AUTHOR’S NOTE
A View from the Top
It is one of those big blue spring days that sun-baked Las Vegans live for. A whispering breeze takes the edge off the warm afternoon and wisps of clouds feather across the limitless desert horizon.
All in all, a good day to die.
I’m strapped into a NASA-goes-to-the-carnival contraption called the Big Shot, which is bolted to the top of the Stratosphere Tower, which stretches 1,149 feet into the glorious April air. As such, it is the tallest freestanding structure west of the Mississippi. That makes me just about the tallest freestanding columnist for as many miles around.
Stratosphere, the casino-resort-tower at the north end of the Las Vegas Strip, is set to open in three days, and I’ve been invited to test my stomach and fear of heights against a ride that is accurately described as the world’s tallest Heimlich maneuver. Riding next to me? Stratosphere’s big-idea man himself, Bob Stupak.
Any machine whose operators make you remove your slip-on shoes, eyeglasses, loose jewelry, and wobbly denture plates before experiencing it qualifies as a thrill ride. Anyone who travels anywhere with Bob Stupak qualifies as a thrill seeker. The ride is more like taking a double dose of syrup of ipecac with a mad scientist than taking a spin on the giant teacups with Walt Disney.
The Big Shot launches 16 citizens out of their shoes with the force of four Gs up 160 feet to near the top of the tower in less time than it takes to beg God for forgiveness.
Then you drop like a dead man at negative one G, only to be caught a few feet from a certain messy demise on the platform below—and propelled upward again. The ride takes 31 seconds from start to finish. There’s no telling how much time it takes off your life.
Bob Stupak, still looking frail after nearly killing himself in a motorcycle accident a year earlier, knows something about the precious value of life. He once set speed records on a motorcycle, and was traveling with his son, Nevada, at 60 miles per hour when he rammed his Harley-Davidson into the side of a perfectly good Subaru. Not even Stupak liked his odds of recovering from that accident, which shattered his face and spirit and left him in a month-long coma.
But only in Las Vegas could a guy like Stupak find a Florence Nightingale in the form of McGuire Sisters legend Phyllis McGuire. Perhaps somewhere inside Stupak’s cracked skull was what naysayers and hunch players had learned over the previous 25 years—that it never pays to bet against the quintessential Las Vegas huckster.
To go from a heartbeat from the Big Hereafter to riding the Big Shot on a gorgeous spring afternoon is vintage Bob. Sitting next to him as he mugs for the cameras moments before blast-off, the accident’s effects are still noticeable. But they don’t keep him from smiling and selling his project to anyone willing to listen.
“You look nervous,” Stupak says to me. “Loosen up. We haven’t lost a rider yet.”
Nervous? The tower is a full 1,145 feet taller than the threshold of my acrophobia. I feel like Jerry Lewis doing a remake of “The Right Stuff.” Whatever stuff I have is doing the mambo in my stomach. Television camera crews from Los Angeles train their lenses on Stupak as he tosses off one-liners and prepares to take the Big Shot to the top of the tower, where those who manage to keep their eyes open can glimpse Lake Mead and can take in every inch of the Strip before free-falling back toward the concrete launching platform and what would appear to be certain death.
Stupak’s hulking personal valet, Brendan, snaps photographs of his boss hamming it up with gawkers, reporters, and construction workers. Then we’re ready.
“Every ride starts the same way,” Stupak says. “Repeat after me: Hail Mary, full of grace—” and then he cackled like Vincent Price on laughing gas.
Our chairs shoot up the side of the tower.
“Top of the world!” Stupak yells, mocking his anxiety-riddled guest. Who does this guy think he is, James Cagney?
We’re at the top in a finger snap, then enter a free fall, then climb, then fall, climb, and fall again before gently returning to the launching pad.
Somewhere between my breathless cry for absolution and the second drop, I begin to enjoy myself. I stop squinting long enough to catch the expansive Las Vegas Valley and the unadulterated glee on Stupak’s scarred face.
At this moment, I know I’ll write a story about Bob Stupak.
Providing, that is, I don’t vomit on his shoes.
If P.T. Barnum had a hedonistic twin, Bob Stupak might be the guy. He is one of the last of the great Las Vegas wild men. In an era in which corporations have placed their publicly traded USDA Grade A stamp on the city, at a time in which gaming’s most notorious party animals have begun posturing as elder statesmen of Las Vegas casino society, Bob Stupak is still tearing up the neon-lighted streets with his big ideas, big bets, and big mouth. He is a man bereft of hypocrisy, pretense and, some say, table manners, a guy incapable of passing up an intriguing wager. He is a man capable of betting the price of a four-bedroom house on the most innocuous proposition, a fellow who would lay $1 million on the Super Bowl and not only win the wager but get ten times that in publicity.
Stupak is a gambling man and a carnival-style promoter of the first order. His “Free Vacation” promotions attracted thousands of customers, as well as the intense scrutiny of fraud investigators from across the country who just knew there had to be something crooked about the deal. After all, Bob Stupak is the guy who once promised a stuntman $1 million to jump off the top of his 24-story Vegas World Hotel—propelling the casino operator to international tabloid celebrity—then charged the fearless flier a $975,000 landing fee. More than once, Stupak’s huckster’s heart had nearly cost him his coveted Nevada gaming license. If, as Damon Runyon once wrote, life is 6-to-5 against, Stupak has enjoyed the longest run of luck in the history of a city that makes suckers out of even its most savvy players.
And there’s the Stupak who was voted Mr. Las Vegas by his ally, Mayor Jan Jones. Following his accident, the huckster emerged as a philanthropist with the fastest checkbook in a place that prides itself on its big-hearted spenders. Stupak gave away more than $1 million before the last bandage was removed from his battered body. He knew he had enjoyed the greatest good fortune. Maybe he was hedging his spiritual bets.
Stupak is annually voted the Most Embarrassing Las Vegan by newspaper readers. In a pitchman’s paradise the caliber of southern Nevada, where candidates for the title proliferate the landscape, it is a mighty statement.
With the improbable construction of the Stratosphere Tower, in spring 1996, Bob Stupak finally was about to make the score of his life in the city that eats dreams like 99-cent breakfasts. The fact his triumph was on the edge of a crime-riddled neighborhood known as Naked City made the emerging success story all the more incredible.
On a clear day from the tower’s observation platform, the keen-eyed can see all of Naked City—every dilapidated rooftop, small-time drug deal, and street-corner hustle. Naked City has been a starting point for Las Vegas immigrants for decades. Other Las Vegas neighborhoods have crime rates as high, but no other is as notorious; even changing the neighborhood’s name to the kinder, gentler Meadows Village hasn’t improved its reputation as a gang-infested shooting gallery.
To the south, the tower offers an incredible view of the Strip and the heart of the city built by Las Vegas’ notorious founding fathers. There’s the Las Vegas Country Club, the Desert Inn, and the Stardust, built by Moe Dalitz and his associates. There’s Caesars Palace and Circus Circus, two of the amazing ideas to take shape from the mind of Jay Sarno. And there are the wildly successful Mirage and Treasure Island resorts, the creations of the gaming industry’s premier player, Steve Wynn.
Looking north to downtown, Fremont Street’s clog of casinos jut from under a ponderous metal canopy whose two million lights were designed to reinvigorate the area and return Glitter Gulch to its past glory. But the so-called Fremont Street Experience is downright plain compared to Stupak’s flashy tower.
If you gaze with a forgiving eye, Las Vegas appears almost handsome from so high above the street. Boomtowns are not by nature attractive places. They are full of the dust and bluster of breakneck progress, and Las Vegas fits the profile. Boomtowns have the thrown-together look of a stripper late for her curtain call: hair mussed, too much rouge, and buttons undone. They are riddled with road construction, exposed water lines, and the kind of energy that attracts Joad families from across the land. As such, Las Vegas perennially ranks among the fastest-growing cities in the nation, with approximately 4,000 newcomers arriving each month.
As the last great American boomtown, Las Vegas suffers from all those infrastructural maladies and offers every ounce of the promise. For the immigrant with no English, the autoworker with no assembly line, the desperate hunch player with a fatally flawed dice system, it is the place for fresh starts, second chances, and last stands. The community is a national leader in job creation, personal-income growth, and suicide.
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The Big Shot ride epitomizes Stupak’s improbable, even death-defying rise in Las Vegas. It is as if all the energy he has expended during his extraordinary life and career has been manifested in the nation’s tallest freestanding observation tower and a couple of thrill rides to end all thrill rides.
Any city can have the tallest observation tower. Only in Las Vegas would such a structure merely qualify as a piece of mundane architecture unless it had a NASA blast-off simulator and a rooftop roller coaster. But that’s Bob Stupak for you.
In the corporate era, where gaming stocks trade on Wall Street and casino bosses carry Ivy League degrees and a bravado that often passes for brilliance, the individual operator is an anomaly. Sadly, the city’s personality has changed. It has largely reinvented itself as a sort of Stepford with a casino-based economy: ceaselessly prosperous, but quiet. A little too quiet. Most of the city’s genuine characters have gone the way of the Dunes, Sands, and Silver Slipper. The seasoned racketeers who migrated to Las Vegas ahead of the law and settled into a respectability have faded into the landscape. In the corporate company town, there isn’t much room for personality—not with billions of dollars at stake. Even Stupak needed to bail out his big idea with eight-figure assistance from Grand Casinos Inc. and its founder, Lyle Berman. True to Stupak’s nature, he met Berman across a poker table.
Of all the risky proposition bets Bob Stupak ever placed, by far the most daring was his idea to remake the Las Vegas skyline by constructing the incredible Stratosphere Tower.
Even in a town built on long odds, this venture was a million-to-one shot.