What a great businessman. It's too bad this whole thing couldn't be orchestrated on TV. But no, business deals in the real world are based on what real people do with real brains, instead of a gaggle of asskissing quasi-celebrity has-beens trying to curry favor. I've been to this casino and the review in here is dead on. The place is a dump. Of course it's also located about a mile away from the Boardwalk, but that's another story.
I love where they say how hard it is to get Trump's name off of everything. That sounds like the area where the most attention was paid to engineering - making sure his name was applied everywhere, indelibly. Best part is near the end, where the guy says Trump Entertainment paid more attention to the other two Atlantic City casinos they had. Those two went broke as well.
In Atlantic City, all that's golden is not Trump.
New Jersey casino regulators approved the sale of Trump Marina Hotel Casino on Monday to the owners of the Golden Nugget casinos in Nevada for $38 million -- about a tenth of what the property was expected to fetch just three years ago.
Landry's Inc. has rebranded the casino as the Golden Nugget Atlantic City, a name change that became official with Monday's vote by the Casino Control Commission.
The giant "TRUMP" letters have been removed from the front of the casino, though the top and rear of the casino-hotel still bear Donald Trump's name. A temporary banner proclaiming the casino as the Golden Nugget could be put up as soon as Tuesday, a company spokeswoman said.
Fertitta said renovations will be completed by December, including a remake of the casino's boxy, institutional facade.
"It is not going to have that hospital look anymore," he said. "It'll look like a totally different building. You will not recognize this property come December."
Work was already under way on the changeover Monday afternoon. About 200 slot machines near the top of the escalators from the parking lot garage were being removed for a restaurant, and prototypes of the newly made-over guest rooms were being left open for guests to wander through and admire. Swatches of colorful new carpeting were laid down in hotel hallways to show what will eventually replace the more drab patterns consisting of tens of thousands of interlocking letter "T"s, beneath the "Trump" name on each room door.
"We have been working on removing everything that says `Trump,' but it's overwhelming," said Amy Chasey, a Golden Nugget spokeswoman.
The sale leaves Trump Entertainment Resorts, which emerged last summer from its third stint in bankruptcy court, with two Boardwalk casinos -- its flagship trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort and the older Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.
Trump Entertainment has been trying to sell the Marina casino since May 2008, when it struck a deal with Coastal Marina LLC, run by former Donald Trump protege Richard Fields. Fields first agreed to pay $316 million. After the economy tanked, Trump and Coastal Marina agreed to a lower price of $270 million, but the deal fell apart in 2009 over disagreements about the physical condition of the casino.
Coastal claimed that summer that the Trump Marina needs at least $50 million in repairs. Things were so bad, Coastal Marina claimed in a lawsuit, the casino was putting plants under leaky windows and skylights to catch the drips when it rained rather than fix the leaks.
Fertitta said he will operate the Golden Nugget better than Trump Entertainment did.
"What shocked us was there's only one bar right at the front," he said. "It's almost like everything was done not to do business here. It was a big box."
He said Trump Entertainment Resorts paid more attention to its two other casinos than to Trump Marina.
"We will be 100 percent focused on driving business to the Golden Nugget," he said.
[Associated Press]
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