Excerpts
He’d pulled up at The Nugget one night at the end of September in his $350,000 Maybach and six hours and three minutes later walked out with $4,753,200 of our money.
A week later he came back in for three and a half hours and took us for another $1.5 million. But let me give you an idea of how insane his touch had become. Before he even got to the dice pit, he sat down at a slot machine and hit a $100,000 jackpot.
Tim and I had taken the keys to The Nugget only ten months earlier. In less than ten hours, Mr. Royalty had basically wiped out what was going to be a great third-quarter profit. To us, that was more than just a figure on a spreadsheet. It was a number that told the world we weren’t just a couple of kids who got lucky and hit the jackpot during the dot-com boom. It told the world we were entrepreneurs who knew how to make a business soar.
That number was now gone. The critics in the press who sneered whenever Tim and I took a risk that flopped would now have more ammo. And we didn’t need Ed Borgato, the man who tracked our finances and who was eating dinner with us that night, to remind us that in two weeks we owed our investors a $7.5-million interest payment. But he did anyway.
There are few people in this world who believe in themselves more than Tim. What’s that expression? Sometimes wrong, but never in doubt. Only now his eyes were puffy. The eighteen-hour workdays and the beating we’d opened ourselves up to by extending the high limits was taking a toll on both of us.
When Johnny D. came over to our table to alert us that Mr. Royalty was on his way over again, I felt my heart squeeze. I didn’t know if this was the night we’d get it all back, or if the Bonzai Pipeline would turn into a tsunami.
It was nearing midnight. We’d been working since eight in the morning. Our day was just beginning.
I headed to the security room with Ed to watch on the surveillance cameras. Tim got up to greet “our guest.”
Mr. Royalty came through the doors with a small entourage like a fighter walking down an aisle of a packed arena to enter the ring. Didn’t matter that his belly looked like he’d been training on Krispy Kremes. Dressed in sweats, he was bobbing and weaving with a cold-blooded snake-eye stare. There’s a description for that sort of entrance in Vegas. He walked in, they say, like he wanted to change the name of the joint.
Johnny D. went to make sure Mr. Royalty’s private table was just right. Right for Mr. Royalty, and right for The House. We needed dealers at that table who wouldn’t be intimidated, and a boxman with an iron bladder. On that table, one simple mistake on a dealer payout could cost us $100,000. And one of the many items on Mr. Royalty’s list of requests was that the boxman – the guy sitting at the center of the table responsible for all The House’s chips – could not leave his seat even if he had to take a piss. These demands drove Tim crazy. “It’s not his hotel! He does not make the rules!” But we wanted our money back. What could we do?
The chips were neatly stacked — yellows, whites and blues. The yellows were $1,000. The whites were $5,000. The blues were $25,000. Mr. Royalty was putting up a million in cash to start.
Tim walked over. That was one of the things we prided ourselves on. There were hardly any casinos left in Vegas where the customers could meet the owners and have a conversation on the floor. People loved this. It made them feel special. It made them feel at home. It made them want to come back.
But the greeting between Tim and Mr. Royalty was a different sort of hello. “Hey, welcome back,” didn’t really mean “Good to see you.” It was more like the formality of two boxers tapping gloves in the center of the ring – just before they tried to knock each other’s brains out.