Bill Bennett and Bill Pennington purchased the Circus Circus casino from Jay Sarno in 1974. They immediately transformed a losing property into a “winner,” as they parlayed the investment into one of the most successful casino companies in the world.
Bennett was born in Glendale, Arizona, on 26 November 1924. Following his service in World War II as a pilot, he returned to Phoenix to run a furniture store. Soon, however, a friend coaxed him into investing in a financial firm. The firm went broke and so did Bennett. Luck was on his side, however, as his friend L. C. Jacobsen was president of the Del Webb Construction Company. Jacobsen was looking for personnel who could help in the company’s newly acquired casino properties. Bennett signed on and worked his way up to a top management post with the Mint Hotel in Las Vegas. In 1971, he cashed in his stock options with Webb and entered into a partnership with Bill Pennington. The two established a company that distributed gaming machines to casinos. In 1974, they found Jay Sarno in deep financial trouble, and they helped bail him out by taking over the Circus Circus casino in a lease option deal.
Bennett and Pennington liked the Circus Circus idea, but the two saw that the property was not being managed properly. They first made plans for a tower of hotel rooms and cleaned up many carnival games that at best would be considered sleazy. Circus acts were moved away from the gambling tables. They marketed the property heavily through radio advertisements and dropped Sarno’s notion that Circus Circus could appeal to high rollers. Instead, they nurtured and developed the idea of marketing the property to middle-class patrons—lots of them. The new owners placed a much greater emphasis on their slot machine department than it had received previously. The property also began sponsoring many sporting events. Bennett was a stunt pilot, and he rode motorcycles and speedboats. Soon Circus Circus had a hydroplane boat on the professional racing circuit.
Bennett and Pennington also reached out to develop new properties. They built Circus Circus-Reno in 1978, and they purchased the Edgewater Casino in Laughlin, Nevada, in 1983. Later they added the Colorado Belle. In 1983, Circus Circus became a public company. Over the next ten years, the stock outperformed all others in the casino gambling field. Values of shares increased 1,400 percent.
The 1990s were good to Circus Circus, although the company was not always good to Bill Bennett. At the beginning of the decade, the company opened the largest hotel casino in the world. The Excalibur featured a medieval court with the knights of the round table. The facility had 4,000 rooms and was built at a cost exceeding $250 million. In 1993, the Luxor, a pyramid-shaped casino hotel with 2,500 rooms, opened, and the next year a Circus Circus casino opened in Tunica, Mississippi. In 1994, several management changes accompanied lower-than-anticipated revenues at the upscale Luxor property, and Bennett was roundly criticized by an organized opposition at an annual stockholders’ meeting. He decided to step down as chairman of the board, and then to leave the company altogether. He sold his stock for $230 million and promptly purchased the Sahara Hotel for $193 million. He knew the Sahara, as it had originally been a Del Webb casino. Now it was aging and in bad repair. Bennett invested millions more in improvements and in the construction of a new tower of hotel rooms.
Las Vegas needs dreamers and builders like Sarno, and it needs people like Howard Hughes, who will purchase properties others wish to get rid of. But it especially needs persons who take others’ dreams and convert them into reality for stockholders and customers. In the gambling industry, Bennett has not been a dreamer, but he has been one who makes dreams come true.