Wynn-Adelson feud renewed; Caesars readies wrecking ball

Until recently, Sheldon Adelson was the face of Republican Party fundraising. But the GOP’s new fair-haired boy is a certain Steve Wynn and Adelson doesn’t appear to be taking it lying down. His Las Vegas Review-Journal, showed uncharacteristic investigative moxie when it zeroed in on a $7 million Wynn Family Limited Partnership stock donation to “an undisclosed recipient.” What was most striking was the article’s brazen assumption that aforesaid recipient was Donald Trump. (Not illogical: Trump is already raising money for his re-election campaign.) The story’s lead sentence described Wynn as “casino owner and new Republican National Committee finance director” and made the observation, two paragraphs later, that “The gift came a month before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, which raised a record $90 million from donors. Wynn was among a group of 25 individuals chosen by Trump on Nov. 15 to help organize his inauguration.” (So was Adelson but that’s not disclosed.) The donation is a tiny chip off Wynn’s block of $1.2 billion in Wynn Resorts stock. It is, however, a pretty “george” percentage of Wynn’s annual charitable giving, which can run to $20 million.

Wynn’s ascendancy within the RNC was reciprocated by the appointment of its political director, Christopher Carr, as a senior vice president of Wynn Resorts. According to the Las Vegas Sun, Carr’s portfolio will include “managing the company’s government relations, charitable giving, community development initiatives and the expansion of the Wynn Employee Foundation.” Hmmmmm. Maybe Adelson’s people are onto something here. If they’re right about the donation, a Carr-pro-quo shows that no good deed goes unrewarded in Steve Wynn’s world.

The mogul had a right to be in an expansive mood. Financial results for 2016 were in an profit was up from $195 million to $242 million. Touting his Macao casinos’ appeal to
VIP players, Wynn took a swipe at Adelson, saying the latter’s style “is more akin to, say, Wal-Mart. That is a mass approach, and that is what the Sands (and others) do. And they do that beautifully. We come to these people with a different message.” Ow! Compliments are rarely so backhanded. Despite the perception that his company had maxed out with Wynn Palace, El Steve said it had the capital and real estate to keep building mega resorts. He also offered the inscrutable sentiment that the VIP crackdown, which is now easing, was “right thing to do for the right reasons.” I’ll bet he didn’t feel that way when China was chasing players away from his casinos. He definitely wasn’t a fan of Macao’s hard cap on his baccarat-table inventory, although he’s had to eat those words several times over.

* Caesars Entertainment has performed a monumental public service, buying out some slums along Koval Lane and targeting them for demolition. It’s speculated that the land will be repurposed for parking but the late Oscar Nunez‘s fleabags were one of the obstacles thwarting then-CEO Gary Loveman‘s dreamed-of “Epicentre” metaresort. Nunez entertained plans of a delusional condo/retail development … or so he said. It was probably a ploy to extract the highest possible purchase price from Loveman. However, the Great Recession rolled in and the tide went out for Nunez. The apartments finally sold for $11 million, a pittance compared to what Caesars was spending on land back in 2003-2006.

* A Downtown-focused panel discussion chaired by Mayor Carolyn Goodman wrestled with certain intractable problems — like the homeless population. There’s really no place to put them and if you try to keep them away from the tourists they drift to residential neighborhoods. Those hoping on new-development revelations from Derek Stevens went away disappointed, although apparently La Bayou has been reprieved and will continue its grind-joint existence, fueled by 100 slot machines for the Golden Gate. As for the fates of the Las Vegas Club, Mermaids and Glitter Gulch, those remain a mystery.