He Built Caesars Palace and Circus Circus. He Died Owning Neither One.

So picture this: February 1963, and a heavyset Atlanta motel developer named Jay Sarno is on a junket to the Flamingo, playing like the degenerate gambler he genuinely is, and getting bored out of his mind between hands. Not with the gambling — the gambling’s fine. Bored with the room around it. The dealers look shabby. The carpet’s cheap. Every hotel on the Strip looks like it cost less than it actually did, and Sarno, sitting there losing money he can afford to lose, decides Las Vegas is being run by people with no imagination. He doesn’t just think it. He says it, to anyone who’ll listen: he can build something better than any of this.

Here’s the story Caesars people still tell each other, pride passed down like a family recipe, the kind of thing you hear on your first week on the property and repeat for the next thirty years: the valet who drove Sarno back to the empty lot on the Strip after that boozy Flamingo lunch — after the gambling, after the drinks, after Sarno had talked himself into the whole fantasy right there in the car — is the same guy Sarno hired to run the valet department once Caesars actually got built. \[Worth being straight about this one: it’s oral history, not paper. It’s the kind of story that gets told with real pride inside Caesars and never seems to make it into a book or a newspaper archive, which doesn’t make it false — Sarno was exactly the kind of guy who’d remember the driver who was there for the idea being born and give him the job on the spot. Take it as company legend, told the way the people who worked there always told it.\]

Sarno wasn’t new to building things, and he wasn’t new to Teamster money, either. He’d started as a tile contractor in Miami, then built subsidized housing in Atlanta, and in 1958 he and his college friend Stanley Mallin met Jimmy Hoffa and his lieutenant Allen Dorfman and got financing for the Atlanta Cabana Motel straight out of the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund. More Cabanas followed, in Palo Alto and Dallas. By the time Sarno decided Vegas needed him, he already knew exactly who to call for money nobody else could get — Hoffa, who reportedly took something like a ten percent kickback on loans like this as a matter of course, arranged a $10.6 million pension-fund guarantee for a resort that had no collateral to speak of beyond Sarno’s confidence that he was right.

He was right. Caesars Palace opens August 5, 1966 — $24 million all in, 680 rooms, sixty-foot fountains, imported Italian statues, a hundred-foot crystal chandelier, staff dressed as Roman soldiers and cocktail waitresses done up like something off a temple frieze, the driveway swept back from the street on purpose so guests feel the transition from the real world into somebody else’s fantasy before they’ve even parked the car. Sarno wants every guest walking through those doors to feel like an emperor, and he builds the entire property, down to the matchbooks and the stationery, to make sure of it. Jimmy Hoffa himself shows up for the opening. Stanley Mallin remembers them still hauling furniture into rooms the night the doors opened to the public — that’s how close the whole thing runs to not being ready in time.

It doesn’t stay Sarno’s for long. Caesars is bankrolled by Teamster pension money and run day-to-day by an unlicensed casino boss named Jerry Zarowitz, a Miami bookmaker the state of Nevada never actually cleared to be operating a casino floor — and once the FBI and the Justice Department start circling the property over skimming and its ties to Kansas City’s underworld, the whole partnership curdles fast. Sarno, his fundraiser Nate Jacobson, and Zarowitz can’t function in the same building together, and the state keeps the casino’s license on a month-to-month leash while it decides what to do about all of it. In 1969, three years after opening night, Sarno and Jacobson sell out — $58 million, to the Perlman brothers’ Lum’s restaurant chain, who quietly bring aboard Meyer Lansky as a silent investor almost the moment the ink’s dry. Sarno built the most influential casino Las Vegas had ever seen and got to keep it for three years.

He doesn’t slow down. Circus Circus opens two years earlier than the Caesars sale even closes, October 1968, and it’s the opposite of Roman marble in every way that matters — a literal circus tent over the casino floor, trapeze artists working the air above the craps tables, an elephant wandering the mezzanine occasionally pulling a slot handle just because it’s there, jugglers moving through the crowd like it’s a midway instead of a casino. Sarno’s original blueprint for the second-floor entrance doesn’t include stairs as the only way down — guests are meant to slide, literally, down into the casino floor on a winding metal slide, arriving at the tables the way a kid arrives at the bottom of a playground. Employees get their own version — a fireman’s pole down to the floor for shift changes — until Sarno’s insurance representative fights hard enough about the liability that the poles end up mostly reserved for staff, not the paying public.

Circus Circus almost doesn’t survive its own opening. Sarno’s so short on cash he starts charging admission at the door — an actual taboo on the Strip, no casino had ever asked a gambler to pay just to walk in — and by April 1969 the Nevada Gaming Commission is close enough to shutting the place down that Sarno has to step aside from the presidency just to keep it open. When he finally lines up Teamster money to build the hotel tower in 1972, it comes with strings he doesn’t get to negotiate: Tony Spilotro ends up nominally running the gift shop, which is about as convincing a cover story as it sounds, while actually keeping an eye on the count for people who aren’t Jay Sarno.

Spilotro’s worth a beat of his own here, because “gift shop owner” undersells him to a degree that’s almost funny. He’s got the nickname because an FBI agent, William Roemer, got in the habit of calling him “that little pissant” on the surveillance record, and the newspapers sanded it down to something printable — Tony the Ant, five foot two, a build that makes the nickname sound almost affectionate until you know what he actually did with it. He arrives in Las Vegas in 1971 to watch the Chicago Outfit’s interests in the same four casinos — the Stardust, the Fremont, the Hacienda, the Marina — that Frank Rosenthal would spend the rest of the decade quietly running from an armchair full of security monitors, and the two men become close friends, a friendship the state cites years later as one more reason to keep Rosenthal out of a casino for good. By the time the FBI’s finished counting, they’ll suspect Spilotro in something like two dozen murders, techniques involving ice picks and a vise that don’t need repeating in detail here. Decades later, when Martin Scorsese needed a template for Joe Pesci’s character in Casino, Spilotro was the obvious choice — and by most accounts, the movie undersold him. His own full story — the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, the Gold Rush pawn shop, how it all ended in an Indiana cornfield — gets the space it deserves in Chapter 6\.

The end comes in 1974\. Sarno and Mallin are arrested on charges of offering what prosecutors call the largest bribe in IRS history, and under Gaming Commission pressure they lease Circus Circus away to Bill Bennett and Bill Pennington rather than fight the state while running a casino. Oscar Goodman — the same defense attorney who’d go on to represent half of mob-era Las Vegas — argues entrapment and wins the case outright. Sarno beats the charge. It doesn’t matter. He never gets management control of Circus Circus back, same as he never got Caesars back, two casinos that would define what a Las Vegas resort even looks like for the next thirty years, both of them run by other men before Sarno’s even finished paying his lawyers.

Jay Sarno dies of a heart attack on July 21, 1984, in a high-roller suite at Caesars Palace — the hotel he dreamed up in a car ride back from a boring afternoon at the Flamingo, the one with his name nowhere on the deed anymore, the one he still couldn’t stay away from even after it stopped being his.