Atlantic City Weekly

In the end, the decision to close the Sands Casino and Hotel came down to a matter of dollars and sense, coupled with the time-tested operating philosophy of its owner.

Not that it made the decision any easier. And there's no escaping the irony that the Sands is generating positive cash flow and is financially healthier than it's been in over 20 years.

"That's what makes it even more difficult [to close]," says Sands president George Toth, who helped put the casino on a better financial footing for its owner, billionaire corporate raider Carl Icahn.

"The bottom line is that we're way ahead of where we were last year," he adds.

That, plus the Sands' parent company's recent acquisition of the adjacent land where the fabled Traymore Hotel once stood, may have been enough to save the city's smallest casino. But it simply didn't fit in with Icahn's business formula.

Icahn, a self-described "riverboat gambler," has always been a buyer, never a builder. He ultimately decided to stick with the tactics that made him a billionaire.

"[Icahn] thought long and hard about building [a new casino]," Toth says. "But he has no history of doing that with any of his companies. What he does best is take a distressed business and turn it around. And that's what we did with the Sands. We took it out of bankruptcy and put [Icahn] in a position where he had choices."

When Toth locks the doors to the city's smallest casino hotel on Nov. 10, it will be only the second time in more than 28 years that a casino has gone out of business. In 1989, Elsinore's Atlantis Casino Hotel, which originally opened as the Playboy Hotel & Casino, had its licensed pulled by state gaming regulators because of financial instability.

That building eventually reopened as the Trump World's Fair casino and operated until 1999, when it closed for good and was eventually demolished.

Once it's closed, there will be no second life for the Sands. Gaming machines and tables will be removed and distributed to other casinos operated by the property's new owner, Pinnacle Entertainment, which bought the Sands and the adjacent Traymore Hotel site for $250 million to create one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on the Boardwalk.

After the 26-year-old building is gutted of anything of value -- fixtures, furnishings, wiring, copper pipes -- it will eventually be imploded sometime in late 2007. Pinnacle hopes to begin building a billion-dollar-plus mega-resort complex in 2008 and open two years later.

On Aug. 11, 1980, Ocean City businessmen Eugene Gatti and Arthur Kania opened the Brighton Hotel & Casino, which was named for one of Atlantic City's stately old hotels. It was the city's first all-new casino and wasn't a retrofit from an existing building. In the 850-seat Brighton Music Hall, singer Jack Jones, accompanied by the Si Zentner Orchestra, christened the room with a show that also featured Jones' father, stage and screen actor Allan Jones, who performed his best-known song, "Donkey Serenade" and "Don Quoxite" from the musical Man of La Mancha, in which he toured for many years.

In financial trouble almost from the start, the Brighton was sold in 1981 to the Pratt brothers of Texas, who'd also purchased the Sands in Las Vegas. The Brighton was renamed the Sands to cash in on the familiar Las Vegas brand name.

For as long as there's been a casino on the Sands' landlocked site, every owner has coveted the Traymore property. But for years, Caesars Entertainment, which acquired the land in the late 1970s, refused to sell as a hedge against competition. At one point, Caesars intended to develop the land as a major casino and even had plans drawn up. But the company decided to put all its eggs in one basket -- the original Caesars Boardwalk Regency Hotel Casino. The company kept the Traymore site vacant and leased it out as a parking lot.

When Harrah's Entertainment, Inc. bought Caesars Entertainment, Inc. last year, it announced it would sell the 14-acre site and said Icahn had first dibs. The deal was consummated last June. In anticipation of the land grab, the Sands already had grand designs for the site.

"I've got three different sets of plans in my office right now," Toth says. Sources say Toth and Richard Brown, the CEO of Icahn's gaming company, had many meetings with architects last year to discuss plans for the site.

Fans rushed toward the stage bearing bouquets of flowers as Ann-Margret took her bows following her electrifying Atlantic City debut in the newly renamed Copa Room. From a ringside seat at the stage, a dapperly dressed middle-aged man rose to present the actress, stage star and Hollywood sex kitten with his own opening-night gift -- a magnificent, full-length sable coat worth around $15,000.

Like everything else related to the heavily regulated casino industry, there's a specific procedure for closing a casino that's outlined by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission and its law enforcement arm, the Division of Gaming Enforcement. Toth says his primary focus during the next three weeks is to make sure those procedures are followed.

"There's a ton of regulations we have to follow," the casino chief explains.