Tropicana Casino Pursues Vegas's Middlebrow Market

It's been a long time since anyone did anything in Las Vegas on purpose. Ever since the spring of 2008, casino investors have felt like characters from , trying to figure out what they got themselves into and how the hell to get out of it. Deutsche Bank's loan to a real estate developer went so bad that the bank wound up owning a half-built casino. Unable to offload the project, it currently operates the Cosmopolitan Hotel. In 2009, Caesars Palace halted construction on its new Octavius tower and is only getting around to finishing the job now.

After the fall, Alex Yemenidjian was the first person to actually invest in the Strip on purpose. He and Canadian private equity billionaire Gerald Schwartz bought the Rat Pack-era, once-classy Tropicana out of bankruptcy in 2009 after guaranteeing at least $75 million to update the property. It was actually their 24th-favorite available property in Vegas, but they'd looked at the first 23 before the crash and considered them overpriced. Then the company that owned the Tropicana went bankrupt, and Yemenidjian and Schwartz bought it in cash. By that point, though, Yemenidjian remembers that the hotel had duct tape holding the carpet together every few feet. And a note in the employee lounge offering a bounty for each bedbug brought back alive.