same day Warren and Miriam’s son Byrd was born. In May 1936, tired of continual harassment by the police in Montana, Warren loaded his family, lottery equipment, and crew on a bus headed toward Reno. When he arrived in the town that boasts of being The Biggest Little City in the World, he was astonished to learn the gambling bill enacted by the Nevada legislature did not include lotteries. They were, in fact, specifically excluded.
However, a game alternately called keno or beano was among the various games enumerated on the legislation that legalized gambling in the state. The name keno was derived from the Latin word for five, the number of squares in each dimension of the game’s playing grid; beano, from the beans used for markers. That game—which is now called bingo—had been used to raise money for churches and charitable organizations and therefore was considered to be one of the more innocuous forms of gambling.
Vogel perceived a few similarities between his lottery and keno, though the two games are, in actuality, quite different. He set out to befuddle and bribe venal gaming officials into concurring his lottery was merely a variation of the legalized game. Vogel’s ploy was successful. With a little semantic sleight-of-hand and a number of under-the-table payments, the lottery he brought to Nevada was reborn as racehorse keno, and Vogel was able to open his game legitimately.
Eventually, the unnecessary word racehorse was dropped and today the lottery, which can be found in virtually every casino in the state, is known simply as keno. A few traces of the racehorse designation still remain, however—the most notable of which is that each individual drawing of numbers is still referred to as a race. To this day, lotteries are still illegal in Nevada, but the Nevada Gaming Control Board does not consider keno to be a lottery because of the transparent legal fiction created by Warren Vogel over seventy-five years ago.
Just prior to the start of World War II, Warren moved his family from Reno to Las Vegas and opened a small gambling hall on Fremont Street. In addition to keno, the Byrd Cage Club—eponymously named after Warren’s son—had three poker tables and a dozen five-cent one-armed bandits. Byrd Vogel was a mere twenty-one years old in 1952 when his father passed away after a short bout of influenza and willed the modest establishment to him.
The Byrd Group, as it is now known, grew from that single tiny gambling hall into one of the largest gaming operations in the state of Nevada. The Byrd Group owns two casinos in downtown Las Vegas. One, the Paradise Hotel and Casino, sits on the site of the old Byrd Cage Club and markets extensively to a steady clientele of Asian high rollers who fly in daily to McCarran International Airport on jumbo jets. The second downtown casino, a small grind joint (so named because it grinds away money from the customers a few coins at a time), is frequented mostly by little old ladies visiting Sin City on turnaround bus trips. The Byrd organization bought or built or otherwise acquired one megaresort on the Strip and another in Reno, a locals casino in Henderson, the Mexican-theme Guadalajara hotel and gambling complex on Boulder Highway, and a smaller but equally successful hotel and casino in Laughlin, situated on the banks of the Colorado River.
Byrd Vogel had numerous affairs but never married. He was always too busy building his casino empire to take on the responsibility of a wife. His employees were his surrogate family, and he was their pretend patriarch.
Byrd maintained an open-door policy. His workers knew they could go to him any time of day or night with their joys and woes. He cried with them when they suffered the loss of a loved one. He sent gifts when an employee married or had a baby. He bankrolled college scholarships for any of their offspring who showed promise. And why not? Byrd was making more money than he could spend in a dozen lifetimes.
Byrd’s sister Nightingayle married a motion picture producer and moved to California. His other sister, Robyn, remained in Las Vegas and wed a brawny Irishman named Sean Brendan who worked for Union Pacific Railroad. Sean and Robyn had one son, Marshall. Marshall was orphaned in 1970 at the age of fourteen when, in the same week, his mother died of pneumonia and his father was killed in a train wreck.
Byrd took Marshall under his wings and into his own home, which consisted of a suite of rooms on the top floor of the Paradise Hotel and Casino. He paid for Marshall’s tuition at a Catholic high school. Marshall was tall and agile and big-boned and made the first string of the school’s basketball team.
After school and on weekends and during summer vacations, Byrd taught Marshall the hotel and gaming business from the ground up. Never was any favoritism shown to the boy. He was treated just like every other employee in the Byrd organization.
Marshall was too young to work in the casino itself, so he made beds and cleaned the hotel rooms. He swept the floors. He bussed tables in the restaurant. When he passed the driving test and got his license, Marshall valet-parked cars.
At age twenty-one, Marshall was taught how to deal blackjack. He learned how to be a boxman and a stickman for the game of craps. He spun the roulette and Big 6 wheels. Marshall was especially fond of keno, the game his grandfather had adapted from the Chinese lottery.
Most of all, Byrd Vogel instilled into Marshall Brendan the philosophy that all employees should be treated with respect, from the top echelons of the organization down to the porters who clean and attend the restrooms.
“Your success as the owner of a gambling business depends on the courtesy, productivity, and honesty of each and every one of the people who work for you,” Byrd stated repeatedly. “If any of your employees treat a guest badly, you will be the one who gets the blame and takes the heat. Always be considerate of your employees, and they will repay you with their loyalty.”
For Marshall’s twenty-fifth birthday in 1981, Byrd gave his nephew enough money to open his own hotel and casino. It was time, Byrd decided, for Marshall to leave the nest.
The Flamingo, built by mobster Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, was the first hotel and casino on Las Vegas Boulevard, otherwise known as the Strip. Because of cost overruns that caused problems with his partners, perhaps because of his fiery temper, Siegel was felled by gunfire in his Beverly Hills, California residence. Even without Siegel—or, perhaps, because he was no longer around—the Flamingo became a success. Today, the Strip is lined with hotels and casinos more expansive and ostentatious than even the optimist
ic dreamer Bugsy Siegel could have envisioned.
The Regal Inn was a small hotel and casino. It occupied a good location on a side street, just a short walk from the Strip. Due to poor management, the Regal Inn’s mortgage was in arrears and the property in foreclosure. The building itself was sound enough, but the lack of working capital had taken its toll. Carpets were threadbare. The guest rooms needed painting and refurbishing, and the shabby furniture had to be replaced.
The Gaming Control Board closed down the Regal Inn’s casino because its owners weren’t able to maintain sufficient cash in reserve to meet the Board’s mandated requirements. The bank repossessed the slot machines and sold them at auction. The coffee shop was open for breakfast and lunch only, and then with a very limited menu.
Marshall examined the company’s books and discovered the Regal Inn had one asset its owners had overlooked: contracts with a half dozen airlines to house and feed pilots and flight attendants during their layovers in Las Vegas. He determined the revenue from those contracts was more than enough to cover the hotel’s overhead, if the money were to be prudently applied and not frittered away frivolously or skimmed by dishonest employees.
Marshall Brendan was able to acquire the Regal Inn for a fraction of its appraised value and with a low down payment. He raised operating capital by taking on two partners. One remained in the background as a silent investor. The other, a handsome young man of Italian descent named Paul Carey, who had been one of Marshall’s classmates at the Catholic high school, worked with Marshall in the business.
Marshall’s first task was to build company morale. It had been years since any of the Regal Inn employees had received a raise. They were further disillusioned because of frequent layoffs and cutbacks and the common knowledge the company they had been working for was in serious financial trouble and on the verge of going belly-up.
Marshall held a series of staff meetings, one for each shift, during which he assured the employees their jobs were secure. He gave everyone a five percent raise immediately and told them more increases would be forthcoming when the company started showing a profit. He promised that, whenever possible, he would promote from within. He meticulously wrote down their suggestions, no matter how farfetched or ridiculous they sounded, and implemented all ideas that were feasible and cost-effective.
The entire building was repainted inside and out and recarpeted and otherwise spiffed up. The neon sign was replaced with a larger and flashier one that included a moving message board. The hotel rooms were filled with new furniture and 19-inch color television sets.
The small casino was reopened with thirty-five slot machines of the latest design, three blackjack tables, one craps table, and one roulette table. A keno department was squeezed in, with the seating at the bar doubling as the keno lounge.
Marshall Brendan not only took Boyd Vogel’s indoctrination to heart, he took it a step further. As important as conscientious, loyal employees are to an organization, its customers are even more important, Marshall determined. Without repeat customers casinos cannot survive. He knew that by treating gamblers as the valuable assets they are, he would be able to make a success of the Regal Inn.
Marshall started making significant changes immediately. First, with the coffee shop. He hired an executive chef away from one of the larger Strip hotels. He expanded the coffee shop and remodeled it into a full-fledged restaurant open twenty-four-hours a day. New menus featured USDA Choice steaks, prime rib, and comfort food entrées. He insisted portions were plenteous and the quality of meats, produce, and other provisions second to none. And he set the prices forty percent below his cost. He reasoned that people who came to the restaurant for good, inexpensive food would play the slots or gamble at the tables before or after dining, and the casino profits would more than offset any restaurant losses.
Marshall hired buxom young women as cocktail waitresses and garbed them in revealing costumes. They were instructed to offer free drinks to every player in the casino at least once every fifteen minutes.
He brought in a five-piece band that featured an Irish tenor and three backup singers. The tenor had a marvelous voice and the singers had voluptuous bodies. There was never any charge for the lounge entertainment.
He loosened the slot machines, raised keno payoffs, and liberalized blackjack and craps rules. Marshall wanted to give players a good shot at catching frequent slot jackpots and being able to occasionally walk away from the tables as winners. He knew that even with a low house edge, the casino would still take in more money than it would pay out. It was better, he determined, to win a small percentage of a large number of bets than to win a larger percentage of a small number of bets.
Marshall Brendan’s strategy worked. Within months, the Regal Inn had acquired a following of local gamblers who came for the liberal games, frequent drink comps, good food at bargain-basement prices, and free entertainment. The operation was solidly in the black.
Two years later, El Chollo—a dilapidated fleabag motel located on Las Vegas Boulevard—closed its doors. Although the motel was sitting on a relatively small parcel of land, the lot was sandwiched between two of the largest and most successful casinos on the Strip. When El Chollo was auctioned, Marshall was amazed that the management of the adjoining casinos didn’t even bother to show up, for the property would have enabled them to expand their frontage on the Strip. He picked up the deed to El Chollo for less than half of what he had been willing to spend for it.
Admittedly, several problems came along with the property. First, Marshall had to pay the cost of razing the motel structure. Second, the electric company had an easement on the land, and their high-tension power transmission lines overhead severely curtailed the height to which he could build. But by June 1985, construction was finished on a tiny jewel of a hotel and casino, which he named the Silver Crest.
What the Silver Crest lacked in size it more than made up for in Victorian opulence. It was more reminiscent of an exclusive private club than of a gambling establishment. Gleaming brass. Polished marble. Dark hand-burnished mahogany woodwork.
Valuable stained-glass adorned Silver Crest. Not actual windows—which would be somber when the sun sank behind the mountains to the west—but backlit frescoes, illuminated with fluorescent tubes for round-the-clock viewing. If a person knew where to look, he would discover the artist had slyly included a thinly-disguised image of Marshall Brendan himself. Brendan appeared as a satyr reveling with Rubenesque nudes who bore a striking resemblance to the Silver Crest’s executive secretaries. The artist made a sly statement, but few heard it.
The Silver Crest quickly acquired a well-deserved reputation for fine dining. The coffee shop featured some of the best Chinese food available anywhere. Behind an inconspicuous single door was secreted the gourmet restaurant Marshall’s, where those in the know could experience a gastronomic experience to be treasured.
At Silver Crest, Brendan continued the policies that had made the Regal Inn successful (and which had enabled him to sell the Regal Inn quickly at an enormous profit). Soon, the company’s coffers were overflowing. His partners were ecstatic with the success of the new operation. Expansion of the Silver Crest was impossible, as every square foot of the old motel property was already being utilized, so they pressed Marshall to build a second hotel and casino.
A forty acre parcel was located a few miles west of the Strip in a primarily industrial neighborhood. It was there Brendan chose to build the Gold Crest. A separate partnership was formed, consisting of Brendan, Carey, his silent partner, and three new investors. Brendan remained in control with over fifty percent of the points in the new venture.
The Gold Crest, built in Spanish Mission style, opened its doors in December 1990. It was immensely profitable from day one. Naysayers who had disparaged the concept of a casino located away from the Strip and geared primarily for locals quickly realized the error of their judgment.
The Gold Crest prided itself on offering something for everyone. The
casino had loose slot machines and liberal rules for the table games. Its five restaurants—a coffee shop, steak house, all-you-can-eat buffet, Italian and seafood restaurant, and a snack bar with the best hamburgers and hot dogs in Las Vegas—featured huge portions of great food at modest prices. There was a swimming pool, bowling alley, twin screen movie theater, gift shop, discount liquor store, and even a child care center with free baby-sitting service for the casino’s customers.
In the years that followed, the Gold Crest was often imitated but never equaled. Byrd Vogel expressed pride at the accomplishments of his nephew, but Marshall Brendan humbly gave his uncle most of the credit for his achievements, for teaching him the importance of placing a high value on his employees.
And then came the Blue Hawaii.
One
THE INCIDENT IN CANCUN was the fruition of Michael Kaplan’s most exquisite fantasy and the beginning of his most hideous nightmare.
Some people carry the cause-and-effect theory to a ridiculous extreme, adamantly asserting that a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing will, in some small way, affect the weather in New York City. In Cancun, there was no direct cause and effect, for the impetus was not of Michael’s making—though one can always rationalize that his past actions contributed heavily to the onset, and, consequently influenced the outcome.
What happened in Cancun was a classic example of the Law of Unintended Consequences coming into play. It proved to be a turning point, a pivotal event that would have a profound, paramount, and permanent effect on Michael’s life.
One might argue that because Michael was intimately familiar with the personalities involved and participated in many of the myriad events that preceded and hence molded and shaped the vacation trip, he should have been able to foresee he would have to deal with at least some consequences, though their exact nature and import might have escaped his grasp. But then, hindsight is always one hundred percent accurate, whereas the most minute digressions and deviations in a carefully devised plan can irreparably transform the future. In this case, the wild card—if one must be pinpointed—was an unexpected tropical thunderstorm.
A Time For Us (Michael Kaplan Mysteries) Page 1