Cast Away

I wrote a piece about the closing of the Castaways and the possible reopening of the Moulin Rouge for my next KNPR commentary. Here it is:
For those who live in Las Vegas, the closure of a casino is about more than the failure of a business. The sudden shuttering of the Castaways hotel and casino on January 20th, the second closure of a storied Las Vegas casino in less than a month, means more than just the loss of hundreds of jobs, 80,000 square feet of gaming space, 447 hotel rooms, and a super-sized bowling alley. It means, in a small way, proving the lie of the guiding principal of this city: that the house always wins.
The Castaways was a likely candidate for closure. After all, it had been in bankruptcy since June, and had steadily leaked cash since its purchase from Harrah’s Entertainment in 2000. Before that year, the Castaways had been the Showboat, and it had an interesting history. Opened in 1954, the Showboat debuted the riverboat motif; two decades later, the Holiday casino on the Strip—today Harrah’s Las Vegas—would take the idea to new levels, and by the 1990s, a string of working riverboat casinos in seven states would make the idea of a boat-shaped casino seem part of the natural order of things. But Harrah’s acquired Showboat in 1999 for its Atlantic City property, not its Las Vegas flagship. In what seems to be a pattern, it then sold the original casino but kept the name (the current rumor is that the newly-acquired Binion’s Horseshoe will share the same fate). The new owners, left with a less than desirable location and lacking the property’s most valuable asset, its name, tried to graft a new history onto the casino by renaming it the Castaways. The Castaways was itself a well-known casino on the Las Vegas Strip of the 1960s through the 1980s until it was demolished to make way for the Mirage. So, in 2001, Mardi Gras went out, a seaside Spanish ocean theme came in, and the owners hoped to write a new page in the history books.
But for VSS Enterprises, there was no new continent to be found across the ocean blue. Though many industry analysts write the Castaways off, some speculate that the right investors, with the right plan and deep enough pockets, could make a go of the former Showboat.
Hope spring eternal, it seems, where casinos are concerned, and an unrelated news item proves it. Where others see dismal prospects for a casino that has been closed for the better part of forty years, the Moulin Rouge Redevelopment Corporation sees opportunity. “Bad is not necessarily for us,” the company’s president says, explaining that, when he and his partners rebuild and reopen the fabled Moulin Rouge in 2005, it will transform its West Bonanza Road neighborhood. The fact that the area has no other major attractions is, for the Moulin Rouge’s owners, a positive benefit. Where others see blighted urban decay, they see an untapped market.
Whether a new Moulin Rouge revitalizes the neighborhood, or construction even begins, is almost unimportant today. The mere fact that someone is willing to invest substantial money in the project, that the Moulin Rouge may be brought back, gives a logical symmetry to the news of the Castaway’s closure. It reminds us that, even though the house sometimes loses, there is always someone willing to gamble otherwise. For every casino that fails, another will open; the dice will keep rolling, and all will be right in Las Vegas.

More about the Castaways closing from the LV Sun.
You can look forward to hearing this on the radio sometime soon. Have a great weekend.
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posted by Dave at 6:03 PM

Online extortion

One of the perils of being a bookmaker used to be that any local tough could shake you down for "protection" money, unless you had "protection" from someone higher up the food chain. Since bookmaking has gone digital, the extortionists have too. Threatening denial of service attacks, they are demanding payment from online gaming sites. With the SuperBowl around the corner, many of these cyber gangs are stepping up their attacks. From Yahoo! News:

Britain's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) told Reuters it is investigating a series of attacks and threats of attacks on companies in the United Kingdom.

But security experts say sites based in the Caribbean and continental Europe have also been targeted.

"These are not groups of amateur hackers -- great deals of money are changing hands," said an NHCTU spokesman. "These are for-profit crimes and all intelligence suggests that organized crime is involved."

One such target is Curacao-based VIP Management Services, which runs seven gambling sites including www.VIPSports.com and www.Betgameday.com.

"We were first targeted in September and have been under intermittent attack ever since," said Alistair Assheton, managing director of the privately held six-year-old firm.

The so-called denial-of-service attacks, which can disable a corporate data network with a barrage of bogus data requests, are a standard tool for hackers aiming to knock out a site.

Lately, police say, crime gangs have adapted it to extort businesses. Security experts and police said they believe the gangs are based in Eastern Europe and Russia, taking advantage of the region's weak cyber crime laws and its legions of savvy programmers.

Assheton said that on Monday he received the latest threat via e-mail. It was a demand for $30,000 to be wired via Western Union to the extortionist's account or risk being hit. "They essentially said 'pay up or you will go down for the Super Bowl,"' he said.

Police sources said this type of cyber "protection racket" has grown in recent months. The risk of being knocked offline by a digital attack on Super Bowl weekend, one of the busiest betting periods of the year, could doom a gambling site.

Jeffrey Weber, who writes an online news letter dedicated to the industry, called www.Alltopsportsbooks.com, estimated an outage of a few hours is costly. "That's $500,000 to $1 million dollars worth of action wiped out in one shot," he said.

FULL STORY

Technology is constantly expanding, impeded only by the human imagination. Changing the technology seldom changes the rules--it just shifts the venue and raises the stakes.
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posted by Dave at 1:32 PM