West of Denver is a city called Las Vegas. But in Christina Binkley’s telling, Las Vegas is not so much a city of the American West as it is a state of mind, a Disneyland of the desert.
Binkley, who has covered Las Vegas for more than a decade for The Wall Street Journal, has not written a chronological history of a geographic locale that rose from vast emptiness. Instead, she has written a glitzy account consisting of 28 short chapters that fail to follow chronology or any other discernible plan as they focus, alternately, on the three men named in the book’s subtitle.
Steve Wynn is the most flamboyant by a long shot. Now in his mid-60s, he began transforming the city 20 years ago with the construction of gambling resorts with such names as the Bellagio, the Mirage and Wynn Las Vegas. But his seemingly impractical vision for what today is called Sin City dates back to the mid-1960s, when he moved to the Nevada desert with his wife, Elaine, their then-infant daughter, and almost no money.
After becoming an entrepreneur the hard way — by trial and error — Wynn demonstrated that persistence sometimes pays off, big- time. Today, rolling in money beyond the understanding of most mortals, it seems as if everything Wynn does revolves around increasing his name recognition and feeding his ego.
Although Binkley suggests Wynn might be a suitable subject for pity because of his progressive eye disease that has gradually led to blindness, on almost every page, he comes across as piggish and therefore thoroughly objectionable.
Kirk Kerkorian, in his ninth decade of life, is so wealthy from so many ventures that his wealth is probably impossible to document or to fathom. His personal wealth is quite likely larger than Wynn’s.
Unlike Wynn, though, Kerkorian comes across as an understated, nearly humble, gentleman. He owns probably half of the gambling-musical entertainment-shopping-eating strip that makes Las Vegas notorious. Kerkorian apparently cares little about living the high life himself. Instead, he cares about doing deals — big deals that involve buying and selling empty lots, as well as buying and selling casinos already on the lots.
Gary Loveman of Harrah’s Entertainment Inc. is a former Harvard University economics professor with a Ph.D. who unexpectedly got hired by a casino company while in his 30s and just kept advancing to the top of the corporation.
Never comfortable in the Las Vegas scene, he continued commuting to Boston to see his wife and children. Perhaps because of his lack of comfort with the Las Vegas scene, Loveman calculated, thinking like a Ph.D. economist, how average folks in small towns spread across the nation could be induced to gamble away their money — not only during trips to Las Vegas subsidized by the casinos, but also in newly built meccas, such as Tunica, a bit across the Mississippi state line from Memphis, Tenn.
Binkley is a savvy, observant reporter, so the anecdotes about the three men, plus their mentors, associates, underlings and relatives, keep coming. The pace and the atmosphere of the book are dizzying, perhaps much like Las Vegas feels to the millions of visitors each year.
For readers who care little about the getting and spending habits of Wynn, Kerkorian and Loveman, the book contains a few serious journalistic (that is, non-gossipy) mind-boggling chapters about the business of gambling across the United States and within other nations. Some of that business involves personal addictions, ethically questionable corporate deals and outright thuggery. For readers overdosing on the gossip provided by Binkley in most chapters, skipping to Chapters 19 and 20 is the cure.
Besides the extensive statistics about gambling’s reach shared by Binkley, the truisms abound. Binkley states what everybody “knows” but that determined amateur gamblers want to forget: “Casinos do not gamble — the odds are always on their side. Whether it’s the programming inside a slot machine or the payout table for blackjack, a casino sets the percentages that result in its profits. The more you gamble in a casino, the more you lose. This is why casinos try to keep customers around longer.”
Nonfiction
Winner Takes All: Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman, and the Race to Own Las Vegas, by Christina Binkley, $25.95
Steve Weinberg is a freelance writer in Columbia, Mo.
