Getting a gaming license in Nevada is a little different from getting a driver’s license—and a lot more expensive.
In Nevada, you have to pay to be investigated no matter how long it takes or how much it costs. Back in 2003 it cost more than $100,000 for each of us to be investigated and pay our legal fees.
Even though you know you’re being investigated, it’s still a shock when State Gaming Control officials show up at your door and say, “Good morning. We’re going to spend the day on your computer.”
They go through your e-mails, your bank accounts, your phone records. By the time they’re through, they know everything about you and the guy who washes your car.
Fair enough. It’s their job to keep the industry clean. But the investigation turned into something out of a spy film one sunny day when my cell phone rang as I was driving with Perry.
“The FBI is in the office,” my assistant said, “and they have some questions for you.”
The FBI? About the only time I’d ever broken the law was when I rode an unauthorized motorbike down the streets of Barnsville in seventh grade. Even then I must’ve looked both ways about ten times as I approached each corner—making certain I didn’t turn straight into a paddy wagon.
“Should we call our gaming lawyer?” I asked Perry.
“We’ve got nothing to hide,” Perry said. “Tell ’em we’ll go right now.”
As we drove over, I couldn’t help wondering if I’d done something wrong that I didn’t even know about.
After a number of questions, the FBI agent came right out and put his cards on the table. “I know you’re going to tell me the truth,” he said. “Does Rick Rizzolo or any of his associates have a hidden piece of The Golden Nugget?”
That was it? I actually started laughing. I just couldn’t help myself. The tension drained right out of me.
Rick Rizzolo was the owner of one of Vegas’s strip clubs: Crazy Horse Too. The club had been around so long it was a Vegas institution. So was Rizzolo. He’s one of the most sought-after gamblers in town. The Hard Rock kept a table on reserve for him twenty-four hours a day. Nobody else could play on it. Rizzolo often promoted charity causes, and he was a fixture at political fund-raisers. It would be hard for anybody who’s anybody in Las Vegas not to have crossed paths with Rick Rizzolo at some point.
Besides, he’s a very friendly guy and a lot of fun to be around. In the days after Tim and I sold Travelscape, we occasionally went to Rick’s club to smoke a cigar and have a drink. There weren’t even strippers soliciting lap dances in the VIP lounge where we drank. The VIP lounge was a place where celebrities could unwind without a hassle, and where friends of Rick’s could get together. Sometimes we had dinner and gambled with Rick. But that was the extent of the relationship.
I’d been traveling to Europe frequently for Expedia so I saw a lot less of Rick than Tim did. But the FBI had been tapping Rizzolo’s phone in an investigation dubbed “Operation G-Sting” that had lasted more than a decade. There were allegations that employees at Crazy Horse Too had beaten patrons with baseball bats and that customers were being forced to sign inflated credit card receipts. Our experiences at the club had always been friendly, and our only exposure to baseball bats or inflated bills came on the pages of the newspaper.
But suddenly, we were somehow being linked to the investigation like many others who’d walked into that VIP lounge—Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and George Clooney included. It’s true, logs showed that I’d phoned Rizzolo eleven times. But anybody who listened to those calls could tell they were simply about the timing of dinner reservations.
“No way,” I told the agent, “Rick Rizzolo is not involved in The Golden Nugget in any way, shape, or form.”
Would Tim and I, asked a gaming agent present, come to Carson City to look at a few photos?
Next thing you know we’re at the Gaming Control Board offices in the capital getting barraged with questions. Did we know this guy? This guy? This guy?
There were about four or five photographs of guys we’d seen before. One guy who worked for Rizzolo, it turned out, was the brother of a member of a Chicago crime family named Joey “the Clown” Lombardo. During the interview, a gaming agent said ominously, “We know about Naked Twister.”
What the—?
One of the recordings the FBI must’ve picked up from Rick’s conversations had some mention of the game Naked Twister. It was mentioned over the phone as part of some joke. But I guess the FBI was casting it out like a fishing net to see what it might haul in. Okay, I’ve been to the Crazy Horse. I’d go as far as to say that when I was in my twenties and early thirties it was part of the young, single guy’s circuit in Vegas. When friends came in from out of town, you took them to dinner, hit the Hard Rock to throw the dice, and then capped the night off at the Crazy Horse. It was a damn good time, I might add. But just because you have dinner at Piero’s with the owner of a strip club and smoke a cigar in his joint, that doesn’t mean you’ve been contorted on a Twister game board with the limbs of six naked women wrapped around you.
It was hard to tell if they were trying to build a case against Rick Rizzolo and the guys in the pictures, or if our knowledge of the people in the photos was going to be used against us when we stood before the state’s Gaming Control Board.
We already knew that our appearance before the Gaming Control Board wasn’t going to be a picnic. But now we quickly began to get the drift of two different cases that might be brought against us.
Here we have Mr. Tom Breitling, the bumpkin from Barnsville, who’d never even seen The Godfather when he went off to college. Who came to Las Vegas thinking that the VIG (the vigorish percentage) advertised atop taxis by casinos to attract gamblers to their baccarat tables stood for Very Important Gambler. Who thought the signs in front of hotels that said Valet Full really meant the valet was full, when everybody else in Las Vegas knew the sign meant you needed to grease the palm of the attendant in order to get your car parked. This is the same Mr. Breitling who was repeatedly outfoxed in the game of cribbage as a young man by his Grandma Johnson. Could there be an easier mark in this city of 1.8 million for the mob?
And here we have Tim Poster. Could the Gaming Control Board members even begin to count the number of incidents in Mr. Poster’s past that might raise an eyebrow?
There was that night as a very young man when he got cut off in his Lumina near the intersection of Flamingo and Las Vegas Boulevard, when he jumped out of his car and reached through the window of the offending vehicle with the intention of pulling the offending driver out, causing the offending driver’s wife to race out the passenger door and start smashing the high heel of her shoe on the back of Tim’s Lumina, distracting Tim enough to allow the offending driver to hit a switch and power the window up, causing Tim to grab the offending driver’s hair as the window closed. The next thing Tim knew the offending driver’s wife was back in the passenger seat, the offending driver was hitting the gas, and he, Tim Poster, was standing alone on Las Vegas Boulevard with a toupee in his hand.
Oh, yes, and what about that night Mr. Poster and his business partner enjoyed stogies and Sambuca at Morton’s steak house? The night when a diner whom they passed on the way out said, “Thanks for ruining my dinner with your fucking cigars!” And Mr. Poster responded, “Excuse me, sir, but this is a cigar-friendly restaurant and we were simply enjoying ourselves—and maybe you should watch your mouth in front of the lady.” To which the guy shot back: “Well, you should know you’re a fucking asshole!” To which Tim grabbed the guy’s coffee cup, splashed the beverage in the guy’s lap, set the cup back down, straightened his jacket, and walked out. At which point the guy with the puddle of coffee in his lap picked up the cup and hurled it at Tim, who turned the corner just in time for the cup to sail by and smash into the forehead of a diner at the table just beyond, drawing blood and sending the poor guy to the hospital.
These were scenes that could’ve come straight out of a Martin Scorsese film. And I’ve got to admit, the images might well create a certain impression in the mind of somebody who didn’t really know Tim.
When I first arrived in Vegas, we’d go to see Sinatra without a ticket, receive a hug from Nicky the maitre d’, pass the legion of Frank’s adoring fans, and get escorted to a seat at a front table. “How the hell did you do that?” I’d ask. And Tim would bend his nose with a finger to imply that we were “dialed in.” It was a friend and two Benjamin Franklins that got us those seats—not any link to the mob. Favors are currency in Las Vegas. You get me in here, and I’ll get you in there. To Tim, being a wise guy means figuring out the angles in order to get what you want. That’s what makes a wise guy “wise.”
But the Gaming Control Board had a very different definition of the word “wise.” Even after our trip to Carson City, we had no idea what kind of grilling we were in for when we stepped into that first hearing. We should have known the moment we arrived. The toughest cases are always scheduled for early in the day. Ours was first on the docket.
To be fair, I should point out that it’s a damn good thing Nevada’s got a Gaming Control Board. The Strip was put on the map thanks to a man by the name of Bugsy Siegel, who opened the Flamingo in 1946 with $6 million of the mob’s money. Even though Siegel was whacked with a hailstorm of bullets, one of which pierced his cheek, the legend of his murder inspired the shot-through-the-eyeball-while-getting-a-massage scene in The Godfather.
For years, the mob and the teamsters were rooted in the casino industry in Vegas. The Gaming Control Board is partly responsible for that no longer being the case. The cleansing of the casino industry, in fact, could be cited as one of the catalysts that drove the boom in Las Vegas. Every nickel is accounted for in the casino industry. It’s exactly this sort of scrutiny that makes it easy for hotel-casinos to attract billions from Wall Street. It may seem strange, but Wall Street can trust a casino in Las Vegas a lot more than it can many other businesses because of the layers of accountability and the stringent monitors the state government has set in place.
On the other hand, the rigor of a Gaming Control Board investigation is said to have kept many high profile people from owning a hotel-casino. Nobody likes a trip to the proctologist unless it’s absolutely necessary.
Owning a casino was Tim’s dream. We wanted the license. The rubber glove was necessary.
Our first appointment was scheduled for 9:00 AM on January 7, 2004. After the initial pleasantries, one of the Gaming Control Board’s three members, Bobby Siller, began to bring up a lot of the information that the FBI had asked us about—in a very ominous tone.
“Do you know a Mr. Rocky Lombardo?”
“Do you know a Mr. Vinny Faraci?”
We stated for the record that these were guys we might have eaten dinner with at a table of twenty. But whatever we said seemed to get twisted against us. Reasonable responses began to sound like admissions of guilt.
When the board members asked Tim if he’d ever loaned or taken money from Rick Rizzolo, Tim remembered a time that he had. His explanation was perfectly understandable. They were at a casino where Tim didn’t have a credit line and Rick did. So Tim accepted a loan from Rick, and they hit the tables. This is commonplace among high rollers in Vegas. You could almost call it professional courtesy. Tim often lent money to people he trusted from his credit lines. But the back-and-forth triggered by the discussion of that one loan made it seem like Rick’s hand was already in Tim’s pocket.
Siller, one of the three members on the board, had a background in law enforcement, and he focused on the nights we’d spent at the Crazy Horse Too. He pointed out that the surveillance cameras at these clubs could also be used in ways that we might not anticipate—to capture moments that would prove embarrassing to patrons in the future. Such images, he added, are a red carpet to extortion.
He let everybody know that the results of the FBI’s investigation of Rizzolo would be over shortly, and that some bad things were going to come out. “It’s been my experience that you would definitely have been a mark,” he told us—along with every media outlet in the state. “Something would have happened to both of you, make no mistake about that.”
Siller’s tone suggested we were doomed to wake up with a bloody horse head under our bed sheets any day now. It seemed absurd to us. But what could we do? Again and again, Tim admitted his bad judgment in continuing to speak with Rizzolo after our lawyer had advised him to cut off all communication. How could Tim make the world understand that he had backed away from Rizzolo? It just wasn’t his way to completely ignore somebody he’d been friendly with, somebody who’d never done him any harm.
It was hard for anybody who didn’t really know Tim to understand. Years earlier, while picking up business around town for LVRS, Tim would occasionally check into a hotel room, then check out less than an hour later. It was assumed by many that Tim was using the room with a hooker. But in fact, Tim had paid the entire day’s rate simply to make sure he had a clean restroom. But who’d believe that in Vegas?
Well, the worst was yet to come. Soon the name Jack Franzi came up. Tim’s great uncle. Our beloved Uncle Jack.
“Mr. Poster, are you aware that Mr. Franzi is a denied applicant?”
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“Are you aware that one of the concerns was his association with organized crime figures, illegal bookmakers?”
Suddenly, it sounded to Tim as if they were asking him to sever all ties with his uncle, the man who had helped put him through college, who was a father figure during a time when his own father wasn’t there for him. As they looked at Tim, friends who’d come to the hearing were actually squirming in their seats.
Tim’s restraint was being tested almost more than he could bear. The guy who once got into a fight over a parking space with a pediatrician suddenly had to stand at a podium and turn the other cheek as his uncle’s reputation got slapped around.
In any other setting, Tim might have made the case that Las Vegas ought to be thanking people like his Uncle Jack and Bob Martin for helping to organize legal sports betting. But Tim knew that the slightest retaliation would be an alarm to the board and give the three members just the evidence they needed to deny the license. This was not a court of law where there are rights to protect the innocent. The board held all the power to judge our character. The three guys at the head of the room would make a decision on whether to recommend or deny us that license.
For two hours Tim remained on the grill. At one point the board called me up to answer a few questions, and just when Tim thought he’d gotten off the hot seat, they summoned him for more.
When it was over, the three members of the Gaming Control Board didn’t see fit to recommend that we receive a license unless the state could easily yank it away.
“There are too many questions here,” said board member Scott Scherer. Without a limitation, he said, his vote would be no.
That basically meant the board would recommend to the Nevada Gaming Commission that we receive a license only if we’d start out on probation.
Probation? We hadn’t done a damn thing wrong! But we were in quicksand, and our lawyer only pushed us deeper. “It’s clear that the board wants a limitation,” he said. “Hopefully it will be as short a limitation period as possible.”
When the Gaming Control Board recommended a one-year limitation, we knew we were dead. What investor in his or her right mind would hand over money for a hotel-casino without knowing whether the owners would be allowed to run it for more than a year?
We were distraught as we stepped outside the courtroom only to find Mark Burnett’s reality TV cameras waiting. We headed to the elevator and let the doors close on them.
What was there to say? It didn’t matter, anyway. How can you have a show called The Casino without a casino?
The next morning, the newspaper was not a pretty sight.
Here we were, trying to do something good, and what we got in return was a public pummeling. The fact is we’d worked our asses off for years, and now a board member had dismissed our accomplishments as luck. Now, after Tim and I had spent a couple of years apart searching for and finally finding ourselves, the public was seeing a completely distorted image of us. All of a sudden, we were being dished up as either naïve fools or public enemy number one.
Once you’ve been painted like Joe Pesci in a mobster movie, it’s hard to restore your image. People would never know Tim as he really was now. But I knew him. And the guy I knew was the owner of a successful company who went to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas to take an economics course just so he could get the final three credits for his degree at USC—even though the degree would have no impact on his livelihood. People would never know that, when USC refused to honor the UNLV credits after he passed that course, Tim flew to USC on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for an entire semester to take another economics course and earn his degree. People would never know that it was Tim who held me back when I first moved to Vegas and might have succumbed to her 24/7 delights. But that’s a very different picture of Tim, not the sensational wise guy that had just been trotted out by the media. It’s much easier—and certainly far more fun—to paint a mobster dressed in silk.
Phone calls flooded in from family and friends to lift our spirits. One unexpected call really stood out.
Only someone who’d gone through the same process could truly understand how Tim and I were feeling.
Elaine Wynn knew what it was like to be judged guilty before being proven innocent. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission had treated her and her husband, Steve, so suspiciously it wouldn’t even let them attend the opening of their own hotel back in 1980.
“You’re probably feeling it’s us-against-them,” she said.
“That’s exactly how we feel,” I told her.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t underestimate the power of the process. And don’t disrespect the dues you have to pay. This is not just about them riding roughshod over you. This is not about you being cavalier. This is about them getting your attention and saying, ‘Listen, boys, you may be the next coming. But there are rules here that must be adhered to.’”
She wouldn’t let us feel sorry for ourselves, and it was just the support we needed. In hindsight, I can now see she was saying, “Welcome to the club.”
We were now living under a microscope, and we had to understand what that meant. We were asking to be the youngest casino owners in the state of Nevada. The state wanted to make sure that we weren’t boys on a lark. It wanted to see us as responsible men.
In two weeks, we’d have to step onto the grill again when the Nevada Gaming Commission considered the Gaming Control Board’s recommendation and made a final decision. The ante was raised. Our lawyer made plans to ask for an extension of the limitation. Every fact that had been revealed at the first meeting was sure to be scrutinized even further.
We’d gotten as far as we had by being ourselves, we decided, and that’s the way we were going to stay. “It feels like I’m going to the electric chair,” Tim said as he approached the hearing. Mark Burnett’s cameras were there to catch it all.
It was painful to watch Tim stand up to yet another inquisition. It was painful not only for me and our friends, but for my mother, who was battling colon cancer, and my father, who’d already worked through his own misconceptions of Tim.
My dad is the straightest arrow in the world. There is simply nobody more trustworthy. For thirty-three years, thousands of people stepped into a gigantic metal tube and depended on him to lift all 873,000 pounds of it off the ground, navigate it through the clouds, and then land that tube safely six thousand miles away. Never once did he disappoint.
Now, Tim felt like shit as he looked over at my dad when my name was linked to the mob. And my dad, having gotten to know Tim, could barely keep himself from jumping out of his seat and giving the five members of the Nevada Gaming Commission an earful. “Let me tell you about these boys…”
By the end of the hearing, we were beginning to understand what it would take. The chairman of the commission, Peter Bernhard, asked, “So let me be clear on this, Mr. Poster. Am I right in the knowledge that there’s not one member of your ownership group that has ever had any experience running a casino operation?” When we agreed to bring in a team of experienced people, the board began to understand the seriousness of our intentions. It extended our license to four years with probation. When the hearing was over, Mark Burnett’s cameras captured our hugs. All we had to do was wait until midnight before we got the keys to The Golden Nugget.
As we prepared for the celebration at the hotel, an elderly man and his wife, who were parked on the fourth floor of The Nugget’s garage, drove through a retaining wall, and their car plunged to the street. Both died. The man had hit the gas instead of the brake, and it certainly wasn’t the hotel’s fault. But we were besieged with news reporters as helicopters hovered overhead.
The enormity of our undertaking was right in front of us. Tim and I were now responsible for 1,907 rooms and suites, 40,000 square feet of casino space, and nearly 2,800 full-and part-time employees. It was like being in charge of a little kingdom. As the clock ticked toward midnight and we prepared to celebrate under these strange circumstances, our lawyers’ cell phones were jangling at our table to sort out the accident while singing waiters were hitting operatic high notes.
Well, you can’t call it an adventure if you know what’s going to happen next.
At the stroke of midnight, January 23, 2004, it was all ours, and we lifted our glasses as Tim held up the keys to the joint.
“We’ve got the keys to the kingdom,” Tim said.
“But you’re open twenty-four hours a day,” Perry said. “Why do you need keys?”
“To get in the cage,” Tim said, “That’s where all the cash is.”