During a telephone interview some years ago with the late Frank Rosenthal, I casually referred to the reputed organized crime associate by his nickname, “Lefty.”
At the time, Rosenthal was facing a 1987 hearing by Nevada gaming regulators over his impending inclusion on the List of Excluded Persons – frequently referred to as Nevada’s Black Book. The line went silent.
After a few seconds, Rosenthal calmly – but sternly – said, “Don’t ever call me Lefty.” I could feel the chill in his voice. Even with Rosenthal, the inspiration behind Robert De Niro’s Sam “Ace” Rothstein character in the 1995 Martin Scorsese film Casino, sitting almost 3,000 miles away in Florida, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.
Coincidently, I interviewed De Niro in 2012 at Caesars Palace before the opening of the property’s Nobu Hotel Tower. (De Niro is a shareholder in Nobu Hospitality.)
Talk about coming full circle.
That said, don’t for one minute believe reporting on the gaming industry is all about mobsters and celebrities. Far from it. Gaming is high-finance, economics, politics, development, entertainment, and personalities – all rolled into one.
I started covering the gaming industry when there wasn’t much to it besides Nevada and Atlantic City. In 1989, when the old west town of Deadwood, South Dakota legalized small stakes gaming to drive tourism, an idea was born. Soon, riverboat casinos popped up in Iowa and the casino industry began to spread.
American Indian casinos started to sprout up after passage of the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, but I dare to say the 1998 approval of California’s Proposition 5 – which specified the terms and conditions of compacts between state and Indian tribes – exploded the market.
Gaming is one of the most fascinating topics for a journalist to write about. There are a wealth of stories and subjects.
For me, it’s time to get off the sidelines and back into the game. There are still reporters’ notebooks with a lot of empty pages to fill, and there is a lot of typing left in these fingers.
To some folks, 26 months might seem like an eternity. I don’t believe so. I’ve been gone from day-to-day coverage of the casino industry since leaving the Las Vegas Review-Journal in March 2016, but I was never far from the action.
Thanks to CDC Gaming, I was able to write a few commentaries here and there while I dabbled in the legal and corporate worlds. The positive and supportive comments in emails and on social media from many of you since the announcement of my appointment by CDC on Tuesday morning have been taken to heart.
Much has changed in the gaming community in a little more than two years.
Steve Wynn has departed the industry, chased out by a growing sexual harassment scandal. Equipment giant Scientific Games is now on its third CEO. The regional gaming market is dominated by three companies – Penn National, Boyd Gaming and Eldorado Resorts. And there are now three gaming industry-focused real estate investment trusts.
Last week’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, which opened the door nationwide to legalized sports betting, sucked all the air out of the room, and there’s a lot more on this issue to come.
Then again, some things never change.
The decade-old gaming debate in Japan continues. The country’s leaders are still attempting to determine the structure for an integrated resort market in its major cities, one that analysts believe will rival Macau and Singapore once it’s established. But the notion that casino taxes would fund necessary infrastructure improvements for the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics is off the board.
Meanwhile, online gaming continues to thrive in Europe, while in the U.S., a potential national Internet gaming network is still restricted to Nevada, New Jersey and Delaware. The off-the-charts revenue projections made a decade ago have been thrown out with yesterday’s trash.
It will be fascinating to cover how sports betting unfolds nationwide over the next 12 to 18 months. Some 20 states are currently in various stages of either adding regulations or outright approving sports gambling legislation.
Atlantic City casinos and New Jersey’s Monmouth Park Racetrack appear ready to launch sports betting facilities as soon as state regulators give the go-ahead. But one insider tells me Delaware’s racetracks, which have been legally able to offer football parlay cards – the state was one of four exempted under the now unconstitutional Professional Amateur Sports Protection Act – has the infrastructure in place and could be the first to punch the ticket.
I’m ready for the ride to begin.
Howard Stutz is the executive editor of CDC Gaming. He can be reached at hstutz@cdcgamingreports.com. Follow @howardstutz on Twitter.
