Remembering When
By Chuck Darrow
If you think about it, a casino is, in some ways, a microcosm of a city or state. Like them, a gambling den collects revenue, has a dedicated law enforcement operation and has a chief executive whose responsibility is to oversee all facets of its daily operation.
While a gaming hall’s CEO (or president or general manager, depending on individual corporate structures and nomenclature) is compensated in multiples of the average U.S. salary, the hours are long, the responsibilities grave and unceasing and the potential sources of bad news impossible to quantify. Which is why it takes a certain breed of person to function at this level of the gambling universe—and why frequent changes at the top are baked into the industry’s DNA.
In Atlantic City (and elsewhere), these individuals have been, mostly by necessity, corporate types who wouldn’t have been out of place running insurance companies or accounting firms. However, the past 47 years have also seen those who have left legacies that still inform the way business is done in Atlantic City—and beyond. Some were visionaries whose impact can’t be measured. Others were gender and racial barrier-busters. Some were conservative in demeanor, others were larger-than-life characters. All deserve to be remembered for their contributions to Atlantic City and the industry upon which its fortunes rise and fall.
Below is a look (in alphabetical order) at a few of these folks. It is not meant to be a definitive list; many worthy individuals have been omitted because of space limitations (and faulty memory):
Robert Boughner
With one exception (see below), it’s hard to find a casino suit more influential than Boughner. In 1998, he began his tenure as the big dog at what would ultimately debut in 2003 as Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, the bayside adult playpen that forever altered the local gambling scene and created the template for such East Coast pleasure domes as Boston’s Wynn Encore, Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun and Borgata’s corporate sibling, MGM National Harbor in Washington, D.C.
Boughner’s inspiration for Borgata were what he dubbed the “Atlantic City rejectors”—people who lived within AyCee’s geographic market, but, for whatever reasons, had no interest in patronizing the existing casinos. Through such local innovations as celebrity-chef-branded restaurants and a high-end, luxury hotel tower, Borgata grabbed the rejectors’ attention. And it was Boughner who realized there was a huge, untapped market for younger-skewing headliners who, with a few exceptions, were ignored by local gambling dens.
That The Big B remains the city’s revenue leader (as it has been since it opened in July, 2003) is testament to Boughner’s foresight and concept that a hip, upscale casino-hotel was the recipe for success on Absecon Island.
James Crosby
Non-alphabetically, this list must begin with Crosby, the first CEO of the first legal casino.
While many individuals were responsible for gaming legalization, it was Crosby–and the company he founded, Resorts International– who was the first to make the dream of state-sanctioned casinos in Atlantic City a reality.
It was on Crosby’s watch that the foundations of how local casinos operate were put in place; procedures and customs—some of which exist to this day—logically had their AC origins during the early days, weeks, months and years of Crosby’s term. It isn’t too far-fetched to suggest that had someone else run Resorts at its birth, some things may have played out differently (although legal guidelines and restrictions doubtless played a much larger role).
And while Donald Trump will forever be synonymous with Atlantic City’s first mega-casino, Trump Taj Mahal Casino-Resort, it was Crosby, who died in 1986 at 58, who conceived the unprecedented development project and, in 1983, commenced its construction.
Dennis Gomes
Gomes was a former Nevada law-enforcement official who initiated the investigation into organized crime in the Las Vegas gambling industry that was featured in the epic 1990 mob movie “Casino.” He ultimately became a gaming executive, first in Vegas and then Atlantic City.
Gomes arrived in Our Town in 1991 at the behest of Trump, whose year-old Taj Mahal was teetering on the brink of failure (his hiring led to a famous lawsuit between POTUS 47 and master-of-the-gambling-universe Steve Wynn, who accused Trump of illegally hiring Gomes away from Wynn’s Golden Nugget casino. The case was settled in 1994). But it was his reign in the late-1990s and 2000s as the president & CEO of Tropicana Casino Resort Atlantic City (now Tropicana Atlantic City) that cemented his place as one of AyCee’s ultimate movers and shakers.
It was Gomes’ vision and instincts that led to the construction of The Quarter, Atlantic City’s first and only Las Vegas-style retail, dining and entertainment complex, which opened in 2004. And it was Gomes—whose casual sartorial style stood in sharp contrast to the far-more-formal look favored by most casino honchos of the day–who brought to the Trop such out-of-the-box attractions as summer-long historic exhibits dedicated to such diverse subjects as President John F. Kennedy, the Titanic and, most provocatively, the history of torture.
He also had a touch of the showman in him (a quality tough to find today given that so many casinos are run by accountants). The most notorious proof of that occurred in 2001, when he installed as a promotional gimmick a Tic-Tac-Toe-playing chicken.
In 2010, he left the Trop to become CEO and part-owner of Resorts. Among his innovations there was Prohibition, the first LGBQT-focused nightclub located inside a U.S. casino.
As those who worked under Gomes—regardless of position—at both properties have attested, his unique style extended to how he perceived himself as more than just “the boss.” He considered every employee a family member, and his efforts on their behalf included everything from personally helping workers deal with non-job-related issues to instituting free martial arts training for staffers.
Gomes died unexpectedly in 2012 at age 68 while undergoing a kidney procedure at a Philadelphia hospital.
Jeanne Hood
Both Hood, who died at 83 in 2009, and the property she helmed may have faded into the mists of the past, but in a gaming jurisdiction where female CEOs historically represent but a small fraction of those who have run casinos, Hood stands tall as the first woman to hold the top job locally.
Her property, Atlantis Hotel-Casino, began life as the Playboy Hotel-Casino in 1981, but legal issues forced its sale to the Elsinore Corp. in 1985. For various reasons (among them the multi-level casino layout), neither Playboy nor Atlantis ever made a profit. As such, in 1989, it assumed a far -more dubious “first” when it became the first local gaming hall to go out of business.
Melonie Johnson
When Johnson was named Borgata’s President & COO in May 2020, she became not only the first African American woman to run an Atlantic City casino-hotel, but the first Black CEO of the city’s legal-gambling era.
Johnson, who today is an executive at MGM National Harbor, didn’t initiate any grand projects, nor was she seen as an innovator during her relatively brief time heading up Borgata. But in addition to her role as a groundbreaker, her two years in the top spot at Borgata coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic; despite the greatest challenge the local industry has faced to date, she was not only able to keep the casino-hotel afloat, but maintain its status as the city’s revenue champion.
