Travel CASINO ROYALTY: THOSE VEGAS JUNKETS

The Las Vegas junket began as 1 suspected it might. The 300-seat chartered jumbo jet was still filling with people when four men staked out two full rows in the middle of the plane, folded the seats down and spread blankets across them. They passed around decks of cards, discarded the jokers and started shuffling.

“Two cents a point, three cents for going down with less than five and five cents for gin,” one of them said as he started dealing.

The plane filled rapidly. Most passengers were in their 40’s, wearing leisure suits and pants suits, a few Neiman-Mar-cus dresses, and flashy jewelry – pinkie rings on the men and big bauble rings and rope necklaces on the women.

A few of the men wore slacks and golf shirts open at the neck. These were the real players who bet $50 and $100 chips. Much of the flash crowd dispersed when we arrived in Las Vegas, and didn’t show up again until the flight home.

As the big TWA charter rumbled down the taxiway, the gin players remained absorbed in their game. I sat gripping the seat arms in stark terror, which is the only way to fly. “That’s gin,” said the big middle-aged man I had dubbed “the banker.” He dropped his filled-out hand on the blanket as the other men began adding up their points. “No wonder I couldn’t get that other king. You were saving them, weren’t you Jerry? And got stuck with ’em too,” laughed a land developer named Jack. The stewardesses dashed about taking drink and meal orders – all free and all first-class. The players kept up their rapid pace, dealing, discarding, playing, ginning or going down for a few points.

To get on one of these luxury gambling junkets is either very difficult, or very easy, depending on which hotel invites, and who the manager is. The Dunes junket from Texas is exceedingly hard to get on, because of Day Kristofferson, who runs the Dallas office of the Dunes Hotel. Day will not take anybody who just walks into his Commerce Street office. Nor will he take anyone he doesn’t like. And finally, he doesn’t take anyone who can’t afford it. “He’s the toughest credit man on the strip,” one of the hotel pit bosses said later.

Kristofferson flies to Vegas four or five times a year, taking 250 to 300 people each time. The hotel says it costs $500 per person to wine, dine and fly them out, but with dealers, pit bosses, cocktail waitresses, waiters, chefs and entertainers, the cost goes up. The hotels say they must make five or six times their $500 investment just to make a marginal profit. But there is no danger of not making a profit, and our junket probably dropped better than $500,000 on the tables before we left. Most of the junket left in the hole, but there were some winners – some big winners.

So it’s understandable for Kristofferson to take “players only,” and to check bank accounts and income status before the trip.

As our plane touched down in Vegas, the passengers cheered and the gin players finally quit. “Jeez. I won 11 hands and it still cost me $46,” said the banker. Outside the terminal, seemingly endless lines of buses were waiting and we were quickly driven to the Dunes. Everyone queued up for room keys, and when I gave the clerk my name, 1 received my first Vegas culture shock. Inside the brown envelope was a big room key, and a white plastic credit card stamped with my name and an account number. This is fool’s play, I immediately thought. Anyone who is foolish enough to give me a credit card ….

Then I noticed the “players” were getting bright yellow cards, good for credit at the tables, while my little white card was good only in the bar or the restaurants. Not so foolish an idea after all.

Some of the junketeers were already at the tables – no surprise, since that’s what they had come for. The gin players, Jerry, Jack, the banker and a guy named Wally, were sitting together at one of the blackjack tables, chips stacked in front of them, watching without expression as a buxom dealer spewed cards out like a machine. Jerry was betting $25 chips and alternately winning and losing. The banker was betting $50 chips and winning steadily. The other two, Jack and Wally, were losing. After half an hour, Jack drifted away to the dice tables and Wally headed for his room. Jerry and the banker stayed with the buxom dealer another half-hour and then moved to another table.

At the dice tables, one of the Dallas players – slacks and open golf shirt – was rolling the dice and losing $300 a pop. His wife, a rather attractive woman with lots of beaded necklaces, hung over the table beside him, drinking heavily and talking to the dice. “Come on, come on baby. Do it. Make it. Come on, baby.” It began to dawn on me: the place is not real. There are no clocks. You don’t see money on the tables, just little ceramic chips. No one seems to know or care what’s happening to the guy standing next to him.

As abruptly as the thought had come, it was gone. Las Vegas is no place for reality or moralizing. It’s a good place to escape to, and a place to escape from. I spent the rest of the afternoon feeding $20 in nickels into the slot machines and felt better.

As the sun sinks, neon begins lighting up Las Vegas Boulevard, “the Strip.” The hotels are bathed in floodlights, hotel signs turn slowly in the soft desert air. The boulevard fills with cars. In the chintzy little gambling parlors sandwiched in between the big hotels, comes the rattle of money being flushed into one-armed bandits. Occasional whoops of joy signify a winner, but most of the gamblers play in silence, or murmur low to the dice or the cards.

In the big hotel casinos, the scene is a little different. The carpets are plusher, the furniture better, and the players are a wealthier class of people than the sandals-and-flowered-shirt set who bet nickels and dimes in the parlors. These people play with hotel credit cards or big wads of cash banked at the cashier’s office. And they are intense, watching every move of the card or dice. In the pits, behind the dice and blackjack tables, the pit bosses and their assistants watch in stony silence, pausing behind a dealer or croupier to study the table action. On heavy nights probably several million dollars flow through the casino, and overhead are mirrors that reflect the scene. Behind those mirrors are supposedly other Casino employees who watch the pit people. It may be a form of low level paranoia, but with all that much cash around, who can blame them for watching each other?

In the Dunes Casino, which is about 200 feet long and about 100 feet wide, the action builds up as the hotel’s big restaurants empty out the high-rollers who have just ordered the most expensive food and wine on the menu and paid for it with a credit card for which there will be no end-of-the-month billing. They’re about to pay for it right now.

The four gin players from the plane sit around the blackjack tables with stacks of green $25 chips. The banker and his mod-ishly-dressed blonde wife sit side by side, playing 21. He is losing; she is winning. Jerry, still wearing his golf cap from a morning’s round on the Dunes Country Club course, sits betting $50 and $100 at a time, still alternately winning and losing. Wally is playing about even, but then leaves for the dice tables. Jack and his wife watch the action for a while, and then he sits down. She goes back to her room to rest before going to a midnight show at Caesar’s Palace where Steve and Eydie and Ed McMahon are holding forth. Wally’s wife strolls by with a bucket of nickels she has won from the slot machine. Standing to one side, watching his players and puffing on a cigarette, is Day Kristofferson.

Kristofferson heads to the pits where he will stand for an entire five days, morning, noon and night, or until his players go to bed. His job is to keep a watchful eye on the action, to okay credit, or in rare cases, to send them home on the next available flight if they’ve lost too much, or even if they’ve won too much.

One of the Dallas junketeers sat at the baccarat table until 3 one morning. Kristofferson watched as the man won $25,000, while a few yards away, at the dice tables, another Dallas player lost $20,000. Throughout the junket, Dallas players won and lost hundreds of thou-sands. I did my part by losing about $90 in the slots, which is not really gambling, I told myself.

By the second day, Kristofferson usually has his players sorted out and knows what they’re doing. The real players stay about even, alternating between the blackjack tables and the dice. The banker and his wife play steadily at blackjack, and he seems to be winning more and more. At one point he ran his $25 chip stack up to about $1,000. Jack, the land developer, plays the dice tables with great regularity, and wins about $300 every few hours before feeding it back. Wally plays the blackjack tables with Jerry, and both seem to be doing fair. Wally’s wife is still lugging around her bucket of nickels, as are several other wives. Their hands are turning dirty gray from the coins, and I’m down fifteen bucks from playing dollar-a-hole golf with Jerry, Jack and Wally.

By the third day the players seem to be into a routine of playing blackjack early in the evening, then moving to the dice tables as the night wanes. Some of the people I had seen on the charter coming out are still not around. Kristofferson tells me he has a few “stiffs,” who play just enough for him to see them.

“I’ve got some ’short horses’ on this trip. They’re $1 craps players who wave at me everytime I walk by so I’ll think they’re playing heavy. All I have to do is check with the pit boss and I know how much they’re betting,” Kristofferson says. He also points out a couple of “steamers,” players who get angry at the tables and bet wildly improbable combinations.

On the fourth day, a Saturday, the tourist crowd begins to slop over from the small parlors into the big casinos where the returns on bets are higher. More flowered shirts and sandals, but also longhairs with backpacks and old army jackets, and girls in hot pants. These are the people who come up early Saturday morning from Los Angeles and spend all day and all night at the tables before heading home early Sunday. Most of the Dallas players are absent, preparing for the big action Saturday night – their last chance to win or lose big.

My last fling in one of the Dunes restaurants includes escargots, medallions of veal and a bottle of 1970 Bordeaux that should have stayed in the bottle a few more years. I finish off the meal with cheese, two snifters of Remy Martin and a big cigar. Well fortified, and having again signed a dinner check, I ease out into the casino to watch the final night of action.

Dazzling is the only description 1 can think of. Diamonds and emeralds are standard. The heavy guns are wheeling into place around the room. About that time, Redd Foxx strolls through the room in crushed velvet and a jaunty checkered hat. “Telephone for Mr. Redd Foxx,” the public address system keeps repeating. Foxx keeps walking through, obviously expecting to be recognized and mobbed by fans, but the ploy fails. These people are here to gamble, and couldn’t care less about stars.

The play is heavy all night around the $25 minimum blackjack tables. The banker sits hunched over his part of the felt-covered table with stacks of chips, betting $200 at a time. His wife has moved from blackjack to Keno, a game similar to bingo. The land developer is at one of the dice tables, edged in along the rail, betting $300 combinations. Jerry plays blackjack and keeps up his win-lose combination. Three men who aren’t from Dallas catch everyone’s eye at one of the tables. One of the three sits at the table, playing up to $1,000 per hand and wins heavily. The other two, obviously supplying the money for the player, watch over his shoulders as he hits a hot streak of six winning hands. After stops at other tables, the three take their stacks of chips on a big tray to the cashier’s office and trade them in for big rolls of money. (Why not me, God?)

The action slows for a while, and then picks up again after the Dunes’ cabaret theater finishes its last act. Two stunning women, one in black and the other in white, move down the line of $25 blackjack tables, winning around $3,000. A young couple edges into the crowd at the roulette table and the husband begins winning on almost every spin. His wife watches proudly as her husband racks up several hundred dollars in winnings, and then they move off toward the elevators to the rooms.

There is no question that the house is getting the better side of the action, but there are also some big winners that night. Around 3 a.m. I go to bed, leaving the casino still full.

Sunday morning the table action is light, but a number of Dallas players are still pushing to get in some last-minute play. Jack sits with his wife in the bar, watching a football game on television. “I paid for my trip,” he says, figuring his losses at about $1,000 – enough to pay the hotel’s $500 outlay to bring him and his wife out. Wally is up only $100 and still trying. Jerry is up $700 and has been up all night, and is still at it. The banker and his wife are still playing Keno, and are probably ahead by several thousand. The dice player and his wife with the beaded necklaces have lost about $3,000.

It has been a long four-and-a-half days for everyone. Kristofferson is tired and his face looks haggard as he checks to be sure everyone has paid their credit tabs in the casino and any incidental expenses other than room, bar and food. Noon comes and the buses load up again with the junketeers, and some of the “stiffs” who haven’t been around very much. As we walk through the airport terminal toward the chartered jet, most trade stories about the shows they’ve seen. Few talk about gambling, because it’s old hat to them now.