Kerzner gaming

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Although he became a junior partner by the age of 25, he found the work less than stimulating and decided to become involved in the hotel business, but in a manner decidedly different from his family's kosher hotel. He told Hotels in a profile, "I always thought a hotel should be more than a bed factory.

It should have good restaurants, nice pubs, good entertainment. He leased the hotel and managed it at night and on weekends while continuing to hold down his accounting job. Kerzner's concept of adding entertainment to a hotel was novel in South Africa and proved very popular.

The taste of success only whetted Kerzner's appetite, inspiring him to build South Africa's first five-star hotel, despite never having seen a five-star hotel or having been out of the country in his life. He acquired some beachfront property in a small fishing village near Durban, South Africa, and then did some belated homework.

As he told Hotels, "I decided I should probably get on a plane and see that I wasn't building something stupid. Although he would not visit California, when it came time to name his new room five-star hotel, he chose Beverly Hills, "because it sounded glamorous, and I knew it was going to be a glamorous hotel and that all the glamorous people in South Africa were going to want to be there.

Because SAB wanted to make the transition from the beer business to the hotel business, Kerzner now had the financial backing to become a hotel magnate. Over the next several years he built the Southern Sun chain of more than 30 high-end hotels in South Africa. The crown jewel of the Southern Sun chain was the Sun City resort. South Africa at the time was both segregationist, practicing the notorious apartheid system that kept blacks and whites separate, and puritanical. With the exception of horse racing, gambling was illegal.

When the government established black homeland states, which were allowed to make their own laws, Kerzner took advantage of the situation and in he struck a deal with Bophuthatswana--a state with a population of 1. Here he built the legendary resort Sun City, which opened in It featured a man-made lake, a ,acre wildlife park, four hotels, casino, two golf courses, and a 6,seat arena.

Because South Africa's apartheid system was receiving increased condemnation from around the world, Sun City had to pay entertainers a premium. Kerzner maintained that Sun City was unfairly targeted by anti-apartheid forces, arguing that Bophuthatswana allowed blacks and whites to mix openly, and that the resort provided thousands of jobs to blacks and brought in tax revenue to the homeland state.

Nevertheless, Sun City became a symbol of apartheid to many, its reputation firmly established in by the protest song "Sun City," in which such celebrity singers as Bruce Springsteen, Bono, and Bob Dylan chanted a pledge, "I ain't gonna play Sun City. His company was called Sun International South Africa. Although he harbored international ambitions, Kerzner found it difficult to transcend his association with South Africa and apartheid.

Investments in France and Australia were also rebuffed. It was not until the release from prison of Nelson Mandela, the longtime black opponent of apartheid, that Kerzner began to see business pick up at Sun City and he was able to expand internationally. Kerzner's first order of business was to upgrade the Sun City complex. In addition to a room hotel called The Palace, The Lost City included a man-made jungle complete with rivers and waterfalls.

While The Lost City helped to renew interest in Sun City, it also served as a trial run for Kerzner's next project: the Atlantis resort on the Paradise Island stretch of beach near Nassau, in the Bahamas. The property fell into disrepair and eventually filed for bankruptcy under Griffin. He picked up three hotels, a golf course, a small airline and airport, and acres of undeveloped beachfront property. He also took over a complex that was in woeful condition, both in terms of the operation and the physical condition.

Most of the buildings leaked and the famous Ocean Club had been virtually destroyed by termites. Not only would Kerzner have to rebuild Paradise Island's structures, he also faced the daunting task of repairing the marketing damage done to the resort, as many people who had once vacationed in the Bahamas now traveled to resorts elsewhere in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. Kerzner quickly took steps to integrate the Paradise Island properties into a massive resort and get it opened for business, essentially designing while building.

As he explained to Hotels, "When we started Atlantis my idea was to bring the ocean into the resort and create these fish habitats. I again felt that if we were really going to do it, it really had to be the right scale. The resort reopened in December as the Atlantis Paradise Island, occupancy quickly increased by 16 percent, and the resort essentially revitalized the Bahamas' tourism industry.

But Kerzner was only beginning to realize his dream for Paradise Island. Even as Kerzner was dedicating a great deal of his resources to the Bahamas, he also was turning his attention to the United States. In the early s he became involved in the rapidly growing tribal gaming industry. The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of gave Native American tribes the right to conduct gaming on tribal lands, including casinos with state permission.

One of the most successful of the Native American casinos was the Foxwoods resort, located near North Stonington, Connecticut. It was run by the Mashantucket Pequot Indians, which as a matter of historical fact were virtually eradicated by English settlers and rival tribes in Members of the reconstituted tribe had to be one-sixteenth Pequot, but these requirements were soon loosened so that anyone who could trace his or her lineage to a Pequot listed in the or census was eligible to apply for tribal membership.

Foxwoods, located close to New York and Boston, was an immediate success, attracting the attention of another branch of the Mashantucket Pequot family tree, the Mohegans, who broke away before the s and moved to Connecticut. For years a group of about 1, people claiming Mohegan lineage petitioned the U.