Children in the world's playground
An excerpt from Timothy O'Grady's 2016 book, Children Of Las Vegas
NEVADA STUPAK
Businessman
Son of a casino owner
My dad found a stuntman and offered him a million bucks to jump off the Stratosphere. Highest freefall ever. I got the day off school to watch it. I saw the guy, just a little speck way up on the ledge. He must have been up there for more than twenty minutes, thinking long and hard about it. Then off he went, came sailing down, landed on an air mattress. No problem, just hopped off, walked over to my dad to collect the million dollars. He thought he was made. My dad says, ‘Did you read the contract?’ The guy goes, ‘Yeah, I’m a millionaire!’ ‘Check again,’ says my dad. ‘There’s a $990,000 landing fee.’ The guy was freaking out. He’d risked his life and all he was getting was ten thousand bucks. But what could he do? He’s a daredevil, not a businessman. He doesn’t read contracts.
That was the Vegas style before the super-chefs, the superrooms. It was carnival land, Barnum and Bailey, Evel Knievel jumping over buses. Coupons! Two for one! Try your luck! My dad was always making up things – promotional stunts, discount offers, new casino games. He had one deal where you could play tic-tac-toe with a chicken for money. I grew up with that. Acrobats would come over to the house and do flips off the diving board. I used to sit right up on the stage with an Elvis impersonator. His name was Morris. A front-row seat wasn’t good enough. I thought he was Elvis. Morris, he was my idol back then.
My dad grew up in gambling. His father ran an illegal craps game on the third floor of a restaurant and bar establishment called the Lotus Club in Pittsburgh. It went on for fifty years. Chester Stupak, he was a big man in Pittsburgh. He knew every cop and politician in town. There was a pool table, dice and a sliding window on the door. I saw it in operation myself. If a competitor opened up my grandfather would go over there and try to bust them. That was my dad’s standard. He was pure gambling, blue collar. Steve Wynn came in here with everything premium-brand – marble halls, luxurious carpet, great contemporary art on the walls. My grandfather used to put up a stack of bread, a stack of baloney and a stack of cheese. Anybody got hungry they could make themselves a sandwich. My dad was the same. As far as he was concerned a gambler only wants to look at the table, the chips and the dealer, not at how good the restaurant and art are.
My dad learned the math for gambling from my grandfather. The thing was to get them in and let the probabilities bring you the money. 1.5, that was the number for blackjack. That was the percentage figure for the house advantage. ‘Every bet costs you money,’ he’d say to me. ‘You put $10,000 down on blackjack and it costs you $150.’ I couldn’t understand it for the longest time. ‘But what if you win?’ I’d say. ‘Doesn’t matter, still costs $150.’ ‘But how?’ I’d say. ‘You’ve got the extra ten you’ve just won.’ And he’d say, ‘The statistical advantage to the house, over time, is $150.’ I was thinking in actual situations while he was thinking in mathematical probabilities. Of course anyone can get lucky. The stories of the big winners are the greatest thing for promoting the gaming business. It makes people think they can win, while for the most part gamblers are desperate people who are losing their money because the math runs true. My dad learned that in childhood.
He went off to Australia when he was eighteen with the idea of selling coupons. They were a new thing there. He came back with a new wife and some money. He wanted to be bigger than his dad in gambling, so he chose Vegas. It’s the Duel of the Titans all the time here. In little bars, flashy clubs, big casinos, boardrooms, wherever, there’s somebody checking the terrain to figure out how to be the most important person in the room. When my dad got here Benny Binion was the bar. Had to be bigger than him. Then Steve Wynn wanted to beat my dad. Then Kirk Kerkorian took Steve Wynn down in a hostile takeover. Steve told me about it himself. He took a call from Kirk in his closet. Kirk says, ‘Steve, I just wanted you to hear this from me. I’m going to make an offer on your hotels tomorrow.’ Steve says, ‘Kirk, you know I’ll never sell,’ and Kirk goes, ‘I know, I know. I just wanted you to hear it from me.’ Eight days later the deal was done. Kirk made an offer and the shareholders took it. Wasn’t a thing Steve could do about it. Steve calls him and says, ‘Why did you do that? You know I built this company from the ground up. My whole life is in this.’ And Kirk says, ‘But Steve, I had to do it. I couldn’t have built all that myself.’ ‘The Smiling Cobra’, that’s what they called Kirk. The way some of these guys operate now you’ve got to spend more than you can possibly recoup just to stay in the game.
My dad started with a small property where the Stratosphere is now. He opened a place called Bob Stupak’s World Famous Historic Gambling Museum. It was a way of getting an entrylevel gaming licence. He changed that into the Million Dollar. He put money all over the walls behind Plexiglass. The whole place was money. It caught fire and my mom and the staff were running around trying to throw all the money into the pool. From there he got a loan from an adventurous banker here named E. Parry Thomas and built a hundred-room hotel called Vegas World. Filled it up with models of spaceships and planets. It started slow, but then he came up with a blackjack variant he called Double Exposure 21 where both the dealer’s first two cards are face-up. That drew a lot of people who didn’t get the repercussions of the fine print, which said that all ties went to the dealer. That put the house advantage up from 1.5 to 3.5. He paid the whole loan back in six months.
At that point Caesars had been at the top for twenty years. Las Vegas Boulevard and Flamingo, that was the epicentre. Then Steve Wynn raised money from junk bonds and had the nerve to build the Mirage right next to Caesars. Steve had been to the Wharton School of Business. He was smart. He also brought an unprecedented level of class to Vegas. People could see that the Mirage was better than Caesars. My dad started thinking abouthow he’d trump Steve. We were way over in downtown, far from the action. So he came up with the idea of a huge hotel with the Stratosphere tower way above the rest of the city. ‘Instead of being two miles away from the Mirage,’ he said, ‘I’ll make the Mirage two miles away from me.’ A poker-playing friend of his put up $550 million, made my dad the chairman of the board and the largest individual shareholder, and he started to build.
We’d lived in a gated community, but then moved over to 6th and Franklin. You could walk to the Stratosphere from there. This is a dirt town, a poor town. I found that out when we moved. Ted Binion lived across from us and Jack was just down the street, but most of the other people around there were bussers, desk clerks, valet parkers, dealers, maintenance men, waitresses. They’re my neighbours, your neighbours, everybody’s neighbours. A lot of people arrive here as if from the moon. You never learn anything about where they’re from. This is a city where a burnt-out case can come and erase his past, start again. And they can do pretty well if nothing pulls them down. All the guys I was talking about before, bar Steve – Benny, Kirk, my dad – they never got out of high school or even into it and they accumulated millions, billions. My dad came out of an illegal gambling room in a steel-mill city and became the chief executive of the third most expensive hotel-resort destination in the history of the world. He ran for mayor. Of course, it’s not like that for everybody.
I could never figure out where people were coming from when I was a teenager. They were nice to me because of my dad, or they felt entitled to use me. They borrowed shirts from me, or shoes, then wouldn’t give them back. To them it was, like, ‘It’s not like he needs it.’ You know what I mean? I could be chasing these things for weeks. All my life I’ve had these desperate people after me in this twenty-four hour town. I tried to pretend that I didn’t have money, but my dad had his name up on the side of a building you could see from everywhere. He bet a million dollars one day on the Super Bowl. The whole town knew about him. I didn’t want to stick out, but my first name was Nevada and my second was Stupak. It’s not like I could introduce myself as ‘Tom’ and no one would know. There was just nowhere for me to hide in this town.
Children Of Las Vegas was published in 2016. O’Grady’s newest novel, Monaghan, is now available to preorder