Jennifer Gaynor - That (Expletive) Broad: Women Who Broke Barriers in the Casino and Gaming Industry

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That (Expletive) Broad :

Women Who Broke Barriers in the Casino and Gaming Industry

Jennifer Gaynor

New Degree Press

Copyright 2020 Jennifer Gaynor

All rightsreserved.

That (Expletive) Broad:

Women Who Broke Barriers in the Casino and Gaming Industry

ISBN 978-1-64137-939-7 Paperback

978-1-64137-742-3 Kindle Ebook

978-1-64137-743-0 Ebook

To my mom, Laura Duplessis. You inspire me every day.
And to the memory of Bob Faiss, the grandfather of gaming law.

CONTENTS

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Chapter 1
The Gaming Industry Today and How We Got Here

Chapter 2
The Card Players and Dealers

Chapter 3
The Casino Owners

Chapter 4
The Executives

Chapter 5
The Regulators

Chapter 6
Being a First

Chapter 7
Even Successful Broads Battle Self-Doubt

Chapter 8
Real Broads Help Others Come Up

Chapter 9
The Winding, Rambling Path to Success

Introduction

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Bending over the game will ruin your ovaries.

A smart woman? Ive never seen one of them.

You need to find a husband.

Women should be nurses or teachers.

Put your tray down and get changed. I have a customer who wants to take you to dinner. Hes got a $400,000 line.

These are all comments and sentiments (some paraphrased) that were directed toward the women profiled in this book at various points in their lives and careers. This is just a tiny sampling of the push-back these women faced when pursuing their careers in what has very much been a mans world: the world of casinos and gaming.

Disheartening? Perhaps. But also inspirational in how these women reacted to the comments. They ignored them. They defied them. They persisted and they overcamespectacularly.

One of the comments in particular resonated with me so much that I made it the title of this book. The comment was aimed at Debra Nutton, who had started working on the floor in Las Vegas casinos during the late 1970s and 1980s. At that time, her presenceat least in her positions as dealer and pit bosswas not welcomed by her male peers. In fact, they would often refer to her as that (expletive) broad.

Im sure they didnt mean it as a compliment, but I love it.

At first, I thought that was strangeto love men calling a woman names in her place of work. I thought about it some more and realized I loved it because it obviously irked the men to have her there, in her positions of increasing power and authority, where no woman had been before. Nutton didnt let that stop her. She stayed the course and carved out an impressive career for herself, despite the names her colleagues might throw her way.

I hope this book inspires you, as it has inspired me, to follow your dreams. For me, that dream is this book. I didnt know I could do it. Once I started to read and write about the stories of Nutton and the other broads, however, I gained confidence to keep going. I hope you, too, find inspiration in these stories to take the risk, to do that thing youve always wanted to do. I hope you are inspired to be an (expletive) broad.

Where Are the Women?

This year marks my fifteenth anniversary as a gaming attorney in Las Vegas, Nevada. For those not familiar with the term, gaming is the industry term used to describe the casino and hospitality industry. I started my career in gaming with my first job out of law school as an associate at the then-leading Nevada law firm, Lionel Sawyer & Collins.

Located in the top stories of the towering (for a smaller city) Bank of America building in downtown Las Vegas, the firm was filled with deep carpets, rich wood accents, and portraits of those who had come before. One of these portraits was of firm co-founder and namesake, former Nevada governor Grant Sawyer. The politically astute former governor played a key role in saving Las Vegas by creating the gold-standard of gaming regulation that allowed the city to morph from a magnet for criminal enterprise to the international gaming and hospitality destination it is today.

During the past fifteen years working in this field, Ive had the opportunity to learn about the history of gaming in the United States. And the story, without fail, centers on men like Grant Sawyer.

Indeed, those of us who work in the gaming industry have long heard about men like Sawyer and others who created the Las Vegas we know today. The usual suspects include men like Sheldon Adelson, the founder, chairman, and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, which owns properties including the Venetian and Palazzo in Las Vegas; Bob Stupak, the card-playing developer behind the towering Stratosphere Casino, Hotel & Tower at the north end of the Las Vegas Strip; Benny Binion, an iconic gambler and known criminal who founded Binions Horseshoe Casino in downtown Las Vegas and is credited as the first to give free drinks to casino customers; and Steve Wynn, the grand architect of the themed mega-resorts that came to define the strip.

This also includes the wise guys from the citys mafia heyday, such as Benjamin Bugsy Seigel, the mastermind behind the Flamingo, which was the first casino-resort built on the Strip, and Frank Lefty Rosenthal, who ran the skim at the Stardust and other properties in Las Vegas for the mob.

No doubt, these men played pivotal roles in creating the gaming industry as we all know and love it today. Surely, however, there were also contributions made by women. Who were these women? What were their names and stories?

These questions really hit home for me when I was at a national gaming law conference last year. I was in a large conference room in a well-appointed hotel on the coast of Northern California. The room was filled with gaming regulators and attorneys who were in-house with large gaming companies or, like me, were in private practice serving clients who are in the gaming industry.

As any bored attendee does in the morning while waiting for the conference to begin, I sipped a tea and flipped through the overview of speakers for the day. I noticed immediately that almost all of the panelists scheduled were men. This really struck me. I wondered why, in this day and age, when there are so many amazing women in our industry, this was the case.

For a moment I thought, Well, some things never change. When I looked around the room, however, I recognized a number of very powerful women. I realized that things do change. I also realized just how much these women meant to meas role models, friends, and mentorsand I wanted to shine a spotlight on them. Not only those who have inspired or guided me in my own life and career, but also those who came before and have paved the way for the women in that room, and those yet to come and make their mark.

I decided at that moment that I would make sure these women are not overlooked when the history of casinos and gaming is written. I wanted to record their stories and make sure they are remembered.

Lady Bosses

In the course of writing this book, I learned a couple of surprising things.

First, I learned that women have played a pivotal role in shaping gaming. In the world of casinos, women have long been seen as decoration or entertainment. They are showgirls, scantily-clad cocktail servers, or blowing on dice with a wink before their date rolls a lucky seven.

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