Trump Taj Mahal: End of an era; Wynn joins Atlanta pursuit

“It’s like saying goodbye to an old friend for the final time. I worked here and lived here, it was my whole life and now it’s closing. It’s all been taken away. My whole body is shaking.” So said longtime Trump Taj Mahal patron Michael Angelo as the casino closed just before 6 a.m. this morning. Owner Carl Icahn gambled that Unite-Here Local 54 would bend to his my-way-or-the-highway ‘negotiation’ style and lost. But Taj workers lost, too, as they now join the thousands of casino workers put out on the streets as the Boardwalk continues its overdue market correction. Icahn claimed to have lost $350 million on the Taj and shed a few crocodile tears, saying, “I am extremely grateful to all of the almost 3,000 employees for their hard work, especially those that stayed loyal to us during this trying period.” Too bad he wasn’t grateful enough to give those workers proper health and benefit plans.

“I gave most of my adult life to this place. I had to pay for health care out of my own pocket, and if you don’t think that’s expensive, you haven’t looked. I lost my fiance to cancer just when medical insurance came off the table for us,” said maid Rose Hall. “I’m angry about what’s happened, but I’m not sad about what we did. I’m at peace with myself.” Added cook Chuck Baker, “it’s destroying our livelihoods and our families. You take away our health care, our pensions and overload the workers, we just can’t take it.” Said Local 54, in a formal statement, “Housekeepers, servers and other casino workers at the Taj Mahal earn on average less than $12 an hour.”

It actually took 75 minutes longer than planned to shutter the casino, as Icahn’s minions had failed to cut the braces on the doors to the correct size, forcing some on-the-fly adjustments. Now the strikers and other employees, some of whom have been at the Taj for three decades, have to venture into the cold, cruel world in search of new jobs. “When we opened this building there were no cell phones and no computers. Some of these people have never filled out a job application. It’s going to be a big transition for a lot of people but we are strong and we are together,” said waitress Tina Condos, trying to find a silver lining in a very dark cloud.

During its 26 years in business, the Taj went from being the “eighth wonder of the world” to a seedy grind joint, as Trump Entertainment Resorts lead investor Marc Lasry tried to run it on the cheap, under cheeseparing CEO Bob Griffin. (The Donald is still trying to take his name off the building.) Even in the death, the Taj has its fans. Said player Ingrid Lutzen, “I still think that it’s the most glamorous place here.” Donald Trump took time out from his presidential campaign to oppose friend Icahn’s decision. “There’s no reason for this,” he said of the closure. “Once it closes, it’s too expensive to ever reopen it.” (He built it, so he ought to know.) “It’s very sad to me. I felt they should have been able to make a deal.It’s hard to believe they weren’t able to make a deal.”

Local 54 prexy Robert McDevitt thinks otherwise. His theory is that Icahn will engage in capex upgrades over the winter and try to reopen the Taj next spring as a scab casino. And he’s prepared the send the picketers back out to counterattack. (Some renovations have already been performed.) The Associated Press painted a bleak picture of the casino’s waning days: “Many table games were left unstaffed, and workers cordoned off entire banks of slot machines with yellow caution tape last week as others ripped the electronic guts from them. Liquor had been removed from some service bars, and even soap dispensers disconnected from bathroom walls.”

Casino pundits weighed in with their own postmortems. “This was for years the iconic, must-see property in Atlantic City. It was as big as Donald Trump’s ego. So a town that was once Trump City is now Trumpless, in every respect,” said Spectrum Gaming Group‘s Joe Weinert. “The legacy of the Taj is a monument built on the ideology of the day, reflecting the excess of the ‘80s and ‘90s. In some respects it is a model to a lack of vision among some of the corporate power brokers and government entities that influenced decisions during that period,” added Drexel University professor Robert Ambrose, alluding to the property’s $1 billion-plus cost, founded on a junk-bond debt burden so immense that the Taj would have had to gross $1 million a day to reach its break-even point. That was just the beginning of a troubled history that culminated at dawn today. “[Trump] built a building that from the start could not sustain itself. While the Taj generated plenty of cash, it was in trouble from the start. He couldn’t service its debt. Despite what he says, he wasn’t that great of a businessman,” says Temple University professor Bryant Simon.

“You can learn everything you need to know about Donald Trump from his time in Atlantic City. The first thing was the seduction — people drawn to his money and his celebrity, the over-the-top nature of his projects,” added Simon. “He took helicopters in and out of town, and he lent his celebrity to the town.” Well, those days are now officially over. As state Sen. James Whelan (D) — a former Atlantic mayor — put it, “You think there’s something subtle here that you’re missing? What you see is what you get with him.”

* Philadelphia‘s Little League park used to be so disreputable that visiting teams balked at playing in it. A brand spanking new diamond has taken its place, thanks to infusions of casino revenue from SugarHouse Casino. In Bensalem, police, fire and EMS services have been thoroughly upgraded thanks to largesse from Parx Casino. And, at least until host-community fees were struck down by the state Supreme Court, Chester could look forward to $5 million in yearly education funding from Harrah’s Philadelphia. These were some of the takeaways from the American Gaming Association‘s Pennsylvania roadshow. However, it wasn’t all “Kumbaya.”

When Greenwood Gaming Chief Marketing Officer Marc Oppenheimer said the Cordish Gaming/Greenwood casino being built in the southern part of the City of Brotherly Love would bring in “incremental revenue,” SugarHouse General Manager Wendy Hamilton went on the attack. “We think the idea is horrifying. Our customers, our employees, our neighborhoods want stability. A lot of the things we’ve discussed today depend on stability for our property … We’ve seen what happened in Atlantic City, with five casinos closing in the last 24 months. At the end of the day, there is a finite percentage of people who will game as a recreation, and there are a hell of a lot of casinos on the Eastern seaboard,” she said, concluding, “Growth in this market does not indicate we need more slot machines.”

* Hard Rock International is expressing interest in Atlanta as one of its next hotel markets. Of course, having infrastructure in Atlanta would give Hard Rock a leg up if and when (more likely when) Georgia legalized casino gambling. Wynn Resorts has also joined the hunt and has retained lobbyists for the next Legislature. Incidentally, the Miami Herald reports that ousted Seminole Tribe chairman James Billie enjoyed “longest tenure of any elected leader in the Western Hemisphere, other than Fidel Castro.” Now there’s a dubious benchmark.

* David Baazov, who has plenty of problems of his own to deal with right now, has called off the dogs in his pursuit of Amaya. The latter, however, does not lack for suitors.

* If you feel like having a bit of a flutter on the 2016 presidential election you can’t do it in Nevada (not for lack of trying by the gaming industry). But you can fly over to Great Britain. If you like playing long shots, the betting markets there give Donald Trump a less than one-in-five chance of winning. Who knows? If he wins, some punters could clean up big.