Running Scared: The Life and Treacherous Times of Las Vegas Casino King Steve Wynn
by John L. Smith
Hardcover: 376 pages
Publisher: Barricade Books (November 25, 1995)
ISBN: 1569800391

Everybody loves a hustler: gamblers, hucksters and con artists occupy a distinctive place in our collective imagination. The same goes for a self-made man.

Steve Wynn, the ruthless, hugely successful casino developer whose Las Vegas empire at one point included the Mirage, the Golden Nugget, and Treasure Island, is such a man.

In the spring of 1964, Wynn took over a struggling bingo palace in Wayson's Corner, Maryland. He was twenty-one years old. The business was left to him by his father, recently dead, along with over $200,000 in personal gambling debts. By 1992 — and several casinos later — Wynn's corporation was worth an estimated $1.7 billion. The golden boy who started out calling bingo numbers in Wayson's Corner now stood as one of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in Nevada.

This is his story — the unauthorized biography Steve Wynn never wanted the world to read.

When Running Scared was originally announced in hardcover, Wynn filed a libel lawsuit in Nevada against Barricade Books for its catalog description of him, and in Kentucky against the book itself. The trial took place in Las Vegas before a judge whose husband, after the trial, was given a high-paying executive job in one of Wynn's casinos. Guess who won the lawsuit.

The real question, of course, is what does Steve Wynn so desperately want to hide?

To his adoring public, Wynn has always acted the benevolent Las Vegas promoter — appearing in commercials with Frank Sinatra, posing for photographs with politicians, schmoozing with Michael Jackson. His elaborate PR machine would have us believe that his meteoric rise to the top was a result of ambition, hard work, and charismatic leadership alone. But Wynn has been accused of shadow-waltzing precariously close to the wise-guy underworld that — at least in Las Vegas — is said to decide who stayed, and who didn't.

Running Scared documents Wynn's rapid rise to wealth and power. It examines the rumor about his connections to the Genovese crime family. It explores his stormy relationship with Donald Trump. It explains why a confidential Scotland Yard report deprived him of a license to open a casino in London. And of course, it tells about his partnership with the man who was there to finance it all, Michael Milken, the six-time convicted felon of Drexel Burnham junk-bond infamy.

More relevant than ever, Running Scared is a meticulously researched biography (including hundreds of primary sources) of an eccentric, vindictive billionaire: here, Steve Wynn is brought to life in all his troubled glory.

John L. Smith is an award-winning columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. A fourth generation Nevadan, he lives in Las Vegas.

Lyle Stuart is the publisher of Barricade Books, which was forced into bankruptcy as a result of the libel judgment obtained by Steve Wynn. Stuart's long career in publishing spans five decades and includes national bestsellers such as The Rich and the Super-Rich, The Sensuous Woman, and A Woman Named Jackie, as well as numerous books on Las Vegas and gambling.

Steve Wynn is one of the prime builders of today's Las Vegas. In the 'employee only' areas and offices of the Las Vegas casino-hotel industry, any conversation that includes the name of Steve Wynn will also include as many opinions of the man as there are folks involved in the conversation. The range of comments will run from derrogatory to very complimentary. This has been the case since shortly after he took over the Golden Nugget and made it the star property of the 'downtown' casinos in the late 70s - early 80s. Born in 1942 to a father who ran bingo parlors in the northeast, and raised in Utica, New York, Wynn graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963. He and his wife, Elaine, arrived in Las Vegas to live in 1967. He worked as a slot and keno manager in his early days here, then, with banker E. Parry Thomas as a mentor, he pulled off a land deal with Howard Hugh and Caesar's Palace in 1971, that got him enough money and influence to pull off the the coup that got him control of the Golden Nugget. Before the end of the decade, he brought the annual profit of the Nugget from a little over one million to twelve million. During that period, the nugget was beautifully renovated and enlarged. Wynn built another Golden Nugget in Atlantic City in 1980. By 1984, he was estimated to be worth about one hundred million dollars. In 1986, he bought the large piece of land next to Caesar's Palace, across the Strip from the Desert Inn. He then sold the Atlantic City Nugget for a reported four hundred and forty million and used much of the money on the dream resort, the Mirage, in 1989. The three thousand room Mirage was the first major resort built on the Strip since the original MGM Grand (now Bally's) at Flamingo Road and Las Vegas Boulevard. The 90s saw Wynn build the Treasure Island next to the Mirage and another 'dream', the Bellagio on the corner of Flamingo and the Strip on the site of the demolished Dunes. Bellagio was luxury and class added to the Strip. Mirage and Treasure Island were major contributors to the 'family Las Vegas' image that the casino industry wanted to build. The three resorts also brought three free attractions to Strip strollers, Mirage's volcano, Treasure Island's pirate ship fight and Bellagio's dancing water show. The building of the Mirage has stirred many others to build and renovate on the Strip. The new MGM, the Excaliber, Mandalay Bay all went up. The Strip went through a major change in the 90s. Steve Wynn may have well been the major player in that change. The new century saw the MGM/Mirage merger take place and Wynn was out of the business. He had done well in his thirty three years in Las Vegas up to that point. He had been partially responsible for the tremendous growth of the Las Vegas Valley's population and building boom. He had created thousands of jobs. He raised two daughters, one of which was kidnapped in the early 90s. Wynn paid the one million, four-hundred and fifty thousand dollar ransom, securing her safe return, and saw the kidnappers later sentenced to long prison terms. Wynn bought the Desert Inn property, and he promises his biggest dream ever, Wynn Las Vegas. The resort and golf course should open in April 2005 at a cost of over two and a half billion dollars. What will Steve's new dreams do to this town?