April 10, 2008
Having Their Say: Vegas Moguls React To WSJ Scribe’s Tome
By STEVE FRIESS
Last week, I detailed a disturbing list of factual mistakes
in "Winner Takes All," the book by Christina Binkley
of the Wall Street Journal about the past decade or so of wheeling
and dealing that created the Las Vegas Strip as we know it.
Binkley’s book deserves special scrutiny because of who she
is – the longtime gaming-beat writer for one of the world’s
most important newspapers -- as well as what she wrote. In the
book, she portrays Wynn Resorts C.E.O. Steve Wynn as both visionary
and petty, MGM Mirage C.E.O. Terry Lanni as somewhat detached
and Las Vegas Sands C.E.O. Sheldon Adelson as irrelevant and
invisible.
Binkley has said in interviews that Wynn is sore about her
depiction of the buyout of Mirage Resorts as an unfriendly merger.
(To my reading, Binkley actually just lays out the facts as
she’s gathered them in that case and lets readers decide.) But
Wynn himself told me the piece that sticks in his craw most
is a passage in which she reports that Wynn became angry over
the $25 million price of something, prompting his German shepherd
to “menace” the fellow, Dino Fusco, with a threatened bite to
the crotch. Wynn got the price down to $15 million.
“Dino and I talked twice this week and he’s furious about
this,” Wynn said. Fusco, Wynn said, insisted he never said neither
had there been a rant nor had the dog threatened him. “In space
of two minutes, you have a story that is twisted so much. And
that may live somewhere forever. And it makes you wonder when
you read history how much of history is bullshit.”
Binkley told me she has Fusco on a recorded interview and
that he hasn’t retracted the tale to her in subsequent conversations.
“But I can imagine he didn't want to tell Steve Wynn that,”
she wrote me in an email. “No one, particularly an investment
banker, wants to be on the receiving end of Steve Wynn's fury.”
Indeed, Wynn is livid over the book, which describes his using
Mirage Resorts funds recklessly and nickel-and-diming MGM Mirage
over their purchase of his Shadow Creek home as well as intimating
he’s a liposuctioned Lothario.
Binkley, he said, “wanted to write a book that would be sensational.
… It isn’t the work of a technically accurate journalist. It’s
the work of someone who is writing what is passed off as a factual,
historical account but it’s gussied up and it’s gussied up shamelessly.”
If she gussied up Wynn, she gussied down Lanni. In particular,
she refers twice to the fact that Lanni was attending Ronald
Reagan’s funeral at a key moment when the MGM-Mandalay merger
became endangered.
Lanni disputed that: “There were a couple of issues that came
up because I had to step away from the funeral to handle some
things with corporate counsel in Washington D.C. on the Federal
Trade Commission. So she really missed out on that. I was (at
the funeral in Simi Valley, California) for about two hours.
It was only for a brief period of time. … There was nothing
in the four and five hours flying down there and then coming
back that was lost.”
That’s a significant contradiction. The drama Binkley infuses
in those merger talks depends upon Lanni being unavailable at
that precise moment. And it is part of why I left the book with
this impression that she regarded Lanni as merely a figurehead
despite having written in June 2004 in the WSJ that the MGM-Mandalay
merger would "make Terry Lanni ... the unlikely king of Vegas
casino.” Binkley responded that she didn’t intend to imply any
breach of duty on Lanni’s part.
The most important flaw of this book, though, is her decision
to ignore Adelson. Vegas has made him, after all, wealthier
than Kirk Kerkorian and helped make LVS worth almost as much
as MGM Mirage and Wynn combined.
Binkley told several interviewers that Adelson is responsible
for only one innovation – the integration of the casino-resort
with a large-scale private convention center – and that he’s
a nonfactor in Vegas’ future because his land’s built out.
Still, she gives more biographical detail of a gaming analyst’s
wife than Adelson. In the book’preview galley of the book, she
referred to him as “eccentric and paranoid” but dropped “paranoid”
for the final version. Binkley told me she did so “because when
I read it in the galley, it didn't seem fair or accurate. The
book didn't substantiate it.” Yet she also didn’t try to substantiate
the eccentric claim, either.
Adelson was irate over the label when I read it to him in
January. He said his trouble with Binkley started in 1997 when
she reported that several Vegas people believed the soon-to-open
Venetian would fail.
“If she was going to characterize me as anything, the one
thing I would never say, wouldn’t even think of it, is eccentric,”
he said. “I’m a risk-taker. That doesn’t make me eccentric and
paranoid. I’m not paranoid. I’m not afraid of anybody.”
Ah, but could it be that everybody is afraid of Adelson? He
is, after all, known for being litigious. Just ask the R-J’s
John L. Smith, who is defending himself against a lawsuit even
after correcting an error about Adelson and apologizing for
it.
Binkley insists that’s not it.
" 'Winner' was never conceived as a collegiate 'Greatest
Men of Las Vegas' text in which everyone who has been important
or colorful would get their due share of print,” she said. “When
I was making these decisions four years ago, I wasn't aware
of any lawsuit between Sheldon Adelson and John Smith; I'm not
even sure if Mr. Smith's book had been published at that point.
I was certainly aware that Steve Wynn had sued for libel over
a book. I do recall that Mr. Adelson was angry at me, and pretty
much everyone else, who wrote about the troubles with the Venetian
opening. That was a very long time ago, though. (LVS President)
Bill Weidner still sends me a Christmas card every year, so
I assume they've taken down the figurative dartboard with my
picture on it."
And with that, so have I.
###
