Gambling isn't the good bet states hoped for

Thirty years ago, the casino owner Steve Wynn kicked off the third big wave of casino construction in Las Vegas when he announced that he would build a resort like none that anyone in Nevada had ever seen before.

The hotel, he promised, would feature a rain forest at its entrance and a tank filled with dolphins inside.

Wynn laughed as he addressed the Governor's Conference on Gaming and Tourism at Lake Tahoe that year and told a roomful of gaming executives that much of the money for the project would come from the sale of his Golden Nugget Hotel Casino on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, N.J. There was no future for casinos in Atlantic City, he said.

The Mirage would become one of the most successful developments on the Las Vegas Strip, kicking off a construction boom in Las Vegas and firmly installing Wynn in the pantheon of casino moguls at a time when anonymous corporations were changing the way Nevada — and, even more important, the stock market — looked at the gaming business.

The Mirage eventually would be dwarfed by new, more glamorous resorts on the Strip, including several built by Wynn himself (the Wynn among them) and Wynn would be forced out of his own corporation (now Mirage Resorts International).

And Atlantic City? Providing a much-needed reminder to every state contemplating licensing casinos as a way to create jobs and fill the public coffers, Atlantic City today is in free-fall.

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When Revel, the biggest, most expensive, perhaps most audacious addition to the Atlantic City skyline closes in September, it will be the biggest blow to gaming east of the Mississippi, where state after state has jumped on the casino bandwagon in hopes of winning a chunk of America's unquenchable thirst for gambling for its own economic development.

If the owners of Revel go ahead with the closing, announced this week, it will serve as an expensive reminder that the public's thirst for gambling isn't, in fact, unquenchable. It also will be proof that a casino isn't, as was once believed, a recession-proof license to print money.

Revel, which could yet be sold to prevent its closing, would be the fourth casino to shut its doors this year in Atlantic City, after the Atlantic Club Casino Hotel (formerly the Atlantic City Hilton and originally ... yes, the Golden Nugget), Showboat and Trump Plaza (which isn't, Donald Trump is quick to say, owned by Trump any more).

All told, 9,500 jobs will be lost, if all of the closings go through. Atlantic City isn't alone, of course. Mississippi lost one of its largest, oldest casinos recently, and even the Foxwoods Resort in Connecticut, which once raked in money with more slot machines than any casino in the world, is facing financial difficulties.

That hasn't deterred officials elsewhere from wanting in on the action. The first non-Indian casinos in New York, are awaiting the governor's approval. They'll be aimed straight at Pennsylvania, now the second largest casino market in the country after Las Vegas.

Before New York's governor signs off on the plan, he might want to look at Revel. It proves that gambling isn't the good bet everyone once thought it was. (http://www.rgj.com/story/opinion/editorials/)