Winner Takes All

American journalist Christina Binkley’s non-fiction book Winner Takes All: Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman, and the Race to Own Las Vegas (2008), chronicles the efforts of three men of wildly different temperaments who helped reinvent the city of Las Vegas into a tourist destination filled with megaresorts. Kirkus Reviews calls the book, "A quintessentially American story, full of money, ego, competition, vice, and the stubborn belief that transcendence is just around the next corner, waiting for someone with the vision and guts to grab it."

Before the 1980s, Las Vegas would never be mistaken for a family vacation destination. Although gambling was legal there, American attitudes associated gambling with immorality and organized crime. These associations were not unfounded: high-profile members of the Mafia were stakeholders in nearly all of the big casinos built on the Las Vegas Strip during the 1940s and 1950s. Their ill-gotten funds, combined with legitimate investments from Wall Street—and even the Mormon Church—went toward building the Sahara, the Sands, the Riviera, and the New Frontier, among others. During this period, Las Vegas also became a destination for the showbiz elite, particularly Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, whose lifestyle and high-rolling antics were far removed from the experiences of the everyday American family.

However, by the 1980s, the overall decline of organized crime led to their being displaced in Las Vegas by corporate interests that sought to expand Las Vegas's appeal to the American family. It was a tall order: thanks to decades of Mafia influence along with works of popular culture like Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the city had an image of seediness and crime. This wasn't simply an issue of optics; at that time, Nevada ranked first in the country in teenage suicides and per capita alcohol consumption.



Among those eager to rehabilitate Las Vegas's image was Steve Wynn. Born in 1942 in New Haven, Connecticut, Wynn left Yale Law School in 1963 after his father died, ironically leaving behind $350,000 in gambling debts. Wynn took over his father's bingo parlor chain, showing a natural talent for business. Having paid off his father's debts and amassed a small fortune for himself, Wynn relocated with his family to Las Vegas in 1967. Over the next decade, Wynn made connections with influential bankers who assisted him in a number of lucrative land deals. By 1971, he had a controlling interest in the Golden Nugget, one of the city's oldest and most iconic casinos.

In 1989, Wynn had a chance to design and construct a casino from the ground up. Financed with $630 million with the help of the notorious junk-bond financier Michael Milken, the Polynesian-themed Mirage was unlike any casino before it. Rather than target the kind of hardened gamblers Las Vegas traditionally attracted, the Mirage was designed to be a full-service resort catering to average American families and their children. The success of the Mirage led to the construction of ever-more opulent resorts that forever altered the image of Las Vegas from "Sin City" to "family-fun."

Among those who followed Wynn's lead in the construction of family-friendly destination resorts was Kirk Kerkorian. The son of Armenian immigrants, Kerkorian had had a long and extremely lucrative career as a developer and investor. In addition to owning and operating a number of Las Vegas casinos since the 1960s, Kerkorian was the owner of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie studio. In 1993, he opened the MGM Grand, which at the time was the largest hotel complex in the world with 6,852 rooms.



Nevertheless, while Kerkorian managed his money wisely and gave much of his excess wealth to charity, Binkley paints Wynn as Kerkorian's polar opposite. Among Wynn's reckless purchases was a $7.3 million sculpture by Alberto Giacometti that he used as a doorstop. Elsewhere, he squandered his fortune on private jets and cosmetic surgery. He bought antique books by Dante and replaced their pages with Styrofoam, presumably to make them lighter and easier to transport. His wasteful ways caught up to him in 2000 when he was forced to sell Mirage Resorts to his nemesis Kerkorian, in an act so devastating to the Wynns that his wife characterized it, without irony, as being "like 9/11."

Finally, Binkley discusses the career of Gary Loveman, another man she credits with reinventing Las Vegas. A clean-living, mild-mannered economics professor at Harvard, Loveman relocated to Las Vegas in 1991 to serve as a consultant for Harrah's Entertainment. There, he developed complex strategies around customer loyalty that were put into use not just by the casino industry but also by huge corporations such as McDonald's, Disney, and American Airlines. After becoming Harrah's Chief Operating Officer in 1998, Loveman instituted complex data initiatives that analyzed customers' travel and spending habits. Through his analysis, he precipitated a sea change in how casinos target customers. Rather than try to attract the big whale high rollers, Loveman determined that the most profitable casino customers are low-risk slot players.

Winner Takes All is both a history lesson and a profile of wildly successful American business titans.