You can smell desperation in the dusty Las Vegas air. With the U.S. economy in ruins, yesterday�s lions now resemble fearful lambs, bleating that bottom lines might bottom out. But when the going gets tough, the tough get going. And that�s exactly what these 10 gaming industry leaders in Las Vegas are doing � getting tough. They�re continuing to build, to open hotels, and to generate new and exciting ideas at a time when their peers are just hoping to wake up one day with the financial turmoil resolved. Everyone is looking to these leaders for direction, and that direction is up, up, up! Without further ado, Liberty Watch salutes them for making the best out of a bad situation.

Bill Weidner
Las Vegas Sands Corp.

The only reason we list Bill Weidner at No. 10 is because of the albatross he wears around his neck named Sheldon Adelson. Weidner helped Adelson successfully expand the company�s international reach and presence in Macau, remember? And don�t forget about The Palazzo, either.

Still, Adelson is a brilliant casino owner who successfully kept his Venetian union-free, for which he should be commended. However, with the distractions of his New Yorker profile earlier this year, his bizarre pissing match with Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith, and his disgracefully pro-war and quickly doomed Freedom�s Watch organization (supposedly the right-wing version of MoveOn), Adelson seems to be drawing the wrong kind of attention � mainly the negative kind. 

Oh, and there were his delayed efforts to inject his own money into the Sands. According to Chief Operating Officer Bill Weidner, the decision to inject more capital was �a matter of robust debate within the organization.� And since the company, its shareholders and board took too long to decide, the result was �a monumental screw-up.� Now that�s what we call a straight-talker. 

Weidner added: �You can think of it as a junkyard dogfight. We�ve got four or five A-plus personalities and a couple of A-minus personalities and the moderates are the As, so you�ve got personality types who are focused and interested in executing.� 

No surprise that every time Weidner speaks, investors� nerves settle down. Weidner knows the right tone to adopt with every crisis, and he�s got what it takes to carry the Sands out of its funk and into another period of growth and prosperity.



Anthony Marnell
M Resort

In just a few months � March 2009, to be more precise � M Resort, Spa and Casino will open its doors. And it will all be due to the sweat of Marnell Corrao Associates, the firm that helped design casinos like Excalibur, Treasure Island and Wynn Las Vegas. And if the name Marnell sounds familiar, it�s because Anthony Marnell III has taken over the family�s architecture and design business, and he�s opening a hotel-casino of his own. The inside of M is said to be �modern Italian, with warm colors, yet simple lines, forgoing the crown molding and intricately designed ceiling features seen in other casinos.� It�s a timeless design and one that�s not going to age or look dated.

Although it will be situated on the south end of the Strip on the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and St. Rose Parkway, M will be different from your typical off-Strip properties. Architecturally speaking, M will showcase ideas that you see on the Las Vegas Strip and you can�t get at a locals casino. 

Just for example, when guests walk through they�ll notice that a lot of the restaurants will overlook the pool and Las Vegas and will all have outside balconies. A retail center inside the resort is slated to open in late 2010. It�s this willingness to move forward in spite of the tendency to retreat in the face of a challenge that puts Marnell on our list of leading industry figures. M looks to stand for another �milestone� in the history of the gaming world.



Bill Paulos
Cannery Resorts

We�re not the first publication to say as much: One of the most admirable qualities about Cannery co-owner Bill Paulos is that he did it his way. 

His path to success was an unlikely one, especially since he grew up knowing little, if anything, about gambling. Just before graduating with a degree in applied science from State University of New York at Delhi, Paulos was approached by a professor who told him of a hotel management school opening at UNLV, then called Nevada Southern University. Two years later, in 1969, he was in the hotel college�s first graduating class. 

His first casino employer was Recrion Corp., the mob-controlled company that once ran the Stardust, Fremont and Hacienda casinos. Paulos developed his skills in Human Resources and later Food & Beverage and Purchasing. Over time, he developed a reputation for running successful casinos like Luxor and Excalibur. 

A sluggish economy has never fazed Paulos: When the Greektown casino in Detroit opened, in 2000, it was a wild success, capturing more than a third of the Detroit market and well over what Wall Street had predicted. A year later though, Paulos faced perhaps his greatest challenge when he and business partner Bill Wortman became focused on a casino on the northeast edge of North Las Vegas. The 1940s-themed Cannery broke ground only days before the 9/11 attacks. With bank lending drying up overnight, the project nearly died. Paulos maxed out his own credit cards paying for incidental expenses. And guess what? It all paid off. The Cannery is one of the most profitable casinos in Las Vegas, earning more than $5 million annually.

And this year�s economic situation didn�t deter either: Paulos opened the $250-million Eastside Cannery in August.



Jim Murren
MGM MIRAGE

Terry Lanni�s decision to retire as Chairman of the Board & Chief Executive Officer of MGM MIRAGE causes concern for many people in the industry, but they should rest easy. The company is in great hands with the new Chairman & CEO Jim Murren. 

Sure, Lanni, 65, has three decades of experience as a leader, experience that could have made a difference in this historic economic downturn. But remember that Lanni has been, for at least the last three years, grooming the 40-something Murren for the top job. 

Lanni�s successor � a former Wall Street analyst with degrees in art history and urban planning from Trinity College � joined MGM Grand as Chief Financial Officer in 1998. In other words, Murren is nothing to sneeze at, with Lanni going so far as to call him �one of the finest chief financial officers this industry has seen.� 

And Murren won�t be the first person to run a casino company who hadn�t been promoted from the casino floor or, like Lanni, from the operations side of the business. Look at Harrah�s Gary Loveman, for instance. Or even Sheldon Adelson, who ran the giant Comdex trade show before buying the historic Sands hotel and opening the Venetian resort there in 1999. 

Murren is more than a skilled number cruncher; he�s a proven leader in his own right. For the last few months, he has led an expense reduction program, which began as an initiative to streamline operations following a string of mergers but became more focused on cutting costs to offset earnings that have declined from a year ago. That�s what a leader does. Murren is the man for the job, and CityCenter will be his enduring and successful legacy. 



Gary Loveman
Harrah�s

Speaking truth to power is what any industry leader will do when the chips are down, and Gary Loveman always proves himself to be a leader who will speak the truth. At an industry conference last month, the Harrah�s CEO shocked a room full of hotel-casino heavyweights when he said that casino operators will need to change how they do business in order to thrive. Loveman said that spending capital �like drunken sailors� instead of spending smartly has plagued the industry. 

�The arms race that has characterized the business over the last several years might have to de-escalate,� he says. �There will be a significant sea change in the way in which the balance sheets of these businesses are structured. I think the industry is going to have to get accustomed to the notion that not every project is a good project � and $1 billion is a lot of money, after all. Until those imbalances are resolved, it�s going to get very hard to get excited about the next new buffet, the next new food and beverage experience, the next new nightclub experience, the next new gaming experience.� 

Truer words were rarely spoken, as Loveman�s shot at a complacent industry was heard around the world. The story was picked up by the wires and published in countless papers around the world, That�s because when Loveman speaks, people listen. He was a business school professor at Harvard University before he was tapped to become Chief Operating Officer of Harrah�s Entertainment in 1998. Since then, he�s helped expand the company in unprecedented ways by doing exactly what he says: being smart when it comes to business.



Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta
Station Casinos

One thing you can say about the Fertitta brothers: They always put their money where their passion lies, whether it�s building up their Ultimate Fighting Championship sport (to the tune of $44 million before breaking even in 2005), or whether it�s keeping Stations Casinos strong and credit-worthy. The Station Casinos owners are thinking about putting more of their own money into the company to ride out the current economic storm.

The Fertittas seem very likely to loan the company between $450 million and $500 million, as well as conduct a debt exchange, to reduce the locals gaming company�s debt load and related interest payments, according to this months� filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

The Fertittas may seem like they�ve gone Hollywood with all their mixed martial arts success, but believe us when we say they are nitty-gritty businessmen who know what makes the world go �round: building, maintaining and expanding a successful company. 

Stations stands as the fifth largest gaming company in the world, with 18 casinos under the company�s proud banner. The brothers come from great stock, too. When their father, Frank Fertitta, came to Las Vegas from Galveston, Texas in 1960, he found work as a bellboy at the Tropicana. Fertitta enjoyed decades of successful casino operations in Las Vegas that some experts say was the original model for Vegas. Fertitta was just a 20-something visionary at the time with smart business sense. His rise to owning his own casino would only take him 16 years. His sons have learned the important lessons, too. Watch them closely and learn how it�s done yourself.



Bill Boyd
Boyd Gaming

Boyd Gaming has two things going for it, as far as we�re concerned. First, it�s a Nevada company, and second, it�s a family-owned business. But Boyd suffered a serious setback recently. Back in January 2006, Boyd announced plans to develop Echelon to replace the dated Stardust. Scheduling to open Echelon Place in early 2010, Boyd demolished the Stardust in March 2007. Because of the financial strain in today�s market, Boyd suspended the project with plans to resume by 2009. 

In addition, though, Boyd purchased a 40-acre site west of I-15 in North Las Vegas for future development. In other words, Bill always has his eye on the ball. 

Although Boyd temporarily delayed the Echelon project, Boyd is planning on kicking construction into high gear by 2009, when the economy is expected to recover. Boyd is also expected to do pretty well on a national level, with a $130-million expansion of Blue Chip in Michigan City, Indiana, that is expected to open on Jan. 22, and from the recently completed projects of Borgata and the Water Club in Atlantic City. The latter is a particularly shrewd move on the part of Boyd, teaming up with MGM MIRAGE to create, adjacent to Borgata, Atlantic City�s first boutique-lifestyle hotel. Or as the press release says, �offering a personalized guest experience within a distinctively cosmopolitan setting.�

It�s the market�s first major non-gaming hotel, and it shows how confident Bill Boyd, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Boyd Gaming, is in keeping up with the changing times instead of sticking too closely to the past models. Also, Mr. Boyd�s law school at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas continues to earn a great reputation.


Michael Gaughan
South Point

Liberty Watch has friends in the Las Vegas hotel-casino industry, and, from what we hear, things are getting really bloody out there � lots of job cuts going on as the Strip seeks to �right-size,� which is the new euphemism for �downsize.� Whatever you choose to call it, cutting payroll is the first thing most corporate executives look to do in order to justify their cushy salaries. 

Not South Point owner Michael Gaughan. 

He still hasn�t laid off any of his rank-and-file employees at the single casino he owns on the very south end of Las Vegas Boulevard. That�s mostly because he�s his own boss and doesn�t have to answer to a board of directors or Wall Street or anyone, really. Gaughan was quoted in one local paper as saying: �Making people fear for their jobs isn�t a good business strategy, especially when customers are tight with their money.� Sounds like a good strategy to us, and it makes us wonder if simply owning your own casino makes more sense than trying to run a whole mess of them up and down the street. 

In any case, our hats are off to Gaughan. He�s a businessman who understands that keeping people working during a down time instead of just maximizing the bottom line according to the ebb and flow of the economy can work. We�ve often thought that there could be enough to go around during the down times if the guys at the top would simply take a short-term hit. Sure, profits are lower at South Point because of Gaughan�s move, but he�ll earn the kind of employee loyalty and customer affection that no payroll cuts could ever make possible.



Glenn Schaeffer
Fontainebleau Resorts

Glenn Schaeffer is the thinking man�s hotel-casino CEO. With a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the prestigious University of Iowa Writers� Workshop program, Schaeffer brings the edge and creativity of an artist to everything he does, and his presence in Las Vegas is a real boost to the cultural community � whether in the form of the Black Mountain Institute or BrightCity Books, both of which he helped found. 

And now he�s turning new page having been named CEO for Fontainebleau Resorts in Las Vegas. The Fontainebleau, of course, is a famous Miami resort that served Jay Sarno�s inspiration for Caesars Palace and Steve Wynn�s precursor to The Mirage. Schaeffer already proved himself as the extremely able former head of Mandalay Resort Group (which was acquired by MGM MIRAGE back in 2005). 

Don�t expect Schaeffer to cut any corners whatsoever in constructing what will surely be one of the most elegant pleasure palaces in Las Vegas. He will be incorporating very significant contemporary art into the building, with art standing as a big part of the attractions. Glenn has been ranked by Vanity Fair magazine as one of the top collectors in the country, and his taste is absolutely impeccable. Schaeffer has been quoted as saying that architecture is the next frontier for Las Vegas, and from what we�ve seen as far as designs go, Fontainebleau will be boldly going where few other hotels have gone before. Oh, and you can be sure that Fontainebleau will feature the best and most sophisticated bookstore in Nevada.

Steve Wynn
Wynn Resorts and Encore

Steve Wynn is a confident risk-taker. He recently opened his $2.2-billion all-suite sister hotel to the Wynn Las Vegas this month, and he did it during the local industry�s usual �dead zone� � the period of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas � when everything is slow. 

The hotel is called Encore Las Vegas, and Wynn already brought attention to the place by perching himself on the very top of the building as a helicopter with a mounted camera buzzed him within just a few feet. This commercial (which appears on Encore�s website) was all filmed by a Hollywood director (X-Men: The Last Stand�s Brett Ratner), and behind-the-scenes footage appeared on YouTube with an additional plug in gossip expert Norm Clarke�s Review-Journal column, drawing thousands of viewers. 

As if that�s not enough, Wynn announced he�s opening what surely will be one of the most incredible restaurants in Las Vegas history: Sinatra. That�s right, Wynn cut a deal with the estate of Frank Sinatra to debut an eatery inside Encore next month that will feature memorabilia from the singer�s career like Ol� Blue Eyes� 1953 Oscar. 

This is quite a coup, given how protective Sinatra�s family is of the name. Then again, many of us still recall how almost 30 years ago a younger Wynn had the smarts to lure Sinatra to a then-revitalized Golden Nugget for a series of exclusive shows. 

Wynn has always had the magic tough, and never lost it.