For Wynn, a swift loss
Mogul spent decades shaping Las Vegas
LAS VEGAS — Steve Wynn’s name still shimmers atop his casino on the Las Vegas Strip. Callers phoning the Wynn Las Vegas on Wednesday heard a familiar recorded voice when they got put on hold. “Hi, I’m Steve Wynn,” it said. “I live in the hotel.” He just doesn’t work there anymore. The billionaire real estate mogul and powerful Republican Party donor resigned as chairman and CEO of Wynn Resorts this week amid sexual misconduct allegations first reported in The Wall Street Journal. It was a swift fall for a man who spent decades reshaping Las Vegas from its mob and gambling roots into a resort destination focused on luxuries amenities and family-friendly spectacles.
For now, he departs an industry challenged in recent years by a generation of millennials who prefer entertainment to gambling, and a city that finds itself in competition with a growing number of cities that offer a similar array of enticements.
“Wynn was and is visionary,” said Michael Green, associate professor of history at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. “He commented in the ’80s that old Vegas didn’t need another casino, but it sure needed an attraction. He understood with the spread of gambling that Las Vegas had to do something else. Something different.”
Former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said Wynn “invented new things” at a time when the city was still in the midst of its grittier days of mob rule.
The son of a bingo parlor owner who arrived in Las Vegas from Atlantic City in 1967, Wynn brought such over-the-top features as “dancing” fountains that move to music and pirate ships to a landscape whose premier symbols of escape had been free booze, show girls and cheap shrimp cocktails.
His first construction project, in 1989, was the Mirage. At a cost of more than $600 million, it featured rare white tigers, an open atrium with lush foliage and truly luxury accommodations. It was the first new hotel built in decades and it spawned Treasure Island — the pirate-themed casino that Wynn saw as a draw for families who could watch buccaneers engage in fights aboard schooners in a lagoon — right along the Las Vegas Strip.
Wynn then set upon building the $1.6-billion Bellagio Hotel and Casino. With its iconic fountain show on an 8.5-acre man-made lake, the hotel served as the centerpiece of the film “Oceans 11,” and Wynn became the Strip’s ambassador for classy living. He seemed to relish the spotlight — much as he had in the early days, when he filmed a series of TV commercials with Frank Sinatra.
In 2000, Wynn lost the Mirage properties amid a takeover by Kirk Kerkorian’s MGM Resorts but in 2005 opened the Wynn Casino, which at $2.7 billion was at the time the largest privately funded project in the nation.
“I have reached the conclusion I cannot continue to be effective in my current roles.” Steve Wynn
Wynn was in the midst of building a $2.4 billion casino project in Boston when the sexual misconduct allegations surfaced.
The Wall Street Journal said it had interviewed a number of women, many of whom were employees of Wynn’s, who said the casino owner had forced them to have sex with him. Wynn paid a $7.5-million settlement to a manicurist at his hotel who said she was forced to lie down on a massage table and submit to having sex, the newspaper reported.
This week, the Las Vegas Review-Journal unearthed a previously unpublished story from 20 years ago that reported similar allegations of sexual misconduct by Wynn, including an account from a woman who said she was pressured to have sex with the casino owner in order to keep her job.
“In the last couple of weeks, I have found myself the focus of an avalanche of negative publicity," Wynn said. "As I have reflected upon the environment this has created — one in which a rush to judgment takes precedence over everything else, including the facts — I have reached the conclusion I cannot continue to be effective in my current roles.”
Wynn had already resigned as finance chairman for the Republican National Committee after becoming a booster for President Donald Trump in 2016. And the University of Pennsylvania announced Tuesday that it was removing his name from a building and stripping him of an honorary degree.
Green said it will be more difficult to do that in Las Vegas.
“His fingerprints are everywhere,” Green said.