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In November 1988, Sheldon Adelson came to Las Vegas for Comdex, the computer expo so large that it needed eight locations throughout the city to house its 1.75 million square feet of exhibits and 100,000 attendees. Adelson had started the convention, whose name was a contraction of Computer Dealers Exposition, in 1979, when fewer than 4,000 computer suppliers and dealers met at the MGM Grand. By the mid-1980s, Comdex had grown into an institution, with three shows held annually. To accommodate his flagship Las Vegas show, Adelson built the West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, donating the building to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
By 1988, Interface was producing several Vegas conventions, including the Cinetex film festival, which debuted that year. Adelson estimated that his company was responsible for 8 percent of Las Vegas convention traffic each year. The company also boasted a travel division, New England’s largest tour operator, which tied into Adelson’s plans to bring tour and junket groups from the region.
The Interface chairman and his associates had scrutinized the Sands over the previous months, and they had developed a plan. Adelson forecast a multi-stage expansion project, with the first phase including a 1,300-room tower, expanded casino, and new restaurants, as well as a large convention center. This was larger than the 1,000 new rooms Adelson had suggested in April, evidence of his growing bullishness.
“I like it more and more each time I’m here,” Adelson explained. “It’s a fabulous property and we have a lot of ideas.”
The growth of Comdex was the driving factor in Adelson deciding to add a major convention center to the Sands. If he was able to replicate his success in building the West Hall (construction was completed in 71 days), he would only have to schedule two venues for Comdex’s 1989 show.
Adelson and Interface, while they would own the Sands, would not be operating it. For that they turned to flamboyant veteran hotelier Henri Lewin. Having fled Nazi Germany as a teenager, Lewin was interred in both a concentration camp and Japanese POW camp before arriving in San Francisco in 1947. After rising to a leadership position at the San Francisco Hilton, Lewin moved to Las Vegas to oversee Hilton’s Nevada operations, which included the Hilton and Flamingo Hilton in Las Vegas as well as the Reno Hilton. Lewin, who styled himself as “Mr. Hotel” and whose business cards read “Henri Lewin, Millionaire,” had been one of the highest-profile leaders in Nevada gaming before his 1985 departure from Hilton. He left shortly after the company was denied a gaming license in New Jersey due to allegations about Hilton’s associations with attorney Sidney Korshak and allegations that Lewin had acted improperly while running the San Francisco Hilton. So, a few months after the license denial, Lewin stepped down from Hilton to form Aristocrat Hotels, a management company. Adelson was banking on Lewin to revive the Sands. And Lewin did not lack confidence.
“Running a hotel is what I do best,” Lewin said in an interview. “The Sands hasn’t done well because it hasn’t had good management. That will now change. I can give you the finest restaurant, but it is nothing without a good chef. One man makes a difference, and that’s what I plan to do.”
Lewin planned to transform the Sands into the first five-star hotel in Las Vegas. With characteristic modesty, he even took a shot at the game-changing resort then under construction across the street.
“I will tell Steve Wynn that if people have trouble finding his new hotel on the Strip,” he told the Review-Journal, “then he has my permission to say it is right across from the Sands.”
Lewin’s confidence didn’t prevent problems from arising during the licensing process. The applicants’ hearing, originally scheduled for January, was pushed back while regulators evaluated “new information” that had emerged. Former Nevada governor Bob List, representing Interface and Aristocrat, said that the delay was merely a temporary setback, some “loose ends” that had yet to be tied up.
But things were not so easily resolved. In a February 8, 1989 session that stretched late into the night, Gaming Control Board members struggled to make a recommendation about the suitability of Interface and Aristocrat. Board members looked askance at the associations Irwin Chafetz, a 14.7 percent owner of Interface, allegedly had with the owner of a group of gay bars that may have been friendly with mobsters.
The allegations against Lewin were more serious. He had reportedly made unwanted sexual advances on a cocktail waitress in his office at the Hilton. Though he denied the charge, Lewin was involved in an out-of-court settlement. At 2:39 a.m., the hearing—now in its eleventh hour—ended with the Board unanimously recommending that Lewin be denied a gaming license. Gaming Control Board Chairman Bill Bible said that the board had serious doubts about Lewin’s credibility. Adelson, who had earlier suggested he might cancel his purchase of the Sands if Lewin was denied a license, stood by the hotelier.
“I am still willing to bet my $100 million on Mr. Lewin,” Adelson said.
Two weeks later, the Gaming Commission met to decide the fate of the Sands applicants. The Board had recommended against licensing Lewin and Paul Klapper of Aristocrat, although Lewin’s son Larry and Ken Scholl were okayed to manage the Sands. The Board recommended Interface for licensing as owners, with the caveat that Chafetz receive a limited two-year license.
After a great deal of deliberation, Lewin was unanimously approved for his own two-year, limited license. The hospitality veteran was not to be involved with the direct operation of the resort and was forbidden from being involved in personnel matters below the level of department heads.
Adelson was now ready to take possession of the casino and begin a $150 million expansion project that would bring the hotel up to 2,000 rooms and add 45,000 square feet of casino space and a million-square-foot convention center that would be even bigger than the Las Vegas Convention Center. Lewin was front and center when Interface officially assumed control of the Sands in May, placing himself at the center of the new executive team and even singing a few bars of “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”
In his opening press conference, Lewin let slip a few more details about the upcoming changes to the Sands: The new hotel tower would be 42 stories, the showroom’s size would be doubled, and a new culinary concept would be unveiled: 11 “mini-food outlets surrounding a theater in the round.”
One of Adelson’s first hires in Las Vegas was a familiar face. Attorney Shelley Berkley had practically grown up at the Sands; her father, George Levine, had moved the family across the country before taking a job as a waiter at the Sands’ Garden Room. He eventually rose through the ranks to become the maître d’ of the Copa Room, one of the most coveted jobs in town. In addition to spending time with her father at work and celebrating a series of family milestones there, Berkley worked her way through UNLV as a weekend brunch server. Now, she was back as the director of government and legal affairs. Her father was still working at the Copa.
Once more, a new owner was taking the Sands’ helm. This time, it wasn’t Mexican high rollers or the tried-and-true Summa management that would save the resort, but conventioneers. As skyscrapers were rising up and down the Strip, getting bigger seemed to be the only way the Sands could survive.
***
THE FIRST ORDER OF business, as far as new owner Sheldon Adelson was concerned, was to get the convention center up and running. This was the keystone to the new Sands that he foresaw, the engine that would power Henri Lewin’s five-star aspirations.
Despite all the business Adelson had brought to Las Vegas in the decade since the first Comdex, not everyone in town welcomed him. While no one denied that Adelson’s conventions filled rooms, they complained that convention visitors did not gamble. One set of numbers showed that gaming revenues fell by as much as one-third during Comdex.
Michael Gaughan, owner of the Gold Coast and Barbary Coast casinos, made a pointed comment when Adelson joined the owners club.
“He’s going to find out how bad his conventions are for business.”
Adelson, however, was convinced that more convention space was essential to Las Vegas. After all, how else would casinos fill the 12,000 rooms that were due to be built soon? The New Englander thought enough of Las Vegas and the Sands that, within a month of closing on the casino, he had shifted his permanent address to Nevada. He was eager to prove his worth to his new neighbors, promising to work with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and other resort owners to keep rooms filled.
Hiring Lewin to oversee a hotel geared to conventions made sense since the Hilton had one of the most robust convention programs in town. Lewin’s big personality asserted itself almost at once. As negotiations between the Culinary Union and other hotels broke down and a strike seemed imminent, he vowed that there would never be a strike at the Sands—before even discussing contracts with the union. He then renamed the Grand Ballroom—which had been hosting headline acts too big for the Copa—Henri’s Celebrity Theater. The deli was reorganized to serve classic Lower East Side fare and renamed David Papchen’s after his father. The Sands gift shop soon stocked Lewin’s autobiography, displayed near a sign advising that the executive would be happy to autograph any copies.
Lewin was attentive to criticism, responding to an open letter published in the Review-Journal by entertainment columnist Don Usherson complaining about the layout of the Winners Circle Lounge by commissioning a redesign of that space. Lewin’s magnanimity had that columnist, at least, eating out of his hand; Usherson posted favorable notices about Lewin’s two entertainment coups, bringing in Sid and Marty Krofft’s 100-puppet spectacular “Comedy Kings” to the Copa Room to replace the sputtering revue “Beach Blanket Babylon,” and returning Broadway to the Strip by placing “Ain’t Misbehavin’” in Henri’s Celebrity Theater.
Whether taking out a quarter-page ad to personally welcome Steve Wynn’s Mirage to the Strip (and to tout the Sands’ expansion) or announcing to the media that, henceforth, all bread in the Regency Room would be served in monogrammed paper bags to ensure that they reached guests with the optimal moisture, Lewin proved adept at making news.
With construction on the convention center underway, Lewin’s team tweaked the Sands’ casino marketing, perhaps self-conscious about the charge that Adelson’s conventions produced anemic gaming results. The “Never Ending Slot Tournament” was held every day, with contests competing for a grand prize that would allow them a free pull, with maximum coins in, on every slot machine in the Sands. Lewin promoted the new tournament with a “never-ending buffet.
The handwriting may have been on the wall when Lewin’s press notices petered out in the fall of 1989. On January 30, 1990, Adelson fired Lewin, dismissing the Aristocrat Hotels team. No reason was given for the termination, but, coming two months after The Mirage’s opening, some speculated that the Sands’ numbers were disappointing. Lewin’s replacement as president, Al Benedict, assumed his responsibilities that evening. Benedict, formerly of the MGM Grand, brought Morris Yeager to run the casino and Bernie Rothkopf to serve as executive vice president.
Benedict’s team made only minor changes to Sands operations—the most famous of which might have been catering to locals by bringing back, after a seven-year absence, the weekend champagne brunch. Perhaps mindful of the example of his predecessor, or simply his inborn good sense, Benedict did not court the media as flamboyantly as Lewin.
But Benedict’s regime lasted only until August, when Adelson confirmed reports that he would be changing managers again. He denied a local television station’s report that his casino was about to declare bankruptcy and that the financing for its new tower had collapsed. Benedict agreed to stay on until his successor was in place, while the local media reported the talks were underway for Benedict to buy the Sands while Adelson retained control of the under-construction convention center.
Adelson announced that he was taking a more active role in the management of the Sands, taking over as chief executive officer and bringing in Steve Norton, who had spent more than 20 years managing casinos for Resorts International in the Bahamas and Atlantic City, as acting president and chief operating officer.
Norton had gotten to know Adelson’s Interface partners while working with travel agencies and packagers in the Bahamas. When Donald Trump bought Resorts International and then sold the company to Merv Griffin (keeping the under-construction Taj Mahal for himself), Norton resigned. But Norton’s contract, with a year remaining, prevented him for working in Atlantic City, or the states where he had helped riverboats become legal. So he headed west to Las Vegas.
“The Mirage had just opened, with four times our rooms and a volcano out front,” Norton later recalled. “Our showroom was next to nothing, and we didn’t have much outside of a good slot tournament. My goal when I got there was to reduce property costs, because we were running in the red,” Norton said.
But the Sands’ owner already had a plan. Denying reports that he was seeking a quick exit, Adelson revealed that trade show bookings for the convention center—whose first phase wouldn’t open until November—were already five to six times greater than his initial expectations. The trade show veteran was now planning two new towers to total 2,500 new rooms, and was seeking even more financing. As always, he was happy to demonstrate, with charts and graphs, why conventions were going to be the next big thing in Las Vegas, making Sunday through Thursday as profitable as the weekend. With as many as 30 trade shows slated for 1991 and another 50 possible in 1992, Adelson’s bet on business travel was about to pay off.
***
LAS VEGAS CASINO OPERATORS had first flirted with the convention business in a major way after the disappointing summer of 1955. But, as the Sands Expo and Convention Center rose from the ground behind the Sands, alarm bells went off on the Strip. To date, casinos had treated meetings as a stopgap that kept hotels full when gamblers were scarce, and tended to work cooperatively, deferring to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority when it came to the big shows.
Now, Sheldon Adelson’s new convention center threatened the status quo. The Las Vegas Convention Center existed to serve the casinos, and the convention business was seen as moderately profitable at best. A public-private partnership, the Convention Center contracted out a range of services, from providing flowers to maintenance. The Sands Expo Center planned to operate them in-house, with all profits flowing only to it.
The Convention Center’s focus on room occupancy over convention hall profitability made sense, given that it was mostly funded by room taxes, and empty rooms didn’t yield taxes. But the Sands was in business to make money for itself. So, some feared a new era of competition for mega-shows like Comdex that could upset everything the LVCVA had built over the previous three decades. Already, rival casinos were intimating that, in periods of heavy demand, they wouldn’t make available blocks of rooms available to Sands convention-goers, which the new Expo Center would desperately need before its own room expansion came online.
Steve Norton even suggested something daring.
“What we’re going to do here,” he told the media in September, as the Expo Center was nearing completion, “is have the first Nevada operation where the catering department may be making more than the casino.”
With a small casino and good margins on catering, it wasn’t as crazy as it sounded.
The first phase of the Expo Center, with 576,000 square feet of space in three massive halls, opened just in time for Comdex 1990, whose 110,000 delegates filled up most of Las Vegas’s 74,000 hotel rooms from November 12 to 16.
Adelson, exultant that it had taken only eight months to build the convention center, promised to add another 800,000 square feet to the complex within three years, making it the largest single-level convention facility in the United States.
Bringing the 170,000 Comdex delegates to Las Vegas was one thing; finding them rooms was another. With other casino owners not rolling out the red carpet for conventioneers, Adelson had a simple task for Norton.
“You know these guys—you get the rooms.”
Norton began working the phones, offering a deal: Casinos could triple their typical mid-week room rate (usually around $50), cutting in the Sands for a 10 percent commission, which would cover the cost of bus transportation for Comdex delegates to all of the various exhibits, meetings, and banquets that would be held at the Hilton, Bally,’s Caesars, and the Las Vegas Convention Center, along with the Sands Expo. The hotels would make money renting those spaces and catering functions, with Norton promising that their gourmet restaurants would be full of paying (not comp) customers all week.
“You might want to ask a few of your dealers to stay home that week,” Norton concluded, “but you’ll make plenty on the rooms and dining.”
Booking attendees into Downtown hotels and even casinos well off the Strip, Norton was able to find rooms for everyone, with all major Strip properties, except Circus Circus, committing most of their rooms. The first day of the show, Circus Circus CEO Bill Bennett, hearing reports of hundreds of convention-goers at Circus Circus and Excalibur, called Norton.
“Can you send us some of those free buses?” he asked.
The experience opened eyes. Here was a way to turn loss leaders into profit centers. Though they were initially resistant, most of the Strip came around to Adelson’s point of view and relying on business travelers to buoy profits became the “conventional” wisdom in Las Vegas.
The success of the Expo Center didn’t lead to stability in the Sands’ executive offices. Norton, who taken on the job as a consultant, continued to advise on riverboat legislation in three states. He departed in May 1991 (“before he could fire me,” he later quipped) to serve as president of the Gold River casino in Laughlin before becoming president of Argosy Gaming, which operated five casinos in the Midwest and South.
Though Adelson took a larger role in planning the resort’s expansion, he lured Phil Bryan from Reno’s Peppermill Hotel to serve as the Sands’ full-time president in January 1992. This was a new role expressly created for him. But Bryan lasted scarcely two months in the role before resigning. The longtime gaming executive professed to have had no disagreements with Adelson. Instead, he was leaving because of his growing commitment to his Buddhist faith. He would be leaving Las Vegas for a religious retreat in either Northern California or New York, after which he would pledge himself to environmental concerns.
Bryan’s departure opened the door to speculation about the Sands’ future. Former Harrah’s executive Richard Goeglein was rumored to either be auditioning for Bryan’s job or to be putting together a group that would buy the Sands from Adelson. Some thought that Adelson considered the casino resort itself a distraction and would welcome the chance to focus on the Expo Center, which would not be part of the sale. Months later, though, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority was exploring the opposite scenario, putting together a master plan that weighed the possibilities of buying the Sands Expo Center.
Nothing came of that idea, but ground hadn’t been broken on the new hotel tower. Adelson admitted in November 1992 that money was not as easy to come by as it had been a few years earlier.
“The financing market for casinos is not good now,” he explained. “If I could raise the money, I would build the tower. But lenders are concerned about overbuilding. They are watching MGM, Luxor, and Treasure Island.” These megaresorts might expand the market—or they might glut it (soon, it was apparent that it was the former). Lenders were waiting to see how Las Vegas responded to these massive projects before financing anything new. Until then, it looked like a retheming and expansion of the casino for $15 million was the most that could be done.
So the Sands spent the next year in a holding pattern, although the growth of conventions in Las Vegas vindicated Adelson’s faith in business travel. In the three years since he bought the Sands, annual convention revenues grew by almost 25 percent, from $1.5 billion to nearly $2 billion. By now, public opinion in Las Vegas had shifted; conventioneers might not gamble extravagantly, but they were, overall, good for business. “We are inclined to believe,” a Review-Journal editorial said in October 1993, “that a Las Vegas which could bill itself as the ‘convention capital of the world’ would profit handsomely in the long run.” So much so that the LVCVA should seriously consider Adelson’s offer to double the size of his Expo Center before selling it to the convention authority for $150 million, instead of pursuing its own growth plan, which would take 15 years to reach fruition. Adelson promised to expand the Sands Expo in 14 months.
The LVCVA had not responded to Adelson’s proposal when, in March 1994, he announced plans to expand the Sands Expo and Convention Center to 1.15 million square feet. By September, with the second phase nearing completion, Adelson came close to taking his offer to the LVCVA off the table.
“I don’t think I want to sell it to them now,” he said. “I’m making too much money.” Demand was so high that he was charging up to three times more for convention space than the Convention Center. “I’m making millions of dollars of profit a year.”
Business at the Expo Center was so good that, in February 1995, Adelson sold the Interface Group’s 17 gaming trade shows to Tokyo’s Softbank Corporation for $800 million. As part of the deal, Adelson bought out his erstwhile partners in the Sands, making him the sole owner. He had grown Comdex into a powerhouse—the previous November, it had welcomed nearly 200,000 visitors. Now, he looked to a new future at the Sands.
With Las Vegas growing to accommodate the now-opened Luxor, Treasure Island, and MGM Grand, banks were far more open to lending money for new projects. Then again, a man with $800 million in his pocket didn’t have to worry quite as much about lenders. The long-awaited Sands expansion, it appeared, was now very close on the horizon.
***
ALTHOUGH THE EXPO CENTER got the most headlines, life went on for the rest of the Sands. The Copa Room continued to showcase the Comedy Kings puppet show, although in early May 1990 there was a bit of a rebrand, as the show became “Playboy’s Girls of Rock ‘n’ Roll with the Kroft Comedy Kings.” The bunnies only lasted three months before the leaving the Copa; they were replaced by Melinda, the First Lady of Magic. This was in keeping with the rest of Las Vegas. When Playboy’s rockers joined the Kroft marionettes, outside of Frank Sinatra at Bally’s, Don Rickles at the Golden Nugget, Redd Foxx at the Hacienda, Diana Ross at Caesars Palace, and Wayne Newton at the Hilton, the kind of headline entertainment that had once defined the Sands was gone, with magicians, revues, and tribute artists now dominating Las Vegas. For the next several years, the Sands would alternate between revues in the Copa and headliners like Wayne Newton and Elayne Boosler in the Grand Ballroom, which reverted to its original name before being recast as the Celebrity Theater.
After selling Comdex and assuming sole control of the Sands, Sheldon Adelson mulled the possibilities. With $600 million, he was considering adding 2,500 rooms and a shopping center to the Sands and building a new 3,000-room resort next door or buying an existing property, either in Las Vegas or elsewhere, to serve as a “springboard” for future growth. To put together a comprehensive development plan, he turned not to Las Vegas, but Atlantic City, hiring William P. Weidner, Bradley H. Stone, and Robert G. Goldstein from the Sands Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. The Sands, still owned by the Pratt Hotel Corporation, had long had no connection to the Las Vegas landmark, outside of licensing its name.
Weidner, who had been the president of Pratt Hotel, took that role with Las Vegas Sands, with Stone, the president of the Sands casino itself, stepping in as executive vice president, and Goldstein coming in as senior vice president. In explaining what had lured him from Atlantic City, Weidner said a great deal about the future of the Sands.
“That is arguably the best property in Las Vegas, a very exciting place,” he said. “There are 60 acres right across the Strip from the Mirage and Treasure Island.”
Little more needed to be said. It wasn’t the Sands’ long history that was its biggest attribute, or its casino, its rooms, or even its employees, but its real estate. Certainly, at this point the writing was on the wall.
The plan, as Weidner shared it, was to begin building a 3,000-room hotel tower on one side of the 1.4 million square foot Expo Center and, after its completion 18 months later, add a second one on the footprint of the currently functioning hotel. The resulting 6,000-room hotel would be the world’s largest, wresting the title away from the 5,005-room MGM Grand. A 250,0000square-foot shopping center and huge parking garage were other components of the new Sands.
Las Vegas itself was changing. While in 1989 a revived Sands made some sense, the Sands was no longer competing with the Desert Inn, Frontier, and Riviera, but with megaresorts. The class of ’93 had been successful enough to inspire a new generation: Monte Carlo, Bellagio, New York-New York, and the Stratosphere were already under construction. Casinos of the Sands’ vintage, it was apparent, were living on borrowed time. The Bellagio had already claimed the Dunes. In November 1995, as Adelson’s new team was planning for the future of the Sands, the LVCVA imploded the Landmark to make way for a parking lot.
While it seems obvious in retrospect that the Sands would have to close to make way for the massive resort complex Adelson foresaw, it wasn’t a given. Adelson himself spent $20 million upgrading the Sands in what would be its final years. But in April 1996, concerns that the Sands would soon close—putting 1,200 employees, many of them who had been with the hotel for decades, out of work—began surfacing as the Culinary Union demanded aggressive action to save jobs.
And yet there wasn’t much argument that the Sands’ best days were behind it, particularly compared with its new cross-Strip neighbor, The Mirage. Its oldest hotel wings were 44 years old, relics in a city that prized newness over familiarity. The original Copa was long gone.
On May 16, 1996, it became official: The Sands was going to shut down on June 30, to make way for a $1.5 billion megaresort.
Shelley Berkley, by now a vice president, had perhaps the greatest emotional connection with the Sands among the executive team. She broke the news to Sands employees. Before each shift, she chaired an employee gathering in the Copa, sharing the closing date as well as plans to set up a career transition center to help employees find new jobs. Her father, still working as a maître d’, was in the last group she addressed.
There was a sense of the inevitable.
Jim Chalker, who had been a bellman at the Sands for 25 years, took the news in stride.
“We’ve been expecting it,” he said. “This baby’s 44 years old, and time keeps marching on. This old girl’s been wife, home and mother to me for a long time. Everybody who’s been here a long time will shed some tears but we’ll survive.”
“It has very little to offer customers,” casino shift manager Gary Saul told the Review-Journal. “The carpets are dirty. We only have 700 beat-up rooms. The only reason we get the business we do is the employees. The customers love the dealers. Everybody is on a first-name basis here.”
In the end, Las Vegas wanted 6,000 brand new suites, 200,000 square feet of casino space, 150 shops, 30 restaurants, and more convention space (along with 10,000 new jobs) more than it wanted the old Sands. Regret over the Sands’ demise was tempered by anticipation for what was to come.
True to the extended family that they were, most of the employees remained until the end. As the closing date neared, there was a sense that more than a casino was about to be lost—that a piece of old Las Vegas was disappearing forever.
“I miss most the camaraderie, the friends, the great times, the schmoozing. Now that’s pretty much over,” Don Rickles told the Associated Press.
“It was a very exciting time,” former Copa Girl and current cocktail waitress Jeanie Gardner said of the resort’s glory days. “It’s a shame we’ll never see anything like it again.”
In the meantime, more details about the Sands’ replacement trickled out. The 6,000-room resort would have a Venetian theme, complete with canals and gondolas.
On its last weekend, guests who had last been in the hotel decades earlier came to pay their respects. The last entertainers to perform in the Copa were the Viva Las Vegas afternoon revue and comedian John Pinette; the legendary venue went dark without any special ceremony.
Then it was the final day: Sunday, June 30. Maverick casino owner Bob Stupak, a rare breed in the new Las Vegas for being a true gambler, made the last craps roll. B.J. Mitchell of Seneca, Missouri, was dealt the final hand of blackjack; he drew 21 as did the dealer, who returned his $25 chip before restacking the cards for the final time. A push.
The casino closed on time at 6 p.m. As gaming regulators watched, workers began shutting down slot machines and ushering guests out the doors. With no fanfare, the doors were locked. Lubie Draskovich, the longest-serving employee, was given the honor of turning off the Sands marquee, which was no longer advertising the Copa, but thanking the world for 44 great years.
But many of the employees weren’t ready to leave just yet. Without an official announcement, dozens of them gathered in the lounge, laughing, crying, sharing stories about the old times, exchanging phone numbers, saying goodbye. Shelley Berkley stayed for a bit; having practically grown up at the Sands, she had as much a claim to the hotel as anyone. But she knew she hadn’t spent decades here sharing the good and bad days. And she had a future in the new, themed megaresort, while many of them didn’t. This was a moment for family only. Out of respect, she left them alone.
Eventually, the last hugs were given, and it was time to go home.
The Sands was no more.
***
BEFORE IT WAS DEMOLISHED, the Sands enjoyed a brief but not quiet afterlife.
First, all remaining soaps, shampoos, and toiletries were donated to local charities. Many of the television sets were sent to UNLV. There were still a few special requests—one couple, who had honeymooned in the tower shortly after its opening 20 years before, called with a request that was forwarded to Shelley Berkley. They remembered their room number and said that in the years since their apparently memorable newlywed stay, they never forgot the painting of two kissing doves that hung over the bed. Could they please, please have it? Berkley had security take her up to the room where, against all odds, the painting still hung. She had it removed and sent to the couple.
After that, the auction houses of Butterfield & Butterfield and Rabin Brothers took over. On July 30, they started liquidating $3 million worth of hotel property—including slot machines, Copa chandeliers, and matchbooks—many, many matchbooks.
The auction emptied the buildings out, but they still had some use. The Sands had once been a coveted filming location, and after its closing it hosted one more film: Jerry Bruckheimer’s big-budget action epic Con Air. The film, in which Nicolas Cage’s Cameron Poe helps foil the hijacking of a prison transport plane by an all-star cast of criminals portrayed by John Malkovich, Danny Trejo, Ving Rhames, and others, filmed in Las Vegas for over a month starting in early September, with several action sequences involving the titular C-123 aircraft, buzzing helicopters, and a firetruck/motorcycle chase.
The Sands has a starring role in the film’s climax, in which the plane crash lands in Las Vegas in a bizarre trajectory that took it from north of the Stratosphere to the Hard Rock Hotel to the Riviera (heading north), past the Boardwalk (where the plane’s wheels touched down), onto Flamingo Boulevard, heading east past Battista’s Italian Restaurant, through the Dunes’ Oasis Casino sign (the casino itself had been demolished three years earlier), through a valet stand, and smack dab into the Sands’ lobby entrance, the plane’s nose coming to rest against a row of slot machines, one of which naturally lined up three sevens and paid out a flood of coins.
The crash, and its aftermath, offer one last brief look at the Sands before it came down, though there was some dramatic license. The pond, for example, that the plane plows through was added by the director to make the crash more visually striking, and was not part of the Sands’ frontage at any point. Still, with its marquee lit and its neon signs aglow, it’s possible to get a sense of the Sands in its last days.
Controlled Demolition, Inc., the same company that had brought down the Dunes and Landmark, demolished the Sands. The highest-profile part of the job was the implosion of the 1965 tower. The date was set for early in the morning of November 26.
At 2 a.m., a siren blared a warning, drawing cheers from a crowd that had waited in the cold for more than two hours. Then, a countdown, followed by a half-dozen syncopated explosions that lit up the tower’s windows. Six seconds later, the structure crumbled to the ground, its rubble disappearing beneath the billowing smoke as the crowd applauded. It was 13 seconds from the first blast to the big crash.
Much of the Sands still remained (though it would be reduced to rubble in due time), but the implosion marked the symbolic death of the resort. Wisps of nostalgia blew through Las Vegas that night, but they were quickly driven away by the anticipation for the themed megaresort that was to come.
“It’s sad to see it gone, but life goes on,’ said Adelson, who had vacationed at the hotel in its glory days. “We’re anxious to get on to the next level.”
After more than four decades, the Sands had returned to sand.