Mike Smith’s road to the Strip construction pantheon started humbly

Wednesday, July 31, 2024 4:44 PM
Photo:  John L. Smith for CDC Gaming
  • Commercial Casinos
  • John L. Smith, CDC Gaming

First in a series.

Although you might not recognize his common name, casino-construction superintendent Mike Smith carved out a legend in his industry right on the Las Vegas Strip. But he’s the first to tell you that there was a time when he couldn’t imagine building even one megaresort on the Boulevard, much less three.

All that would come long after the Reno-born Smith, now 88, first picked up the tools of the building trade and went to work for his father’s company, W.H. Wine Construction. Smith’s backstory is instructive; it not only says a lot about him personally, but it also reveals something about the largely unheralded people responsible for the growth of Las Vegas. Not to mention all the Vegas-lookalikes, from Native American sovereign lands to audacious Macau and the United Arab Emirates.

More interested in boxing than books as a student at the University of Nevada — “I was a little on the feisty side when I was younger,” he says — Mike decided to try his hand at construction and asked his father for help. M.L. “Smitty” Smith’s company was successful, building commercial and residential projects, but Mike didn’t begin anywhere near the front office.

“My dad said to me, ‘Okay, son, if you want to learn the construction business and you want to learn it from me, you’ll be learning it from the ground up – and these are the tools for the ground,’” Smith recalls. “He handed me a pick and a shovel and that’s where I started.”

He also entered the Carpenters Union Local 971 apprenticeship program, an association he would maintain for more than a half-century. When construction jobs dwindled in Reno and his father closed the company, Mike moved to other contractors and added to his growing skill set. That independent streak served him well.

“I didn’t want to be a tagalong son,” he says. “So I worked for other companies and slowly but surely, I got a reputation of being a good foreman. Most of my work was in concrete. I was known as a good concrete foreman.”

That’s how he met Lud Corrao of Corrao Construction, a Reno contractor who teamed up in the early 1970s with architect Tony Marnell to design and build some of Las Vegas’ iconic hotel-casinos. Marnell Corrao Associates is the casino industry’s oldest design-build firm.

As Smith gained experience, he earned Corrao’s trust. He helped build the Reno Sands and was the superintendent of the Colonial Hotel there.

Reno was growing, but not nearly as fast as Las Vegas. When Corrao opened a Las Vegas office, Smith’s phone began to ring. He was called in to supervise the concrete construction on the Sam’s Town bowling center on Boulder Highway and ended up completing the buildout, proving he could “do the whole schmear,” as he puts it.

Following the deadly fires at the MGM Grand Hotel on Nov. 21, 1980, and Las Vegas Hilton fire 90 days later, Smith was part of a Marnell Corrao outfit that worked to retrofit hotels across Las Vegas. “We retrofit a whole bunch of little properties downtown and on the Strip,” he says.

Corrao suffered a heart attack in the early 1980s and turned over the daily operation of the company to Marnell on two conditions, as Smith recalls it. First, the Corrao name would live on and second, the company would run as its proud and respected founder believed it should. Of key importance: “letting the superintendent have the full call, make the schedule, and the calls about … who they were going to use as subs (subcontractors.) And Tony did that for a long, long time.

“At one point, Tony said, ‘Mike, we’re kind of tired of flying you back and forth. Would you move to Las Vegas? And I told my wife Karren, ‘Let’s be close to your family for a change instead of mine.’”

They would remain in Las Vegas for the next 18 years, during some of the biggest construction moments in Las Vegas history. Marnell Corrao was expanding its reach and emerging as a leader in casino design and development and Mike Smith was there to help make it happen.

He’d come a long way from his pick-and-shovel days and found himself in the heart of the action on the Strip.

Editor’s note: Mike Smith and the author John L. Smith are not related.