Double or Nothing: How Two Friends Risked It All to Buy One of Las Vegas' Legendary Casinos Read Online Free PDF

cash. “Remember, baseball season is right around the corner.”
    By the end of baseball season, Tim and Little Frank had paid Big Frank back every cent.
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    There are tons of stories from Tim’s childhood. I could go on all day. But that might give you the impression that Tim was a stereotypical bookie. And that would paint a shallow picture of an American original. Yeah, you could see him as a baby Joe Pesci in a mob movie. But he was also like the mathematician in A Beautiful Mind who could grasp a blackboard full of numbers in an instant. Plus, he had an amazing work ethic.
    There’s an old expression that goes “Personality is what you see and character is what you are.” It’s easy to see the guy with the sports beeper and the cash. But not many people get close enough to see all the qualities inside Tim. Only a few have gotten a true glimpse of his mind or his work ethic. Didn’t matter whether he was valet parking or answering the phones at a room reservation service while he was in high school. Any coworker who wanted a day off to take out his girlfriend or a night off to check out the lap dancers knew he could always call Tim to fill in.
    Tim’s job booking hotel room reservations over the phone was the seed that led to our travel business. It didn’t take a mind like Tim’s very long to compute just how lucrative the reservation business could be. He’d take a call for a weekend room reservation. The rate at the Sahara was, say, $50 a night. That putthe cost for the two nights at $100. Tim then called the Sahara and booked the room. After the room was used and paid for, the Sahara sent 10 or 15 percent—a check for $10 or $15—back to the company that employed Tim.
    The reservations were all recorded on sheets. On the nights that Tim closed the office, it was his job to total the numbers. “Man,” he’d tell himself. “That’s a lot of money for just answering the phone.”
    Later, at USC, Tim took an entrepreneurial class in which he was asked to invent a business and then devise a plan to show how it could prosper. It was the work of an entire semester. Tim came up with a model for a hotel booking business that had the potential to be much more profitable than the one he already knew was lucrative.
    In Tim’s model, the merchant model, he’d go directly to the Sahara and ask for a block of rooms at a wholesale rate. He’d get that same $50 room at the Sahara, say, for $40. Then, when a person called up for a weekend reservation, Tim would charge the guy’s credit card $100 for the same two nights. So Tim’s profit was roughly $20 for the same transaction.
    There were additional benefits to the merchant model. Tim would be charging the customer making the reservation by credit card on the day of the call—even if the person didn’t use the room until three months down the road. So Tim was holding the money for those three months before he got a bill from the Sahara, a bill that he might not pay until a few weeks after it arrived.
    The genius behind this model is that everybody wins. The Sahara’s happy because it’s filling up rooms without having to spend more on marketing. The customer has the convenience of one-stop shopping at prices lower than he’d get directly fromthe hotel. And Tim’s model not only generated a better profit, but it also generated interest on the money he was holding.
    As his junior year wound down, Tim figured he could actually pull his plan off. But he’d already lined up a summer job in finance with the L.A. office of a Wall Street firm called Kidder Peabody. In a strange way, this is where luck came in.
    Tim started the summer job running errands for an executive, but showed up one morning to find the executive’s office completely empty. The executive had vanished in the middle of the night. Tim blinked and wondered if he was in the right place.
    When he