Big Apple Jackpot

All across the United States, in big cities and small towns and even in unincorporated rural places without names, people go to casinos and wish away more than fifty billion dollars each year. There are more than a thousand of them, rooms within rooms filled with men and women spending their paychecks in pursuit of the feeling of having won. Las Vegas boasts sixty-four. Biloxi, Mississippi, has eight. The other day, I visited “the only casino in N.Y.C.,” Resorts World, which is actually a “racino,” or race-track casino, with more than four thousand slot machines, dozens of busty virtual blackjack dealers on large TV screens, and actual horse races next door. Inside, the vibe is more dive bar than Bellagio. “It’s just lose, lose, lose here,” a weathered man in a weathered red rain coat, standing near the “FÙ GUÌ HÁO MÈN GLORIOUS FORTUNE” slots, told me. “I come once a week!” Nearby, a large man with a wad of cash was grimacing into a digital roulette machine. Upstairs, hundreds of people sat silently as they played five-dollar-minimum electronic baccarat. Resorts World N.Y.C. generates more revenue than nearly any other casino in America. But Resorts World won’t be the only casino in N.Y.C. for long.

For the past three years—following an amendment to the state constitution and authorization by the State Legislature—nearly a dozen developers and gambling companies have been jockeying to win three new licenses to open casinos in and around New York City. In the early days, several firms worked up preliminary proposals: a casino atop Saks Fifth Avenue’s midtown flagship store, a casino in Coney Island, a casino in Hudson Yards. New York would become the new Las Vegas; the winner would receive, as one insider put it, “a license to print money, literally.” To gin up good will, developers promised the moon and the stars: new public bathrooms and new public parks, more bike lanes, a concert hall, a museum, surveillance drones, thousands of union jobs, affordable housing, even a meeting with Beyoncé.

Nevertheless, locals opposed many of the proposals before they could even be submitted to the state. The casino company founded by Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas magnate portrayed in “Ocean’s Eleven,” pledged nearly two hundred million dollars for community programs. But not even two hundred million dollars was enough. This past May, on the same sunny morning that Jay-Z met with lawmakers in Albany to discuss his own casino plan—to convert the building above the Broadway theatre where the “Lion King” plays into a six-billion-dollar gambling complex—Wynn Resorts withdrew its proposal, admitting that it could not muster enough public support.

That month, at a high-school gymnasium in Hell’s Kitchen, Mayor Eric Adams held a community-affairs meeting with some constituents and local officials. Under consideration: homelessness, violent crime, scaffolding (“I hate scaffolding,” the Mayor said), domestic violence, e-bikes, lead pipes, and rumors about the forced relocation of some senior citizens living in affordable housing. Just before the meeting concluded, a woman stood up, took a microphone, and looked directly at the Mayor. “I’m concerned about all the discussions of casinos coming to New York City—and particularly in this neighborhood,” she said. For many residents, the plan spelled disaster: the lights, the noise, the crime, the traffic, the drugs, the drunk and degenerate and desperate gamblers wandering the streets at every hour of the day and night. “Is there something we can do to stop that?” the woman went on.

“It’s not a done deal,” the Mayor said, then rambled for a little while. “It’s imperative that everyone comes out and sit down, and be part of the process to voice your concerns.”

In June, eight would-be casino developers submitted formal proposals—thousands of pages of traffic studies, floor plans, construction timelines, organizational charts, exterior-lighting design plans, economic-impact assessments, instructional bylaws, legal and ethical disclosures, architectural renderings, revenue projections, and on and on and on—for approval by state regulators. Up to three projects would be given an opportunity to purchase a casino license, at half a billion dollars apiece. But, before the state could even begin to review the proposals, they had to be approved by a group known as a community-advisory committee.

Every project had a committee, and every committee had among its members representatives from the offices of several local politicians, Governor Kathy Hochul, and the Mayor. Some local politicians were supportive; others much less so. The Governor and the Mayor, for their part, supported every proposal in New York City, often over the objections of City Council members. In mid-July, the City Council struck down a plan to build a casino in the Bronx—at the site of a golf course that had until recently been operated by the Trump Organization—before it could even get to the community-advisory committee. (The Council refused to approve a necessary zoning change.) The Mayor vetoed the Council’s decision. “This is not an endorsement or expression of support giving a leg up to any casino bid over the others,” he insisted. “May the best applications win.”

On a humid day in September, hundreds of people gathered at a Broadway theatre for the second and final so-called public-input hearing for the project spearheaded by Jay-Z. Roc Nation, his sprawling entertainment company, had proposed, in partnership with Caesars Entertainment and SL Green Realty Corp., a casino that would bring to the neighborhood a hotel with nine ultra-luxury sky villas, a two-story night club, three thousand one hundred and forty-six slot machines, and a V.V.I.P. lounge, “the crown jewel of the vertical stack.”

The meeting, which was held by the community-advisory committee, lasted six hours. An unlikely alliance of supporters—a co-founder of the Blue Man Group, the former N.Y.P.D. commissioner Bill Bratton, Reverend Al Sharpton—spoke in support of the project. Bratton said, “It is not crime and mayhem that will be coming. It will be more jobs, more profit, and more safety for everybody.” Sharpton said, “Police Commissioner Bratton and I have not agreed throughout our career. I don’t even think we agree today is Thursday. But we both agree: it’s not gonna bring crime.” Other attendees spoke about the new union jobs, the economic benefit, and, as one bespectacled woman put it, “thoughtfulness from an environmental standpoint.” Still, many more were opposed.

An elderly woman wearing a “NO TIMES SQUARE CASINO” T-shirt said, “Yes, it might be good for some people, but it’s not gonna be good for any of the residents who are here.”

A big, bald man said, “Casinos are exploitative.”

A gray-haired guy reading from a clipboard said, “The two worst places I’ve ever been are Atlantic City and Las Vegas. Both are ugly and depressing, and I grew up in Florida, so that’s saying something.”

At one point, someone grabbed a microphone and shouted, “We are not going to shout down and boo people speaking!” At another, Sharpton said, “If somebody want to boo, I’ve been booed by the best, so take your best shot.” Sixteen public-input hearings—two for each casino proposal—were held across town. They often got heated and contentious. At the Y.M.C.A. gymnasium in Coney Island, police officers had to break up at least two fights between the project’s supporters and opponents; several locals alleged that developers had paid people eighty dollars apiece to speak favorably about the casino, and one of them said there were secret audio recordings to prove it. (The New York Gaming Commission did not investigate these allegations, claiming that it was not in their purview.) When, at a hearing in Queens, the executive director of a group called the Chinese American Parents Association spoke in favor of the proposal to build a Hard Rock casino near Citi Field, someone else shouted, “Sellout!”

“Who said ‘sellout’?” Larinda Hooks, a State Assembly member, said. She was in charge of the hearing, and had sponsored a bill in the State Legislature that allowed the casino to be constructed atop the baseball field’s fifty acres of parking lots, which are technically city parkland. (Steve Cohen, the hedge-fund mogul who owns the Mets, spent, along with his development partners, more than two and a half million dollars lobbying state lawmakers last year.) Immediately, a young woman hoisted a handmade “FOLLOW THE $!” sign even higher into the air.

Hooks shouted, “Security, please! The young lady in the red sweater, please, has to be removed.”

As the hearings continued, each bidder attempted to bolster its application. Soo Kim, the chairman of Bally’s—which was petitioning to build a four-billion-dollar casino resort in the parking lot of the former Trump golf course—donated ten million dollars to save a local Catholic girls’ school, which counts Jennifer Lopez among its alumni. (“There’s no quid pro quo,” Kim said. “It’s just a way to show we care about the Bronx.”) The developers of the proposed Coney Island casino announced a plan to allow local residents to purchase equity in the gaming complex—and share in its profits. Larry Silverstein, the billionaire who rebuilt the World Trade Center complex after 9/11, submitted an amendment to his Avenir project, in Hell’s Kitchen, with a statement that read, “Larry is committed to Jewish causes.”

After the public hearings this summer, the committees began to make their decisions. Jay-Z’s casino bid for Times Square was the first to fail. Afterward, in a meeting room filled with reporters, Marc Holliday, the C.E.O. of SL Green, the real-estate company associated with the bid (and one of the largest landlords in New York City), approached the committee members and began shouting, “Go run and hide! The benefits you denied this community, and this city, and state—you have to live with that history forever.” Minutes later, in the same room, another committee rejected Silverstein’s proposal, and, in the following days, yet another committee killed a proposal to build Freedom Plaza—an eleven-billion-dollar casino complex backed by the head of a private intelligence firm—on Manhattan’s East Side, near the United Nations. Within a week, all the Manhattan casinos were dead.

Meanwhile, in Queens, another committee gathered in another committee room, to vote on a proposal by Resorts World, which already operates the city’s racino, near J.F.K. “Sorry, Jay-Z. We win again,” Donovan Richards, Jr., who is the Queens borough president, said, as he cast his vote in favor of the proposal. “I just had to rub that in.” The vote was unanimous; the audience burst into applause. Afterward, Richards embraced several executives.

I walked out of the meeting with one of them: Robert DeSalvio, who oversees Resorts World. He was headed toward the racino, where a celebration would be held later that evening. “I think we proved that we’re a good neighbor,” he told me. “And you know how hard that is.” I decided to stop by Resorts World, too. As I approached in an Uber, my driver, who lives nearby, said, “I feel so much negativity towards this place. Everyone’s gambling!”

Inside, I watched for a while as a woman wearing Crocs stuffed hundred-dollar bills into a “TRIPLE SUPREME EXTREME” slot machine with a sign that announced a “$12,246.18 JACKPOT.” Then I sat down at a “WHEEL OF FORTUNE” machine to try my own luck. Right away, I won twenty dollars—and then lost it all. The afternoon passed quickly: I lost more, I won big, I again lost everything but five cents. Refusing defeat, I stuffed more money into a slot machine. Eventually, against all odds, the machine began whizzing and whirring and making noises that my body immediately associated with success: I had won fifty dollars! Somehow, I mustered the sense to cash out.

If Resorts World wins one of the new gaming licenses, the racino will be allowed to add two thousand five hundred more slot machines, seven hundred live table games, thirty restaurants, a thousand six hundred hotel rooms, and a seven-thousand-seat arena to the existing complex. (Under the current licensure, live dealers are forbidden; the gambling games at Resorts World are technically “video lottery terminals,” not slot machines.) “We think we have a terrific application,” DeSalvio had told me. “We have all the permits—all the environmental permits, the building permits. We can be up and running by next March.” He grinned and went on, “We’ll have to train a lot of local folks how to be dealers.”

Three other casino bids made it through their community-advisory committees: a project proposed by M-G-M to expand another existing racino, in Yonkers; the Bally’s proposal, at the old Trump golf course; and Steve Cohen’s Hard Rock casino, in the Citi Field parking lot. In late September, at the committee meeting that approved the Citi Field project—Metropolitan Park, as it’s known—Steve McCann, a union leader from Queens, told me, “It’s supposed to create thousands of construction jobs. I’m not opposed to rich corporations that want to spend money, if they want to use union labor.”

After the vote, P. J. O’Doherty, another union leader from Queens, who has spent the past thirty-five years pouring concrete, told me, “Listen, people complain about gambling and the casinos and all that, but see what I have right here?” He pulled out his iPhone. “You can go on your phone and gamble like crazy, if you want. You can lose everything, and you don’t even have to leave the house.”

I asked him if he’d visit the new casino. “I worked too hard for my money,” he said, with a laugh. “But I’ll go there—it’s more than gambling!” Most supporters of the casinos with whom I spoke seemed more interested in talking about the new construction jobs, the new high-end restaurants, the new hotel rooms and concert venues, and the millions of dollars in community investment than about the actual gambling that would occur there. DeSalvio, of Resorts World, told me, “I work in the business, so I don’t gamble.” Soo Kim, the Bally’s chairman, told me, “I don’t gamble.” Vicki Been, the chairwoman of New York’s Gaming Facility Location Board, which will decide which applicants advance to the final review by the state, told a reporter this summer that she had never been to a casino. “That’s nowhere I want to spend my time,” she said.

Last year, Richards, the Queens borough president, said, “People absolutely will be hurt with a casino being in close proximity. But our jobs are to make sure that we are minimizing it as much as possible.” (More recently, he told me, “The target audience is the tourists!”) The negative and positive effects of casinos on communities have been well documented in academic literature. New casinos are often followed by a boost in economic activity, increased property values, and additional tax revenue for state and local governments. (Over the next decade, New York stands to make some twenty billion dollars in revenue from the three new casino licenses, with much of the money earmarked for schools and public transportation.) New pawnshops and payday lenders in the surrounding area also follow the construction of a new casino—as does a population’s increased vulnerability to problem gambling, which can in turn lead to substance abuse, psychiatric issues, obesity, arthritis. When I told Kim, who bought Donald Trump’s golf-course lease in the Bronx for sixty million dollars specifically to pursue the casino project, that I was generally wary of casinos because of the harm they might cause, he told me, “We are philosophically the same, because you cannot kill your customers. It’s bad for business.”

The other day, I met Kim at the golf course to learn more about his plans for the Bally’s casino. (I also asked Steve Cohen’s company for a tour—or even just a telephone interview—but they declined to speak to me on the record for this article.) Kim, whose company owns twenty casinos, in addition to the golf course, said, “I don’t define myself as a golf-course owner or a casino owner or anything like that. I’m a manager of companies that at one point had been quite down on their luck.” He laughed. “I’m a turnaround investor, and gaming, strangely enough, is a space that gets in trouble all the time. I don’t want to mention our President, but, like, even he bankrupted his casino company multiple times.” Kim’s deal to purchase the golf-course lease from Trump was brokered in part by Steve Witkoff, the President’s billionaire friend and special envoy, who reportedly pushed a plan to get Mayor Adams to drop out of the mayoral race by offering him an ambassadorship to Saudi Arabia. (Of Witkoff, Kim said, “He had nothing to do with anything—like, yeah, when we were looking for land, he was one of the people who helped us find the land, but, anyway . . . ‘Trump, Witkoff, Adams, Soo Kim. It’s gotta be bad!’ It’s nothing to do with nothing.”)

Kim purchased the lease—the city of New York owns the land on which the casino would be built—from Trump with a provision in the contract that, if the casino moves forward, Trump would receive another hundred and fifteen million dollars. “That’s a small price to pay,” Kim said. “The community got a better deal than Trump. Think about all the jobs, the money—it’s billions of economic activity.” He went on, “We out-dealed him.”

Near the fourteenth hole of the course, Kim parked a golf cart and looked around. The Manhattan skyline shimmered in the distance. “I grew up right there, at the base of that bridge,” Kim said, pointing to the far side of the Throgs Neck Bridge, in Queens. “And this”—he looked around, watching for a moment as a man in coveralls trimmed the creeping bent grass on the putting green—“this was, like, where you rode your dirt bikes and dumped dead bodies and set off fireworks.” Kim settled on the Trump course in part because of its proximity to the freeway. “Look, I love the subway. I grew up on the subway. But people don’t ride the subway to the casino,” he explained.

Zohran Mamdani, the incoming mayor, who has said that he is personally opposed to casinos (“Gambling is haram,” he once quipped), clarified on the campaign trail that he wouldn’t do anything to stop them. Brian O’Dwyer, the chair of the New York Gaming Commission, which will award the licenses by the end of the year, said, “The question is, Who does best for the community—and the state of New York in terms of tax revenues?” Each casino promises to generate billions of dollars in taxable revenue a year: Bally’s, one and a half billion; Resorts World, roughly four billion; the Hard Rock complex near Citi Field, nearly four billion. But other criteria—the casinos’ effects on neighborhood traffic, diversity-equity-and-inclusion initiatives for new jobs, efforts to assist gambling addicts—will also be assessed.

In mid-October, M-G-M withdrew its bid for the casino complex in Yonkers, citing uncertainty that it could earn as much money as had initially been proposed. Mike Spano, the mayor of Yonkers, was outraged. “Something doesn’t add up here,” he said, demanding that Governor Hochul launch an investigation. “People need to be assured that there is no linkage between M-G-M’s decision and the massive financial benefit to Donald Trump.” (With M-G-M out of the running, there were three bids for three licenses, increasing the odds that the Trump Organization would get its payout.) Hochul later weighed in: “I, at this time, am not aware of any reason to launch an investigation. I have no evidence to suspect there is any wrongdoing.” When I spoke with Spano this month, he told me that he was now less concerned with potential wrongdoing than with the fallout from Bally’s or Citi Field opening up nearby, which, he said, would likely lead M-G-M to close their Yonkers racino. “We’d lose our largest private tax-payer,” he said, growing emotional. “It’s a loss of, immediately, a thousand jobs.”

In late November, members of the gaming board toured the remaining proposed sites in golf carts. As the bidders waited for the verdict, some community members made a last-ditch effort to stop the projects from moving forward. One evening, a protester dressed in a black puffer and a gray beanie, who opposed the Citi Field casino, disrupted an official meeting. “This casino is going to destroy our community,” the protester said, calmly. “You all look like wonderful people. We know that you can do the right thing.” (Afterward, the meeting was closed to the public.) Casino executives and local politicians began to point out that not all three licenses had to be granted—and that maybe their failed bids had a shot, after all. “The whole process and the outcome is still unknown,” Holliday, of the Times Square bid, said, on a recent earnings call. Spano, the mayor of Yonkers, told me, “If they only issue two licenses, maybe we’ll get another bite at the apple!”

As Kim pitched me on the project at the golf course—“cashless wagering” at the five-hundred-thousand-square-foot casino, a “polished casual Latino-Caribbean restaurant,” a rooftop bar offering an “elevated social experience infused with a touch of Bronx flair and unmistakable pizzazz”—I thought less about Trump and more about Resorts World, where, at that very moment, hundreds of people were feeding the existing slots. Kim said, “Look, the core customer is a retired woman, and a lot of them have Social Security checks—they’re not using them! That three hundred and eighty dollars doesn’t really change their lives. You know what it is? It’s a relatively cheap thrill. People don’t go to the casino to make money. Obviously, the odds are against you. You go because you like the risk of it—”

He paused, mid-thought. His phone rang. He took a quick call, collected himself, and continued, “Sorry, so, yeah, people want to take risk. That’s actually what it is. Most animals want to reduce risk. Human beings don’t have that. They have a gene that wants to take risk—that’s why we jump out of perfectly good airplanes. It’s the thrill of the unknown. And that’s what makes humans so unique. Gambling scratches that itch, but it does so in a very controlled way. It’s just a little bit of money. It’s actually not risk.” He moved his hands slowly as he spoke: “You could lose every dollar of your life, and yet you’d still have your health, and the sun comes up in the morning, and we can all equally enjoy this sunny, beautiful day. I don’t want to be metaphysical, but I’m just saying money isn’t the be-all, end-all.” ♦