What Really Happens in Vegas by James Patterson

Author:James Patterson [PATTERSON, JAMES]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

Like Knievel’s jump, building the STRAT tower was an act that could be viewed as either courageous or just plain crazy. It was the brainchild of the swashbuckler known as the Polish Maverick, Bob Stupak, who dreamed of Vegas marvels no one had ever imagined. Stupak was a gambler who defied the odds: he even cheated death in 1995, after crashing his Harley at sixty miles per hour and breaking every bone in his face, looking “worse than anything you could see in a horror movie,” as his friend the legendary Las Vegas–based singer Phyllis McGuire told John L. Smith of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Soon after arriving in 1971 from Pittsburgh, Stupak purchased a casino called the Vault in downtown Vegas and renamed it Glitter Gulch. He was “perhaps the greatest huckster in Las Vegas history,” wrote the Review-Journal. In 1974, he opened a small “slot joint” he immodestly christened Bob Stupak’s World Famous Historic Gambling Museum and Casino. After that place burned down, he took “the worst piece of real estate on Las Vegas Boulevard, a site fit only for a car lot,” and transformed it into a space-themed hotel and casino he named Bob Stupak’s Vegas World—a gaudy operation that, thanks to Stupak’s gift for publicity stunts and sloganeering, nevertheless pulled in one hundred million dollars a year in gambling revenues during its peak in the mid-1980s.

In 1990, Stupak experienced his grandest vision of all. Flying over the city in a private jet at two thousand feet and reveling in a magnificent Las Vegas sunset, he had an epiphany: a resort and casino built not in the desert, but in the sky. Complete with a restaurant and amusement park, the aerial resort would bestow upon everyone in his adopted city the same glorious view he was enjoying from the jet. He would build not merely a tower, but the Stratosphere Las Vegas, the biggest, tallest, and brashest in the world.

“All he had to do is risk everything he owned,” reported the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Originally designed at more than 1,800 feet high, Stupak’s tower was soundly rejected after concerns were raised about it being a hazard to passing airplanes. So the gambler cut a deal. He lowered the height to 1,149 feet but added a roller coaster and freefall ride at the very top of a concrete stem, a spire of nothingness in a city where every square inch of real estate is precious. “You couldn’t build it today,” says Stephen Thayer, the VP and general manager of the STRAT hotel and casino. “The financials just don’t work. Think about how much of it is unusable elevator space. It’s only the small part at the top you can do something with, so most people wouldn’t go and build something like this.”

The tower opened in April 1996, at a cost of five hundred fifty million dollars, and it quickly bankrupted its creator. Like so many in Vegas, Bob Stupak gambled everything, and lost. He died in 2009 at the age of sixty-seven, but his tower, a monument to both his lunacy and his legacy, lived on.

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