THREE
Only at Vegas World
With the arson rumors still smoldering at the edge of his reputation, in the late 1970s Bob Stupak found his career precariously positioned. With a minor downtown slot operation and a piece of real estate on the wrong side of Sahara Avenue, he remained a small-stakes player who possessed visions of glory and more confidence than was warranted. But like his father, Stupak was nothing if not tenacious.
He strained to gain access to the bankers and businessmen who made Las Vegas run. While he had difficulty blending in at the Las Vegas Country Club, his prospects improved greatly when his work ethic came to the attention of Valley Bank founder E. Parry Thomas, perhaps the most important player in the city’s history. Thomas’s bank was responsible for servicing millions in loans from the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund, dollars that were used to develop not only casinos on the Strip, but also the city’s first private hospital and its first large-scale shopping mall. More than the trusted shepherd of the Teamsters fund, Thomas and his partner, Ken Sullivan, were community leaders who left their mark across the valley in places such as the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and numerous housing developments. Thomas was largely responsible for guiding the career of casino mogul Steve Wynn, who met Thomas in the late 1960s and went on to become the head of the casino corporation now known as Mirage Resorts. When Stupak needed seed money and the break of a lifetime, he received both, thanks to Thomas and Sullivan.
“I came into Kenny Sullivan’s office every few weeks with an idea,” Stupak recalled. “I think he got tired of seeing me.”
Although Bob Stupak wasn’t deeply connected to the city’s power base, no one could deny his relentless striving. Sullivan and Thomas finally took Stupak seriously and agreed to work with him. In June 1978, Stupak’s dream manifested in the groundbreaking of Bob Stupak’s Vegas World, the first hotel-casino built close to the corner of Sahara Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard since the Sahara opened in 1952. In more recent times, the only casino to open in close proximity was the Jolley Trolley, a tacky mob bustout joint that has long since been replaced by a department store-sized souvenir shop.
Vegas World was completed 13 months later at an advertised cost of more than $7 million. In reality, it cost a little more than $3 million. The dollar difference was simple.
“I lied about it,” Stupak said in an interview. “I lied about it like everybody else does.”
Valley Bank considered lending Stupak up to $1.5 million for his Vegas World idea—but only if he managed to raise the rest of the money from other sources. He took the bank’s consideration as confirmation and hit up Home Savings for a loan. After all, if Valley Bank was willing to back the deal for $1.5 million, couldn’t a smaller institution such as Home Savings throw in a measly few hundred thousand?
“They thought I already had the loan, and I didn’t tell them otherwise,” Stupak said.
The pitch worked at Home Savings and at Nevada State Bank, where experienced lenders knew Valley Bank seldom made a mistake. With a fourth loan from a Reno bank, Stupak’s hustle was complete.
Before Vegas World opened, Stupak would return for $700,000 more from the bank that Parry Thomas built. Although they knew Stupak never had been responsible for building much more than his name, the cost overruns still irritated the bankers.
“When I ran out of money to finish it, they were hot,” Stupak recalled years later. “They didn’t talk to me for three months, until after it was all over and the thing was built.”
Glorious, Vegas World was not. It hardly qualified as a major Las Vegas property. When completed, it boasted all of 102 rooms with vague plans to add another 500. Even in those years, major Strip properties commonly had more than 1,000 rooms and the Las Vegas Hilton and MGM Grand (later renamed Bally’s) were among the largest resorts in the world. Still, Vegas World was a testament to Stupak’s perseverance.
The original hotel and casino sat on the three-acre site of the gambling museum, and Stupak worked overtime to sell his gaudy paradise in the middle of no-man’s land. His most outrageous pitch was the idea that the presence of Vegas World broke down an invisible barrier and extended the Strip north of Sahara Avenue. Not surprisingly, the Las Vegas media picked up on the story and joined Stupak in the cheer.
“I think the location is great,” he gushed to a reporter. “You can see it from all over town and people walk down from the Sahara. I’m trying to create my own market.”
In reality, while other hotels along Las Vegas Boulevard enjoyed a Strip address, Vegas World would forever risk being known as the gateway to Naked City, one of the town’s roughest neighborhoods. Gushing television reporters might herald Vegas World as the city of Las Vegas’s first resort on the Strip (the city ended at Sahara Avenue; the Strip proper was in Clark County), but locals were less impressed.
Naked City, a downtown neighborhood bordered by Las Vegas Boulevard, Industrial Road, Wyoming Avenue, and Sahara Avenue, is said to have received its name as a tribute to the showgirls who once occupied its art deco apartments and sun-bathed in the nude. Its streets were named for America’s major cities, but when Vegas World opened its residents for the most part were not from this country. Located just a block from the Strip, it was a million miles from the booming prosperity gambling provided the rest of the city.
Naked City became the first neighborhood for southern Nevada’s ever-changing immigrant population. Whether Mexican, Cuban, or Vietnamese, it was a source of inexpensive housing for the newcomers who eagerly filled the thousands of service jobs generated by the casino resorts.
By the late 1970s, Naked City was changing once more.
In the wake of the Mariel boat lift months into the new decade, which brought thousands of Cuban immigrants—many of them hardened criminals—to the United States, Naked City had emerged as a Little Havana. Upward of 2,000 Cuban immigrants moved to Las Vegas. Most were lawful and hard-working. The ones who weren’t made banner headlines for their drug dealing and extreme violence.
Criminal activity wasn’t limited to a single ethnic group. Drug dealing was rampant and prostitutes walked the strand lined with cut-rate motels along Las Vegas Boulevard. As in poor neighborhoods across the country, much of the drugs were sold to residents from cleaner, wealthier parts of Las Vegas who visited Naked City to score their dope. Shootings occurred regularly and Metro dispatched a special task force of narcotics detectives to knock down the trafficking and gunplay.
Stupak wisely attempted to work with city officials to clean up the ramshackle apartments and matchbox houses that bordered Vegas World. He also purchased some of the slums at a steep discount. City building inspectors descended on the neighborhood and began citing landlords for electrical violations and structural deficiencies. Junk cars were towed and garbage was collected.
The Metropolitan Police Department parted with local custom and dispatched officers to walk a foot patrol through the neighborhood in an attempt to get the law-abiding citizens, who seldom walked the streets at night, to begin reporting criminal activity.
“You put too many rats in a box and they start killing each other,” Metro’s Undersheriff Don Denison said after investigating 10 homicides in 16 months in a four-block area. “People are the same way.”
__________________
Dressed in a wild sport shirt with an open collar, Bob Stupak was flanked by Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders and fawned over by local TV personality Gus Giuffre and then-City Commissioner Ron Lurie for the Friday, July 13, 1979, opening of Vegas World. Touted as the newest hotel on the Strip, it stood eight stories high and just on the wrong side of Sahara Avenue. In a town teeming with casino competition, its location was suspect from the start. But where others would have been circumspect, Stupak began immediate expansion plans. In short order, his eight-story hotel was headed toward the 20-story mark.
“The basic policy in the building of the new Vegas World was to please the home folks, the residents of this county,” he said.
It wasn’t all ribbon-cutting and press conferences.
Stupak’s bankroll was as slender as any showgirl on the Strip. State gaming regulations demanded sufficient money on deposit in the cage to cover large payoffs, and an early hit from a high roller would devastate him. More than that, it would expose his shoestring operation for what it was.
Stories of Stupak’s desperate attempts to remain financially solvent are legion in Las Vegas. Some friends recall him borrowing from downtown casino men for quick turnaround loans to keep enough cash on hand. Others remember him coming precariously close to losing the deed on Vegas World in high-stakes card games.
John Woodrum remembers yet another story that separated Bob Stupak’s stock image as a high roller from the reality of his financial predicament. In the early months at Vegas World, there were many nights the tables hosted more action than the house could cover.
“Bob didn’t start out with pockets lined with gold,” Woodrum said. “When Bob opened up there he had a Rolls-Royce, of course, and a big five-carat diamond ring he was wearing, but no bankroll. Gaming Control requires that you have enough cash to open these places. So he went downtown to one of the guys in the pawnshop business down there. He pawned his ring. Bob pawned his ring and I think his car, too, to open up Vegas World.
“That’s always been his act. In later years he told me he did that. I didn’t know he did it back then, and I’m sure Gaming Control didn’t know it, either. Had they known what Bob had done, I’m sure he never would have had a chance to open up. He’s a very slick manipulator, and that ain’t all bad in this industry. Bob is a little bit of a throwback in this industry. God knows he took a spot in a terrible location and made it work.”
Stupak’s relationship with the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees International Union, more commonly known as the Culinary, was stormy from the start. Stupak might have made suspect business transactions in Pittsburgh, Melbourne, and at the Sinabar, but on his wildest day he couldn’t match the Culinary Union for notoriety. The Las Vegas local of the nationwide service employees group had maintained a close relationship with the Chicago Outfit for two generations and was not above negotiating through intimidation. Al Bramlet, the union’s hard-nosed and highly regarded leader, had been murdered. His replacement, Ben Schmoutey, was an intimate associate of organized crime figures linked to Chicago and New York mob families and rarely traveled without at least one tough guy at his side.
With an anemic bankroll and few friends in the Las Vegas casino establishment, Stupak figured to be an easy mark for Culinary organizers. With a little pressure out on the sidewalk and a barrage of tough talk, he was bound to buckle.
Illegal pickets showed up outside Vegas World three months after it opened. Union organizers knew it would take weeks for a judge to force them to leave, and by then the Vegas World contract was sure to be sewn up. Even before the hotel was finished Stupak was approached by union organizers, who attempted not only to force him to hire dues-paying waiters, chefs, cocktail waitresses, and housekeepers, but also to slip them a little something extra to ensure labor peace. Although Stupak had welcomed the Teamsters’ presence at the hotel—the truckers’ union had organized the front-desk workers and parking lot attendants—he balked at the tactics of the Culinary Union. No one was going to strong-arm him without a fight.
By November 1979, the war was raging. Pickets posted on the sidewalk 24 hours a day were beginning to have some impact. Trucks hauling food, linen, and other supplies to Vegas World were delayed by the marchers.
Adding to a previous unfair-labor-practices complaint, in late November the Joint Executive Board of the Culinary and Bartenders unions filed a lengthy list of charges against Stupak and Vegas World with the National Labor Relations Board. Stupak and his executives were accused of all manner of nefarious anti-labor activity, from firing workers for daring to organize to bribing a coffee-shop manager to prevent union members from obtaining jobs.
The organizers, including a few underworld types, were mistaken in their estimation of Stupak as a sucker. Stupak’s street sense was strong. And he not only refused to pay protection, but he also fought the union’s use of illegal pickets outside his door. And he did so in the sort of unorthodox manner that was becoming his trademark.
“Al Bramlet’s interest was to organize Stupak’s place,” John Woodrum recalled. “After Bramlet got killed, Ben Schmoutey became the head of the Culinary Union, and they had a big push on. They were going to organize the workers in there. Well, the union men would come into the coffee shop and glare at old Bob. When they’d meet him across a table they were always giving him the eye. Real tough guy stuff. And Bob would jump up on top of the table in the meetings and start screaming, ‘This is un-American! You can’t do this to me!’ And these tough guys would come in with their shirt sleeves rolled up, and Bob would roll up his shirt sleeves and his tattoos would show. Bob is skinny as can be, but he’s as cocky as a four-headed billy goat.
“They put a picket line up at Vegas World, and I’ll never forget it as long as I live. Their signs said, ‘Bob Stupak and Vegas World—Unfair Labor Practices.’ So Bob takes his own workers from Vegas World and uses them to put up a picket line around the union picketers. They’re carrying signs saying, ‘Unfair Union Practices.’ It was the most comical thing in town. I’d just park and sit there and laugh because none of us would ever have thought of doing something like that. We knew we couldn’t win with that kind of bullshit. So there was no sense in fighting City Hall and the union. And it wasn’t in our best interests. But with Bob it was the principle of the thing.”
Stupak, who already knew a thing or two about being a laughing stock, was making a joke out of the union. He continued his crusade against Schmoutey, going so far as to hoodwink the union boss into playing a “game of chance” for the contract. In the early days at Vegas World, Stupak employed a carnival-trained rooster to play tic-tac-toe against customers for money. In fact, Stupak’s so-called Polish rooster was undefeated at Vegas World before gaming regulators persuaded the owner to put his best gambler out to pasture.
“This is strictly out of the carnival,” Woodrum said. “You aren’t going to beat the rooster because the rooster always gets the first pick. When the rooster gets the first pick, you can’t win no matter how you push the buttons. After a long negotiation Stupak says, ‘I’ll make you a deal. I’ll sign the union contract if Ben Schmoutey will go out there and play against my Polish Rooster. If he beats the rooster at tic-tac-toe, I’ll sign the contract. If he loses the tic-tac-toe game, then you guys go away and leave me alone.’ At this point the union organizers started telling him what a goddamn idiot he was. Didn’t he know who he was dealing with? Schmoutey says, ‘You ignorant SOB, I’ve got 20,000 members and I’m going to play tic-tac-toe against a goddamn rooster?’ But that was the straw that broke the union’s back. They walked out and the place stayed a nonunion house.”
In January 1980, the National Labor Relations Board ordered that the illegal pickets be removed from the sidewalk.
“We have written assurances from the Joint Executive Board that they will not engage in unlawful picketing,” NLRB resident agent Ken Rose said.
Stupak was viewed as anti-labor and as a certifiable nut after word circulated that he not only had challenged Schmoutey, but also had negotiated with the union men from behind the bar at Vegas World singing, “Look for the union label,” while he served his adversaries free whiskey and beer.
After all his antics, Bob Stupak had won a small victory.
They would prove hard to come by in the future.
Stupak was obsessed with building a reputation as a man who, like Horseshoe patriarch Benny Binion, was willing to accept wagers that would make today’s corporate casino bosses stammer. Stupak constantly dropped Binion’s name and sought him out at the Horseshoe coffee shop almost daily.
Stupak ordered signs for his casino with “The Sky’s the Limit” emblazoned in lights and neon. Hours after he opened Vegas World, he raised the table stakes from $50 to $100 and soon allowed up to $2,000 bets. At the time, Caesars Palace allowed half as much.
“Don’t come to the big place with the small bankroll,” his sales pitch shouted. “Come to the small place with the big bankroll.”
Problem was, his bankroll was still suspect. He was, after all, the man who later confided to friends that he had opened Vegas World without enough nickels and quarters to fill all the slot machines in the place and had to hock his car and diamond ring to cover his action.
Fortunately for Stupak, his relationship with Benny Binion and his eldest son, Jack, transcended sage advice and a cup of coffee. When Vegas World’s cage ran short of money, like many operators Stupak took advantage of Binion’s ready cash loans.
One night, a gambler appeared at a Vegas World crap table and began a run that depleted the casino’s reserves and threw a genuine scare into Stupak. A few more passes and the stranger would be in a position to own a large piece of the building, which Stupak was rapidly paying off. If the player were an acquaintance of management, it would have been acceptable to pull him aside and explain the predicament. But with a stranger, that was not possible—and it was too late to close the game.
“He had more money on the fucking crap table than I had in the fucking cage,” Stupak recalled. “There was nothing I could do but let him play and get on the phone to Jack Binion.”
It was after midnight when Binion answered the phone. The request neither shocked nor dismayed the casino veteran, who had broken into the business before he was old enough to vote. Stupak needed $300,000.
“Go to the cage,” Binion said. “It’ll be waiting for you when you get there.”
Stupak returned to Vegas World an hour later with a small fortune in cash in brown sacks, and weathered the storm. Instead of losing Vegas World to a single high roller, Stupak later bragged that he paid off his bank loans in a year.
“There was a time here when a man’s word was his bond,” Stupak recalled years later. “Men like Benny Binion, Jackie Gaughan, Mel Exber. Their word was good and they knew the business. It takes years to learn the business, and they probably knew more than anybody.”
Stupak sought their advice often. He would need all the insight he could gather to make a success out of his Naked City experiment.
Not long after Vegas World opened, Bob Stupak met David Sklansky, the man who would become Vegas World’s gaming guru. The son of a college professor, Sklansky was a published author who had turned his formidable knowledge of numbers into a successful career as a professional poker player and all-around gambler.
“Bob walked into the Horseshoe tournament and decided he wanted to learn how to play poker,” Sklansky said. “I’d just written a couple of books. I told him I knew more about gambling than anybody alive, and that I thought he’d want to meet me. He threw out the crapless craps game to me. He wanted to know about the house edge. I got him the answer in a few minutes, and he realized I probably knew what I was talking about.”
True to Stupak’s flamboyant nature, Sklansky’s business cards would read “Resident Wizard.” Stupak and Sklansky for years were spotted having lunch at different casinos. They bounced their gaming strategies off the competition almost daily.
“We were always trying to figure out what made people tick, what made people want to gamble, what made people want to stay at a place,” Sklansky said. “I believe we had good ideas. The sad part is, we never had a really nice place to use them.”
With a casino set smack on the edge of a rough neighborhood along a section of Las Vegas Boulevard that no one but Stupak called the Strip, the vicar of Vegas World was forced to constantly promote his place, face, and games. He touted himself as a gutsy gambling innovator. Early advertisements for Vegas World showed a caricature of Stupak shouting the incredible gambling deals available only at his casino. The ads called attention to his sense of humor as well as his hustler’s heart.
INTRODUCING POLISH ROULETTE!
WE LOSE MONEY ON EVERY SPIN,
BUT WE HOPE TO MAKE IT UP IN VOLUME.
NO ZEROS
Las Vegas casinos have seldom let the truth get in the way of a good sales pitch, and Stupak’s strategy was part of the great tradition.
BLACKJACK AS YOU’VE NEVER PLAYED IT BEFORE!
SEE THE DEALER’S HOLE CARD
PLAY DOUBLE EXPOSURE “21”
BOTH DEALER’S CARDS DEALT FACE UP!
Stupak’s newfangled blackjack seemed so easy to play, it was hard to imagine how anyone could lose.
“How often have you wished you knew the dealer’s hole card?” the ad asked. “How often have you had a 13, 14, or 15 and hit and busted when the dealer had a 10-count card turned up? Then the dealer turned over a 5 or 6, hit it, and busted too. You could have won if you had known his hole card.
“Now, for the first time you can play 21 and see both of the dealer’s cards. Both dealer’s cards are dealt face up. You know exactly what the dealer has before you decide what to do yourself. Stand, hit, double, split, etc. It’s all new! It’s fun, and it’s only at Vegas World!”
The newspaper ad was marred by some graffiti next to Stupak’s image that read, “He’s Polish.” Someone in the newspaper ad department had attempted to play a practical joke on Stupak, who initially was peeved but quickly grew to incorporate it into the act.
“I said, ‘Well, geez, this is great. It looks like it just ties in with the game, given its personalized Stupak way, you know.’ So from that time on, for the next few years, everything I ever did had Bob Stupak with little black hearts saying: ‘He’s Polish,’ with the ‘s’ backwards.
“And I was always considered a maverick with these special games, so one day somebody wrote something in the paper and they referred to me as the Polish Maverick, putting the two things together. I sort of liked that handle, too. And I used that for a few years.
“Double Exposure was an immediate success. Every day broke a record from the previous days. Then I started advertising on billboards, in the in-flight magazines—in every place that I could legally advertise the game. After two years, I just had an absolute marvelous run. No other major casinos put it in.”
The advertisement, of course, failed to mention that the trade-off for viewing the dealer’s hole card was that pushes, or ties, went to the house instead of the usual return of the wager to the player, but that was a minor detail the player would accept after he had placed his bets and taken his chances. In addition, a player’s natural two-card 21 won even money, instead of the industry-wide 3-to-2, and players were not allowed to double down or split cards. Double Exposure 21 played as it was at Vegas World gave the house a .5-percent edge—which was about the same as the usual advantage cooked into the game through regular house rules—but only if the player played Double Exposure basic strategy flawlessly. A player with a looser strategy faced even steeper odds, and almost everyone who tried this new game made mistakes. Despite the obvious disadvantages, blackjack fans flocked to Vegas World for the opportunity to look at the dealer’s cards.
Double Exposure lured the players through the door and the wonders of Vegas World did the rest.
Stupak’s Experto 21 game, in which a single deck was dealt down to the last card, gave Vegas World a 2.3 percent advantage over basic-strategy players, but the ploy was successful in attracting card counters as well as the curious.
By counting the cards, or keeping a weighted average of the ratio of high cards to low cards that have been dealt, the skilled player improves his odds of beating the house as the deck diminishes. The tradeoff in Experto: a blackjack, which normally pays 3-to-2, pays even money.
Experto 21 was an honest game, if not exactly a square deal for the average player. The uninitiated would be attracted to a single deck dealt all the way through and might not realize that the even-money adjustment for blackjack put even the experienced basic-strategy player at a minimum 2.3 percent disadvantage. Standard single-deck 21 deals to a nearly flat house advantage.
It’s something California card counter Alan Brown was thinking about as he took a seat at the Experto table and began working the deck. Brown, a U.S. Department of Defense engineer, had been making weekend runs to Las Vegas as a serious blackjack player for a little more than a year when he stumbled upon Stupak’s intriguing proposition.
Playing with an uninterrupted deck is every counter’s dream, but he proceeded cautiously. Even after only a year of visiting Las Vegas, Brown was well aware of Bob Stupak’s reputation.
He approached the floorman, who explained that the game had only been open a few days. Most players, a superstitious lot, were spooked by it.
Brown’s hesitancy was based on math, not mysticism; he was well aware of the impact of the even-money payoffs on naturals. The lone player at the table, he began playing $25 a hand. As the deck diminished, and the situation warranted, he bumped his bets up to $100.
“That doesn’t seem like a lot of money today, but back then playing $100 a hand was serious money,” Brown recalled. “As a card counter, you always want to get deep in the deck. That’s where you get your advantage. The impression I had of Stupak was that he often did this kind of gimmicky stuff to attract customers. Jumping into a game where you’re right off the bat losing 2.3 percent, you’ve got to make it up somewhere.”
So he counted down the deck until he was certain of the make-up of the final cards, then spread his wagers to the maximum allowed—and began to win.
“The next thing I know, I look over and Bob is sitting right next to me,” Brown said. “He said, ‘Hi, I’m Bob Stupak.’
“We shook hands. He had the softest hands I’ve ever felt, like he’d never done a day’s work in his life.”
Stupak was intrigued by the counter, who had begun piling up chips.
“He sat there with me all day. He left the table occasionally to go to his office or take a phone call, but he came back and watched me play. He was just fascinated by the game.”
After Brown had accumulated approximately $3,000, Stupak’s curiosity turned to playful inquiry. It wasn’t the money that bothered him; it was the mechanics of the game he was attempting to straighten out.
“Do you think you can beat this game?” Stupak asked.
“I’m not sure, Bob,” Brown answered. “But I think so.”
“He was trying to find out how good I was, but more than that he was trying to find out about the game. Because of all the conversation and interest, I assumed I was the first good player to come in and try it. It’s unusual for a casino owner to come down and sit for that length of time with a player. He was really very cordial, not intimidating at all.”
He also implored Brown to return the next day. When Brown returned, he jumped back in and gradually lost more than $2,000 back to the house. He walked with $800, and Stupak eventually reduced the betting spread to a 3-to-1 ratio.
The prevalence of players of Brown’s skill level led Stupak to print cards of another kind for counters. The cards read:
Dear Card Counter:
Your play is welcome, but due to severe losses, we have to restrict your wagers from 1 to 7 units. Your cooperation will be appreciated.
Professional card counter Howard Grossman took his Vegas World experience one step further. In the early 1980s, Grossman came to Stupak’s attention while he was playing and beating Double Exposure and Experto. Before long, Grossman received a call from Stupak who, of course, had a wild proposition: a $50,000 single-deck match. Head to head, no gimmicks. Grossman rushed to Vegas World.
“I really don’t want to play against you,” Stupak told him. “I just wanted to get you down here.”
Stupak went on to tap Grossman’s knowledge of Experto. Like Brown, Grossman was asked whether he was certain he could beat the game. Challenged again to a match, Grossman agreed to play Experto for high stakes. But Stupak was merely testing him.
“I really want you to work for me,” Stupak told him.
And he did. Over the next two years, Howard Grossman trained dealers, occasionally ran a shift on the casino floor, and served as a jack-of-all-trades consultant for Stupak. Grossman learned more about human nature than the casino business. He also learned a few things about his flamboyant boss.
“Stupak was a character. He’s a clever man,” Grossman said. “He didn’t always have a lot of knowledge about the games, but he would gain his knowledge by taking a gamble. Where most operators obtain their information beforehand, he would gamble first. We changed his casino around and we beat just about everybody.
“He wasn’t that respectful of people; his employees, he didn’t treat them that well. He was nice to his customers, though. He went out of his way to be nice to them. He was a clever gambler and always tried to get the best of it. As long as he had the best of it, he would take the gamble.”
Unlike many executives of multimillion-dollar businesses, Stupak rarely conducted the day’s affairs in his office. Instead, he staked out a table in the Vegas World coffee shop, read the newspaper, drank coffee, and chain smoked from just after breakfast until shortly before dinner. Through the day, he entertained a constant stream of customers, friends, con artists, restaurant suppliers, casino men, card sharks, would-be comedians, and newspaper reporters.
“People would come in and try to sell him anything,” Grossman said. “He taught me about negotiations. My impression of him has always been that he’s very driven to success, as if he’s trying to prove something, to gain someone’s respect.”
Gambling consultant and author David Sklansky defends Experto and all of Vegas World’s gimmick games, most of which he had a hand in developing.
“Experto was always a great game for Vegas World,” Sklansky said. “It remained a great game for Vegas World. I predict it will one day become the great game to be played in Las Vegas casinos.”
Crapless craps proved to be one of Vegas World’s best come-ons. It wasn’t the game itself that the average player couldn’t resist; it was the idea of playing longer and getting something for nothing that so many found irresistible. In an age in which fewer gamblers pitched dice, Stupak concocted a variation with a built-in 5.4 percent house advantage—far higher than the 1.4 percent best bet players of the standard game enjoyed. A shift in the rules changed the odds. For example, although a player could not crap out on the usual 2, 3, or 12 rolls, don’t pass and don’t come bets were disallowed. Other rule changes helped sway the odds in the house’s favor. Players threw dice longer, but they won less.
Stupak also raised the limits at Vegas World to rival, and in many instances exceed, the action accepted at the Strip hotels. In 1979, Stupak’s $1,500 limits attracted high rollers from the poshest suites on the boulevard. They might have slept elsewhere, but they were willing to go slumming at Vegas World.
“When I went to the highest limits,” he recalled years later, “I started to get serious company. My first taste came with a visit from Adnan Kashoggi. He came in on the first weekend and dropped a hundred and ten thousand. That was my biggest score at the time in the casino business. That particular night gave me a real taste for money. I knew I could never go back to being worried about nickels and dimes. I wanted to start dealing to high rollers. I did everything I could to develop a reputation as a gambler, and I tried to convey the image of a loose-cannon type. I took up poker and splashed as much money around as I could. Sometimes I made foolish bets intentionally. And sometimes I made bad propositions with twenty-one players just to get the word out there that here’s a guy who’ll take a risk—and you never can tell how he feels that day or what proposition he may or may not get on.”
Stupak’s willingness to entertain all propositions generated much-needed publicity for Vegas World, but it also attracted card counters, wiseguy gamblers from across the country, and in at least one case, from as far away as Great Britain.
It was there that Kenneth Speakman was born and raised, but it was in the casinos of Las Vegas that he plied his trade as a blackjack card counter.
Card counting is not illegal in Nevada casinos, but the technique is frowned upon by management. In most instances, a person suspected of counting is notified by floor personnel that his action is no longer welcome at the casino. But Stupak publicly welcomed card counters. Where others treated them like Soviet spies, Stupak kept the action flowing.
Speakman strolled into Vegas World in August 1980 and began playing. He’d won approximately $3,200 when the dealer and casino manager thought they had spotted something. It was then that casino manager Chuck Wenner stepped in and halted play, which is the club’s prerogative.
Wenner detained Speakman. The first call the counter made was not to his lawyer, but to the police. Speakman was eventually charged with cheating, but his quickly placed call complicated matters.
Thus began a legal action that resulted in a lawsuit and the awarding of a far larger pot to Speakman. Speakman claimed that Vegas World had violated his rights and had falsely imprisoned him. He feared for his safety, a lawyer would claim more than three years later when the case went to trial before a jury in U.S. District Court. The jury awarded Speakman $25,000 in compensatory damages and $23,000 in punitive damages.
“I’d known Ken Speakman for some time,” Howard Grossman said. “He swore to me he didn’t do anything. Chuck swore the cards were bent and Ken swore he didn’t bend them.”
Through it all Speakman did not blame Stupak for his troubles. After all, the Polish Maverick was a self-proclaimed friend of blackjack players.
But not all card players. While the Vegas World blackjack pit had become a refuge for counters accomplished and amateur, the poker room had begun to take on a distinctly more dangerous appearance. Stupak’s own reputation as a high-stakes gambler attracted some of the best players in the city, but, like many poker parlors in Las Vegas, it also attracted an underworld element.
Associates of the Chicago mob’s Las Vegas enforcer Anthony Spilotro made Stupak’s card room a satellite office for suspected extortion and loansharking activities. Spilotro was a suspect in two dozen murders, but was never convicted of a felony during his lifetime. His lifetime ended abruptly; in June 1986, the bodies of Spilotro and his brother, Michael, were unearthed from an Indiana cornfield.
But in the early 1980s, Spilotro and his street gang of burglars and strong-arm extortionists struck fear in illegal bookmakers, poker players, and many a Las Vegas casino boss. Metropolitan Police Department Intelligence detectives and local FBI agents, who had been obsessed for years with Spilotro, noticed tough Tony’s people frequenting Vegas World and were instantly intrigued. Surveillance teams regularly spotted Spilotro’s brothers, John and Victor, in the poker room.
Were the boys planning to strong-arm their way into Vegas World? Had they already done so and were they now watching after their interests?
The detectives and agents couldn’t find out quickly without help from the inside, the sort of assistance only Stupak could provide. But Stupak, raised on the streets of Pittsburgh and schooled in poker rooms from the South Side to Sydney, was no stool pigeon. Members of the gambling industry have quietly cooperated with federal investigators for decades, but it was bad for business to let word circulate that a casino boss was providing an extra pair of eyes for law enforcement, especially when so many good customers had nefarious reputations.
Then along came Betty Carey, and the cops found a way to get inside Vegas World.
Carey was a self-professed world-class poker player in her early twenties with friends on both sides of the table. She made regular appearances in high-stakes tournaments and was the youngest woman operating in the male-dominated rooms. Like many other skilled players, Betty Carey gravitated toward the heavy action in Vegas World’s poker room in 1980.
It was there, she later claimed, that she was cheated out of approximately $250,000 and perhaps as much as $415,000 by house mechanics, cheaters who operate with the approval of the boss. Bob Stupak surely would have some explaining to do to state Gaming Control Board investigators. If the allegation was confirmed, he would lose his license and be banished from the industry.
Carey accused Stupak of using suspected card cheaters Clifford Isbell and John Deems to take her for the money she had won at poker and blackjack. Isbell was a valued informant for Metro Intelligence’s Lt. Kent Clifford, whose men watched Spilotro day and night. Clifford had played an integral role in shattering the Chicago mob’s influence in Las Vegas casinos. It was through Isbell that Clifford attempted to turn Stupak into an informant. The tradeoff: silence in the Carey cheating accusation.
“John Spilotro was hanging out in his hotel,” Clifford said later. “I saw him (Stupak) as an avenue, as an informant against organized crime.
“I had a meeting with him and that’s what I told him I wanted from him—information on organized crime. He was allowed to continue operating his business down there (in the poker room) in return for giving me information.”
Stupak’s dilemma was growing increasingly complex. First, he swore he hadn’t sanctioned the alleged activity of Isbell and Deems. Second, he suspected Carey was being used to extort money from him under the threat of being exposed as some sort of cheater. Third, Metro’s finest were using the Carey allegation as a pressure point to force him into cooperating against people whose close proximity put his business in jeopardy.
Stupak had little choice but to pacify the police. He met privately with Clifford in August 1980 and agreed to help when he could. Then he shrugged and went back to work.
Years later, Clifford admitted that Stupak made a terrible informant. For all the time the Polish Maverick spent in his casino, he rarely seemed to notice anything.
“Occasionally he would give me something, but very little,” Clifford said.
Placating Betty Carey would not be as easy.
Carey failed to file suit until December 1984 and gaming regulators didn’t investigate Carey’s allegation until several years later. The delays proved a great help to Stupak’s case.
By then, Isbell and Deems had become Carey’s best witnesses. But Stupak’s attorney, Frank Schreck, also provided witness statements that contradicted Isbell’s testimony.
“Isbell told me that he orchestrated the entire incident … in order to get even with Stupak and to make money in the process,” one affiant recalled. “‘If I can’t get the money one way, I’ll get it the other way,’” Isbell was alleged to have said.
For his part, Stupak was supremely confident he would prevail.
“If anybody ever comes up with any evidence that shows I ever cheated anyone, I’ll jump off my building, and I won’t use an airbag,” Stupak crowed to a reporter. “Betty Carey never lost an amount of money anywhere near $415,000. That figure is completely ridiculous. As a gambler, there’s nothing worse that I could possibly be accused of than these allegations. I’d rather be accused of murder. I welcome any investigation. I don’t have any trouble sleeping at night.”
The Control Board investigation found no credible evidence that Stupak had cheated Carey. Stupak was cleared of the cheating allegation in 1986. Carey’s civil racketeering suit against Stupak was thrown out that same year on the grounds that the three-year statute of limitations had expired. She later unsuccessfully appealed the dismissal to the state Supreme Court.
Carey also lobbied U.S. attorney’s offices in California and Nevada in a desperate attempt to prod federal authorities into taking the cheating case. They also passed.
Through it all, Stupak maintained his reputation as a standup guy who managed to tell the police what they wanted to hear without revealing what he knew. Not that he was enamored of the mob. Far from it.
Stupak would later recall being approached by organized crime figures angling for a piece of his action. He was wise to the traditional mob move: he knew if he relented in the slightest, if he granted a single concession, he would be opening a door he would never be able to close. By standing up to the illegal Culinary pickets on the sidewalk outside his club, he had rebuffed their first move. He knew the only strategy they’d have left would be to sit down and attempt to persuade him that it was in his best interests to take on some partners.
They met in the hotel coffee shop, and Stupak put on quite a show. He went bug-eyed, and it spooked them into thinking he was unstable.
“You don’t go to bed with the boys. Once you get into bed, you never get out,” Stupak said. “I handled the Outfit by being absolutely nuts. They let me know what was going on, said I was going to be with them, and I got all excited.
“‘When is the meeting?’ I said. ‘Do I get to carry a gun? I can’t wait. Do I get a kiss? Am I a made guy?’ I was outrageous, but it was nothing they could ever wake up to. Pretty soon the word went around: ‘That Stupak, he’s too nuts.’ They thought I was completely nuts. Nobody ever reacted that way to them.”
It wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last time that people surmised that Stupak’s mental deck lacked the proper number of cards, but the temporary insanity had the desired effect. The Chicago boys went away.
In late February 1981, Stupak announced on the “Merv Griffin Show” that Vegas World would be home to the largest jackpot on Earth. Dressed in a loud sport shirt with an open collar, Stupak said it came to him in a dream.
Four slot machines were grouped in the casino with a flashy sign touting the possibilities. The payoff was $1 million and could be hit only with the maximum $3 bet. Some of the smaller payoffs on the machines could be hit by lining up S-T-U-P-A-K. Never mind that aligning five straight 7s would require more than a little luck. It was sure to attract tourists to his place and attention to himself.
The last time he had attempted a similar pitch, his promotion was interrupted by the fire at the Million Dollar Historic Gambling Museum. And that was only a $250,000 jackpot.
“I want to offer people more than they can get at other places,” he said. “It’s a bit of a risk, but I’m willing to take it.
“This will give me world prominence.”
Or at least National Enquirer celebrity. The $1 million jackpot was touted in national tabloids. Stupak’s sense of promotion had landed him on the front page again with an idea that would catch fire in every casino in Nevada a decade later. He admitted that he wasn’t sure how people would react to it. If they didn’t bite, he would work another angle.
As part of Vegas World’s development, Stupak added a 340-seat showroom. The keno and poker parlors were expanded, the coffee shop cleaned up, and the casino enlarged from 16,000 to 27,000 square feet. Never one for understatement, Stupak had five chandeliers installed, and new oak paneling gave the place a touch of Binion’s Horseshoe. The eight-story hotel still had only 106 rooms and just four suites, but Stupak was on a roll.
Vegas World employees gave away faux $5 bills with Stupak’s face on them for use in select slot machines.
He announced Push-Over 21, in which ties above 21 would count as a push, returning a player’s wager. The fact such a coincidence rarely happened was beside the point. If it enticed a few more tourists into Stupak Country, it eventually would pay off.
Then four weeks before Christmas 1981, a fire broke out on the third floor of the hotel. Black smoke began to pour through the halls. A pile of linen had caught fire. Las Vegas firefighters were dispatched to the scene.
With skeptics still remembering the suspicious Million Dollar Historic Gambling Museum blaze, the last thing Bob Stupak needed was another fire. Even though he had collected money from the insurance company and no wrongdoing was ever proved, Stupak still faced suspicion. People were sure to suspect he was some kind of part-time torch. City inspectors wasted no time lending their opinions about the fire’s origin only hours after it was extinguished.
“We are calling it a suspicious fire at this time. It’s very likely that it is arson but we don’t know that for a fact,” fire inspector Paul Keeton told a reporter. “Someone could have flicked a lighted cigarette into the stack, and it eventually ignited. But the question is, what was the pile doing in the hallway in the first place? There were no maid carts around to indicate that employees were working in the area.”
The theory had a million holes in it, but that didn’t prevent it from making print. The suspicious fire eventually was ruled an accident, not arson, by local fire officials.
Stupak continued to pour his small but steady profits back into his garish operation. Neighbors complained of increasing numbers of robberies taking place in the Vegas World parking lot, but their voices were drowned out by the promise of expansion. In July 1982, he won approval for a 24-story, 339-room tower at a time Las Vegas was in the throes of one of the most serious slumps in its history. The expansion would give Vegas World a total of 441 rooms.
While some of the other casinos suffered during the slump, Stupak didn’t wait for customers to find his place; he all but dragged them out of their homes in the Midwest by offering special vacation packages that they couldn’t refuse. While other casinos were cutting back their complimentary privileges and tightening their belts, Stupak was training telephone sales crews and making mass mailings touting his vacations.
In the early years at Vegas World, it was rumored that the generosity of Stupak’s slot machines varied dramatically almost from day to day. There was a reason for it. He loosened them during the week, when Vegas World had trouble attracting players, and tightened them on the weekends, when his vacation-package marks hit town. The figures varied, but casino man John Woodrum recalled Stupak telling him his tightest machines held 25 percent—approximately five times the industry average.
When the bus customers hit the casino with their cups of quarters, Stupak just grinned.
“Here at Vegas World I have the B and B program—Bust them Buses,” Stupak told Woodrum.
Stupak was schooled in the fine art of the hustle, not in customer service, but soon after he opened Vegas World he realized his high rollers expected more than a wide-open game. One time Stupak was entertaining a wealthy player from Chicago, who was good for a $50,000 loss each time he visited Vegas World. This particular night, the player was in really deep. He was down $200,000 and requested a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Not juice from the bar. Not juice from concentrate, but fresh-squeezed. The cocktail waitress tried to explain that the player was at Vegas World, not Caesars Palace, but Stupak quickly intervened. If he wanted fresh juice, he would get fresh juice.
Stupak quickly rounded up a bag of oranges and headed to the kitchen. With the player growing impatient, the boss started squeezing. The gambler not only got his glass of juice, but he came away with the knowledge that the owner had squeezed it himself.
“All of a sudden, after my fourth or fifth orange, it hit me like a ton of bricks,” Stupak said. “I paused a moment, put the knife down, and asked myself, ‘Who’s the sucker here, that Chicago businessman out there losing two hundred thousand, or me in here frantically cutting and squeezing oranges?’”
At that moment Stupak had something of an epiphany. He decided that he would like to be as big a sucker as the Chicago businessman one day. He would like to be so wealthy that he wouldn’t think twice about spending $200,000 and receiving a glass of orange juice for his effort.
“So I made up my mind what my true ambition in life really was—I wanted to be the world’s biggest sucker with the ability to afford it,” Stupak said.
A man with millions can afford to be a sucker, Stupak figured. He became so enamored of his pet philosophy that he had a gold bracelet made with diamonds spelling the word “SUCKER.”
It was the kind of twist his father, Chester, could appreciate. After all, Chester Stupak had become an extremely prosperous “sucker” on the South Side by treating his good customers with high regard.
When in Las Vegas, Chester would go on dice runners at Vegas World. But after a few hours, Florence Stupak could always find her husband downtown at Binion’s Horseshoe, where he liked the tables and the characters of Benny Binion and his son, Jack.
“We were both very proud of Bob, and we used to go three or four times a year to his club,” Florence said. “One time when we went to Bob’s place we played and we won. Then we went to the Horseshoe and we lost. I’ll never forget him saying to us, ‘Why don’t you go there and win and come here and lose?’”
Chester Stupak remained his son’s hero even after his death in 1991 following a long illness. Feisty Florence Stupak continues to make her home in Pittsburgh.
Out on the sidewalk, Stupak faced more problems from organized labor. He had formed a construction company called High Rollers Inc. to serve as general contractor for the expansion, and he refused to hire union workers. Stupak had become a favorite target of the Southern Nevada Building Trades Council, whose members passed out handbills just beyond the Vegas World property line. With his tenuous reputation, the union bosses might have argued any number of safety issues associated with one of his buildings.
By September, while the AFL-CIO’s 26th annual national convention was meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada’s organized-labor leaders announced a boycott of Vegas World (along with the Imperial Palace and Bingo Palace) due to its non-union status.
Stupak’s stubbornness not only infuriated local labor leaders; it also served as something of a precedent on Las Vegas Boulevard. Prior to his expansion, Strip resorts were built almost exclusively with union labor, as were the majority of other commercial and industrial buildings in southern Nevada.
Stupak had made an enemy for life.
The expansion created other problems as well. Vegas World’s star entertainment policy rarely shined brightly, but it reached its low point after construction began on the new hotel building. The temporary facility featured folding chairs, cinder block walls painted black, and a tiny stage with a stage door that opened onto an alley. Performers would enter from the alley and exit through the showroom and the casino. The showroom was torn up and Vegas World became known as the Bermuda Triangle of entertainment.
Stupak’s $1 “Construction Special” attracted tourists and locals who were curious to find out whether they would get their buck’s worth. From singing trios to a combination magician and ventriloquist, the joint offered a little bit of everything, none of it worth a standing ovation.
Stupak’s showroom also was home to Jahna Reis and the Boob Tube Review, a $4.95 variety show that emphasized jiggle over talent. At Vegas World, encountering oddity in the showroom was half the fun. Where else could a patron watch Jerry Lee Lewis and busty strippers in the same week?
Perhaps the oddest program ever to headline at the hotel was Outrageous Vegas, a vulgar drag-queen show that nonetheless proved popular with locals and, surprisingly, vacation-package buyers.
Stupak, a Vegas history buff, in years to come would advertise his desire to befriend Frank Sinatra, but the acts at Vegas World never approached Rat Pack level.
In the early 1980s, Vegas World testimonials began appearing in national newspapers and magazine advertisements. Stupak hawked Vegas VIP Vacation packages and shouted nonstop about the action available at his casino.
His hotel and casino grew wilder by the day. Its interior design was a cross between early brothel and the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The walls were lined with mirrors—ensuring that first-time visitors would have difficulty finding the restrooms and the exit—and an astronaut and spaceship hung from the ceiling. The Starship Enterprise-sized big six wheel took an electric motor to spin.
Outside, Stupak commissioned a mural that covered the entire east wall of his hotel. The image: cards falling through space with the Earth in the background. Stupak immediately dubbed it the largest mural on the planet.
In time, Stupak would bolt a giant astronaut to the side of the hotel. The marquee would be shaped like a rocket ship, in stark contrast to the ancient entertainers it often announced.
Stupak’s willingness to improvise and operate his business by the seat of his pants was evident when he opened Vegas World’s sports book and immediately began accepting wagers that would have sent corporate handicappers into cardiac arrest. During the 1982 college football season, for example, betting was hugely lopsided on the Peach Bowl, which opened with Florida State as a seven-point favorite over West Virginia. It was one of the few bowl games that year in which the favorite appeared all but assured of victory and the line climbed accordingly. Florida State became a whopping 15-point favorite at every sports book in Las Vegas—except Vegas World.
Stupak locked in his line at 7½ and wrote $1 million worth of action. The sharpest sports bettors in Las Vegas rushed to Vegas World to take advantage of Stupak the sap, who stood to lose more than $400,000 if Florida State won by more than a touchdown. If West Virginia somehow covered the point spread, Vegas World would be $600,000 richer.
West Virginia not only covered, but beat Florida State outright, 28-6. Stupak’s reputation was growing.
“Where most people want to balance the books, Bob wanted to gamble. All the wiseguys came into Vegas World to bet against Stupak,” Howard Grossman said. “Stupak got lucky and beat them. He loved that.”
Stupak was rapidly building a reputation as a gambler and never passed up an opportunity to remind skeptics of it. His boasts resulted in officials at “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” labeling him “The man who will bet on anything.” At the Vegas World pool, Stupak once bet a friend $5,000 on who could hold his breath longer. Despite being a chronic cigarette smoker, Stupak prevailed. It made great grist for reporters and television producers.
Stupak once bet writer Roger Dionne he could beat him in a game of Ms. Pac-Man. Stupak won. Dionne recounted the tale years later in an entertaining feature in Gambling Times magazine:
“Since he finds it unnatural to do anything unless there’s money in it, we played a game for $50. I thought it would be the easiest $50 I ever made, since I played Ms. Pac-Man quite a lot while Stupak didn’t. Going first, I racked up something like 82,000 points. A lock, I figured.
“But Stupak’s final score was 86,000.
“As I reached disconsolately into my pocket for the $50, Stupak laughed. ‘You know,’ he confessed, ‘I’ve never come anywhere close to scoring that many points.’ But there was a match on—it didn’t matter whether it was for $50, $5,000, or $50,000—and Stupak did what he had to do to win. I may have had more skill playing Ms. Pac-Man, but he had more determination, more of that special quality which backgammon champion Paul Magriel calls ‘an insane desire to win.’”
Nowhere is Stupak’s reputation as a gambler more manufactured than in the game of poker. Although he was raised shooting dice and learned in a hurry about blackjack and sports betting, until early 1980 he had never played a hand of poker.
He would eventually become known as a high-stakes poker player and would win several championship tournaments, but he was a laughably bad player when he took up the game. And the high-stakes tables of Las Vegas are the last place on the planet a person should attempt to school himself in the sport of kings and queens. A few months after Vegas World opened, Stupak decided to learn the game. As usual, he did so with a fistful of cash and a mouthful of bravado.
Champion poker player Puggy Pearson taught him a few basics, and Las Vegas poker aficionado Eric Drache gave him numerous tips, but Stupak was anxious to scoop up the glory to be had at the high-stakes tables. He succeeded in part by forcing his will on other players with withering raises and a dangerous energy.
Although he was a daydreamer as a schoolboy, Stupak had to be a quick study in the Binion’s Horseshoe poker room or he might have wound up penniless. One night, he shocked a crew of sharpies with a string of kamikaze head-to-head hold ‘em matches for $5,000 apiece. He numbered keno tickets from one to eight and passed them out to challengers like tickets to the circus. Surely, the professionals figured, they had a bona fide clown in their midst.
He dispatched Number 1 in short order and followed by beating Numbers 2 and 3. His luck was running strong.
Then he lost to Number 4. Instead of allowing the winner who beat him a chance to collect his winnings, Stupak doubled the stakes and beat Number 4 in a $10,000 game. After two no-shows, Number 7 joined the list of losers. When Number 8 took a powder, Stupak’s class had ended. He figured he could take on the world.
“Here’s a sucker sitting here and nobody wants to play him,” Stupak puffed.
Stupak quickly became known as an insanely aggressive poker player capable of busting out a table at breakneck speed. He made sure to buy into the annual World Series of Poker, if only to improve his name recognition, and it was across a poker table that he met professional player and Minneapolis leather- goods company-owner Lyle Berman, who would later become his partner in the biggest bet of Stupak’s life.
In the early 1980s, Stupak became hooked on poker, and he clearly saw his newfound forte as a way to promote himself and his casino. In 1983, he played host to the America’s Cup Poker Tournament. Not only did he promise the winner a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, but he also challenged all comers to play head-to-head for stakes ranging from $5,000 to $1 million.
A year later, with cameras from the “Ripley’s” television show recording the match, Stupak took on ORAC, a poker-playing computer, for $500,000. The computer was programmed by professional player and author Mike Caro. Downtown casino owner Jackie Gaughan staked the computer, and the world was introduced to the wondrous poker skills of Bob Stupak—who had played his first hand just four years earlier. Stupak beat the artificial brains out of ORAC.
That same year, he placed third in the deuce-to-seven draw competition at the World Series of Poker at Binion’s Horseshoe. The finish was good for $31,500, but Stupak commonly played for even larger pots in cutthroat side games at Binion’s.
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One game was never enough action for Stupak. He constantly badgered the players at the table into making side bets. Nothing was off limits. From the bra size of a cocktail waitress to pitching coins against a wall, the propositions never ceased. His patter not only distracted some opponents, but it increased his image.
Of course, he was unable to pull off every stunt. One night in Binion’s poker room, he tossed out a wild proposition: For a few thousand dollars, he would drive blindfolded down Fremont Street and around downtown, returning safely to Binion’s. If he hit anything, he would lose the bet.
Word circulated through the casino quickly. So quickly, in fact, that security was notified, Metro was called out, and police were positioned on the street. They had no intention of letting Stupak endanger lives for the sake of a stunt. The bet was called off.
Another night at Binion’s, Stupak was growing bored with a high-stakes game against top poker players, including Puggy Pearson, so he amused himself with an old barroom con. He bet anyone willing to flash some cash that he could perform between “two and three hundred” pushups without resting. In a finger snap, he had action.
On the carpet in the poker room, he assumed the horizontal position and reeled off three pushups before collapsing dramatically.
His challengers figured they’d beat the wimp from the Steel City, but he laughed and explained their dilemma. They had bet that he would do somewhere between two and three hundred pushups, not between two hundred and three hundred, like they’d assumed. He did more then two, and they coughed up the cash.
Another time, Puggy Pearson fell victim to an even older trick when Stupak bet the gambling wild man that, without being touched in any way, Pearson could not stand on top of a chair for a three-count. Pearson took the bet.
He stood atop the chair and Stupak counted, “One.”
Moving toward the door, Stupak said, “Two.”
Waving goodbye to his friend Puggy, who’d become the focal point in the crowded room, Stupak left the building. Outside, he laughed until tears filled his eyes as Pearson looked around for assistance. When he got the punchline, he stepped down from the chair and handed over the cash. Stupak never told him precisely when he would say “Three.”
It was at Binion’s that Stupak encountered Eddie Baranski, the Joliet, Ill., poker player who became his fast friend and never ceased to marvel at the Pittsburgh native’s sense of humor and gambling audacity.
Outside the poker parlor, Baranski and Stupak were often together. Baranski, who had fought a weight problem for many years, realized he had found a true friend in Stupak when he heard the huckster’s latest proposition: Could Baranski lose 60 pounds with a few thousand bucks riding on the line?
For that kind of money, he could certainly try. After a few days, he began to get unexpected help. Stupak hired a dietician and sent his pudgy pal through a weight-loss program.
Baranski won the bet, and although he gained some of the weight back, he knew he had found a friend.
“That’s the kind of guy Bob is,” Baranski said. “I hang around Bob for one reason. I never know what’s going to happen next.”
As a player, Stupak was the classic steamroller. He lacked patience for drawn-out strategy and had difficulty sitting through tournaments. In nightly games, it was no-limit or nothing at all.
“Was he a great poker player? Not really,” one nationally recognized Las Vegas player said, choosing to remain anonymous. “Not in the true sense of knowing the game inside and out.
“But he was excellent at getting the money. In that regard, he’s probably in the top one percent of all poker players. He knew the value of sticking to situations that gave him his best shot. That meant he played no limit. You have to understand that no limit is a whole other ballgame. When you play for big stakes, everything is different. The pressure is enormous.”
Every player seeks an edge, and Stupak’s was obvious.
“He used to like to play guys who were short on money. He knew they had to win for financial reasons, and he didn’t care about the money. It was winning that mattered. That was his edge.
“Bob constantly runs mind games when he plays. He infuriates some players because of it, but that’s Bob. You’d play him for huge amounts of money and he’d be coming up with all kinds of side bets. Some had nothing to do with the game. People liked to say that it wasn’t worth playing Stupak even when you won because of the aggravation.”
Although he tried at every turn to make a sucker out of his competition and customers, Stupak was himself a sucker for fancy automobiles. He collected Rolls-Royces as a status symbol and for their investment potential, and at one point called Imperial Palace owner Ralph Engelstad—owner of one of the world’s largest classic car collections—to inquire about a model’s worth. When Engelstad explained that the particular model was worth approximately $50,000, Stupak thanked him and hung up.
Weeks later, Engelstad discovered Stupak had paid three times the car’s worth.
Stupak was more at home in the casino. He even managed to turn some of his losses into wins. After dropping $10,000 to two-time World Series of Poker champ Stu Ungar in a Texas hold’em freeze-out at Vegas World, Stupak challenged him to a simple game of chip lagging. The closest to the wall would win the bet, in this case $100 and later $500 per throw. Stupak gradually won back the money he had lost in the poker game.
Without an intergalactic advertising budget, Stupak set out to generate name recognition for Vegas World any way he could short of standing on the sidewalk in a sandwich board. And what better way to do that than run for elected office?
Traditionally, casino operators didn’t run for office—not even for mayor, which every four years attracts an eccentric collection of candidate characters worthy of Robert L. Ripley. From late-show vampires to retired prostitutes, freaks of every stripe are drawn to the office like moths to neon. With so few sober choices, the race for the job of chief ribbon-cutter in a city built on atomic doses of hype rarely is hotly contested. In the previous three decades, Las Vegas had changed mayors about once a generation. Oran Gragson, a charming furniture-store owner who overcame a heavy stammer to become the city’s top public leader, served as mayor for 16 years. His successor, Bill Briare, held the post eight years. With most of their competition coming from candidates with hand-painted signs, Oran Gragson and Bill Briare merely kept smiling, cutting ribbons, and winning.
Rather than put themselves out front, the state’s gambling bosses instead generally adhered to a simple credo: Why be one when you can lease one? They had money to make, and couldn’t be bothered worrying about neighborhood zoning or the latest citizen complaint. They let their campaign contributions and their all-pervasive influence determine the outcome of elections. And they rarely had difficulty communicating their wishes to those they had helped elect.
If the people were to draft a gambler for the job, Stupak would not have been their first choice. There were several more popular options. Horseshoe Club patriarch Benny Binion enjoyed his role as the wily sage and grandfather of Glitter Gulch. Sure, he had obliged a few men whom he believed needed killing during his wilder days, but a little gunplay never hurt a fellow’s reputation in Las Vegas. Then there was Jackie Gaughan, the former Omaha gambler who, with Brooklyn-born partner Mel Exber, turned a downtown grubstake into a formidable casino empire. Gaughan and Exber would have made a good team, but they were too busy taking care of business.
Flamingo developer and mob representative Benjamin Siegel captured the political philosophy of the old Las Vegas gambler when he took to task his assistant and boyhood friend, Moe Sedway, a little fellow who smoked long cigars and dreamed of legitimacy. Sedway’s entree into Las Vegas society in the early 1940s was so successful that he wanted to run for office; he temporarily forgot he was an outlaw’s assistant. Siegel reminded him.
“We don’t run for office,” Siegel sneered. “We own the politicians.”
His political aspirations dashed, Sedway hid from the maniacal Bugsy Siegel for weeks.
In a similar vein, Flamingo frontman Gus Greenbaum, who took over the place after Siegel was murdered in 1947 in Beverly Hills, sometimes was known as the Mayor of Paradise. Mayor Greenbaum and his wife, Bess, had their throats cut in 1958 in Phoenix.
Even if Greenbaum’s title was ceremonial and the cause of the homicide not politically motivated, perhaps Stupak should have taken it as a sign.
Gamblers’ resumes had improved measurably since the days of Siegel and Greenbaum, but the credo remained the same.
In March 1983, Bob Stupak quietly moved from his residence in the county into Vegas World with its city address. The move made him eligible to run for an office in Las Vegas. When filing opened for the spring election, Stupak picked the post with the highest profile: mayor. To reach his goal, he would have to unseat well-liked Bill Briare. While casino bosses had long dictated policy in Nevada, daily governmental operations in Las Vegas were run by staff and the city manager. Although the mayor sat on the City Council, his duties were largely ceremonial. The job paid little, but Stupak wasn’t in it for the money.
“I’ve met Mayor Briare on several occasions and he is, without a doubt, a fine man and a dedicated mayor,” Stupak said, already sounding very much like a seasoned politician. “However, eight years is long enough for any man in such a demanding job. Today we need someone with a fresh outlook and a different point of view, a man who is visible and willing to make changes. If nothing else, I assure you I’ll make the heart of this city beat as fast and as vibrantly as it ever has in the past.”
Stupak promised not to accept campaign contributions larger than $50, but he was far from the people’s candidate. He immediately began flooding local newspapers and radio and television stations with advertisements stating his goal of restoring a “winning attitude to Las Vegas.” Most of his ideas were ringing clichés, but he appeared to be having a good time. Although his outlay topped $100,000 for the campaign, it put his name and mug in every home in southern Nevada and generated publicity outside the community as well.
Not all of his ideas were crafted as sound bites. Although the office is nonpartisan, Stupak began talking like a well-meaning socialist. If elected, in the first 30 days he promised to create a program that would give senior citizens discounts on medical and dental care. He later expanded the theme to include discounts on clothing and entertainment. As if they didn’t know, senior citizens were welcome at Vegas World day or night, too.
On Election Day, Briare prevailed with 61.5 percent of the vote, but Stupak ran second. His 33.1 percent placed him well ahead of a topless bar proprietor, a retired motel operator, a sporting-goods store owner, and a gaggle of others. Although Stupak hadn’t come close to winning, he had developed a dangerous infatuation with politics, one that would return to embarrass him years later.
But in 1983, Stupak was nonchalant about his second-place finish. He knew he had enjoyed his 15 minutes of political fame and more; the campaign cash was money well spent.
“That’s the way it goes,” he said. “I was looking for miracle. So many miracles have happened to me since I’ve been in Las Vegas, I was starting to get used to them.”
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Less than a year later, Stupak hit upon a way to attract attention to his casino that not even the city’s legendary promoters had considered: he would hire a guy to jump off the building.
He found his man in Dan Koko, a divorced father of three from North Carolina who specialized in high-altitude stunts. Dressed like a pilot without an airplane, on May 19, 1984, Koko stepped out of a window on the 20th floor. Arms wide, he dropped 250 feet and landed atop a giant airbag.
The fact Koko had dropped more than 80 yards and lived barely caused a ripple in the Las Vegas media. Local newspaper editors were so used to Stupakian stunts that they played the photograph, which depicted Koko falling off the Earth, on page 10 of the local section.
Three months later, Stupak upped the stakes and drew national attention: he promised to pay Dan Koko $1 million if he would free-fall 326 feet from a scaffolding atop the hotel. The record for such madness was 311 feet.
Koko accepted and stepped into thin air outside Vegas World on August 30. This time, Stupak made certain the press was watching. Photographers from the National Enquirer and People magazine and cameramen from “Entertainment Tonight” were there to capture every second. Stupak again had seized the moment. For a short time, the gambling world was looking his direction on the Strip.
Koko landed safely and the feat was memorialized from coast to coast.
“I feel pretty good, just a little shaky,” Koko said, after the jump.
His emotional state soon grew noticeably shakier. According to Stupak, while he was playing high-stakes poker in Ireland, Koko concocted a contract in order to secure the huge safety airbag he used for his jumps. The bag’s manufacturer believed Koko was cutting him in on 25 percent of a million-dollar payday. Stupak discovered the problem when he returned to Las Vegas and found Koko and company waiting to be paid.
The fallout from the jump held all the promise of a public-relations fiasco, so Stupak devised a plan he thought would make everyone happy. He announced that he had charged Koko a $975,000 landing fee for the million-dollar jump. Reporters laughed it off as yet another Stupak caper. Koko was ready to take his money and run. Only the duped airbag manufacturer was displeased. So much so, in fact, that he sued Stupak for breach of contract.
But in those days, Stupak seldom entered into an agreement without getting the best of the deal. After a three-day trial, a jury found in Stupak’s favor. Koko, meanwhile, went into hiding.
All in all, it was just another day at Vegas World for a man becoming known as the biggest promoter in a huckster’s paradise.