How George Maloof brought the stars back to Sin City
BY DEAN BLAINE
Celebrity Magnet
At 8:30 on a recent Friday morning, the telephones at George Maloof’s Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas start ringing. Los Angeles is calling.
Mandy Moore’s people are on the line. Jimmy Connors’ daughter phones in; she wants a room. So does Clint Eastwood’s son. “Make it happen,”
someone shouts. Rocker Tommy Lee’s assistant calls to book the two-story, $40,000-a-night Hugh Hefner Fantasy Suite. Lee will stay three nights.
Later in the day, a representative of guitarist Dave Navarro requests a room in a couple of weeks. Chris Carrabba, the lead singer for Dashboard
Confessional, and seven of his friends want to get into the Palms’ Playboy Club tonight. A representative from his record company is on the line. “Has
anyone heard of the Dashboard Confessionals?” asks Maloof’s executive secretary, Paula Pace, mishearing the name of one of the world’s hottest
emo bands. She decides to comp the singer but not his friends. “If they’re teenyboppers,” Pace tells the woman on the phone, “they’re not going to be
able to get in.” Pace hangs up. The line rings again. “You say you used to play for the Sacramento Kings?”
At the center of this intersection of Hollywood, pro sports, and rock superstardom stands George Maloof. The 42-year-old billionaire bachelor, owner
of one of the only privately held casino resorts along the Strip, may well go down in history as the man who almost single-handedly lured celebrities
back to Vegas. From the outdoor patio at Moon, his rooftop nightclub on the 53rd floor of the new $250 million Fantasy Tower at the Palms, he
surveys his empire. Downstairs in the casino, fashionable 20- and 30-somethings from all corners of the United States are already lining up for one of
four flashy nightclubs at the Palms, hoping to gain entrée to the world according to George. It’s a world they know well, thanks to hit reality television
shows based at the hotel, including MTV’s Real World Las Vegas, A&E’s Inked, E! Entertainment Television’s Party @ the Palms with Jenny
McCarthy and The Girls Next Door, and Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Showdown. The common message portrayed in all this programming is
unmistakable: Behind the gray velvet curtains of the Palms exists a VIP playground rife with Hollywood celebrities and boundless indulgences. The
Palms is an endless party where the dance floors breathe fire, Playboy Bunnies deal blackjack, and the roof at the nightclub Moon opens with the
push of a button to reveal the stars.
When Maloof opened the Palms in late 2001, Las Vegas was in the throes of an identity crisis. The town had previously cast aside its short-lived
image of a family-friendly destination, reverting back to Sin City. But the large resorts along the Strip still weren’t clear how best to reach adults.
Maloof found a way by welcoming Hollywood back to Vegas. When he heard that MTV was scouting locations in the city for the latest installment of
the network’s popular Real World series, Maloof convinced the network to take a shot on his new casino hotel by investing $1 million to convert seven
rooms on the hotel’s 28th floor into a luxury Real World suite. Then he gave the show’s producers carte blanche in the hotel and permission to film
anywhere, anytime. Some in Vegas said Maloof was insane, that he was bucking a longstanding Las Vegas taboo against outside cameras in
casinos, and that no one would gamble at the Palms if they thought their image might appear on television. “People used to ask me if I thought
bringing the Real World to Las Vegas was a big deal,” says Anthony Curtis of LasVegasAdvisor.com. “I said, ‘No.’ How wrong could I have been about
that? It was brilliant.” Maloof went one step further. He brought Paris Hilton as his date for the hotel’s grand opening, a star-studded event welcoming
Matt Dillon, Samuel L. Jackson, Tara Reid, Charlize Theron, and more. The cameras were everywhere. He outfitted Hilton in a dress made from $1
million in casino chips. The press coverage was priceless. “I just wanted, right off the bat, to connect with pop culture,” Maloof says, “what better way
than with Paris Hilton and the Real World?”
Maloof didn’t stop with luxurious accommodations and TV tie-ins. He joined forces with nightlife gurus the N9NE Group and opened not one, but two
of the hottest nightclubs in the city. Suddenly the “What Happens” in the new Las Vegas mantra “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas” was
happening at the Palms. Not since the days of the Rat Pack, when Jayne Mansfield swam laps in the pool and Dean Martin drank scotch at the bar,
had so many celebrities been drawn to Las Vegas. “George drove what we know as the modern-day Vegas,” says Las Vegas gossip hound Robin
Leach. “He set the casinos on fire with the frenzy of celebrity.”
Therein lies the rub. Competitors quickly replicated Maloof’s celebrity-fueled marketing strategy. Pamela Anderson reigned at Pure in Caesars Palace,
Michael Jordan held court at Light in Bellagio, and Paris Hilton danced on tables at Tao in the Venetian. Some demanded everything from private jets
to paychecks of $80,000 to $100,000 just to show up. That’s where Maloof draws the line. He says he’s never paid and never will pay cash for a
celebrity appearance, but these temptations arose from the star-driven culture he helped create. “When you’re hanging around Britney Spears, it’s
pretty cool,” he says. “But you can’t forget about your family, you can’t forget about your employees, and you can’t forget about your customers.”
You might call George Maloof a lucky stiff, and few would object. His grandfather arrived from Lebanon in the early 1900s and established a general
store in the tiny outpost of Las Vegas, New Mexico. Forty years later he acquired exclusive state distribution rights to a fledgling beer called Coors and
founded Quality Imports, a wholesale liquor distribution center. Maloof’s father, George Sr., inherited the business in the late 1940s and expanded the
company to include hotels, banks, and the Houston Rockets NBA franchise. By the time Maloof entered his teens, his father was one of the richest
men in New Mexico. But Maloof’s lucky lot in life doesn’t stem from the family’s finances as much as it does from the life lessons passed down by his
father to him, his sister Adrienne, and his three brothers. “Work hard,” he told them. “Treat everyone with respect.” “The customer is always right.”
“There’s nothing more important than family.” By the time Maloof and his brothers were each 10 years old, they were packing boxes and loading
trucks in the family’s distribution warehouse.
Maloof was 16 in 1980 when his father died suddenly of a heart attack at age 57, the day after he opened his Classic hotel in Albuquerque, New
Mexico. No one would have blamed the family if they had cashed out everything and slipped into a comfortable existence. They refused. Facing
creditors, Maloof’s mother, Colleen, committed the family to seeing things through. Any one of the teenage or 20-something Maloof boys could have
taken time off to “find themselves,” to travel, to move to California and frolic on the beach and chase Hollywood starlets. They didn’t. Armed with the
tenets they inherited from their father, all four brothers followed in the elder Maloof’s footsteps. The day their father died, the Maloof brothers tend to
say, they went to work, and they haven’t looked up since. Nearly 27 years later, the Maloof empire has grown to include the Sacramento Kings
basketball team, Sacramento’s Arco Arena, the Palms Casino Resort, Maloof Music, and Maloof Productions (a film production company). Joe and
Gavin Maloof, ages 51 and 50 respectively, run the Sacramento Kings; George Maloof runs the Palms in Las Vegas; and Phil Maloof, age 40, former
New Mexico state senator, runs the music and production companies in Los Angeles. The family’s worth is estimated at well over $1 billion.
After graduating from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, George Maloof became committed to opening his own casino. Driving around Vegas, he
noticed that the parking lots at the local casinos away from the Strip were always full. “I was fascinated by that,” he says, “I thought, there’s a huge
market here for the locals.” In 1990, Maloof bought a site in north Las Vegas for $4.8 million. But he couldn’t get financing to build his casino. Investors
disliked the location and worried about Maloof’s lack of experience. So he moved to Central City, Colorado (population 515), purchased a 2,500square-foot Victorian house, added some floors, and put in 200 slot machines. Now he was in the casino business. George and his brother Gavin
lived in Central City for two years. Finally in 1994, Maloof received $20 million in financing to build the Fiesta Hotel Casino in north Las Vegas.
Under Maloof’s guidance, the Fiesta became one of the most profitable casinos per square foot in the state. After four expansions, Maloof sold the
Fiesta in 2000 for $185 million and immediately dumped the money into the Palms. Tourism was down, and the hotels on the Strip had laid off as
many as 12,000 workers. Many in Vegas cautioned Maloof not to open. He didn’t listen—and the Palms took off from its 2001 launch. “Everybody just
needed something to pick them up,” Maloof says. He still considers the opening of the Palms and being able to provide 500 jobs to laid-off casino
workers as one of the proudest moments of his career.
But Maloof’s career consumes all. Santa Fe, New Mexico, is one of his favorite places in the world. If he closes his eyes, he can imagine himself
there, breathing the crisp New Mexico air and strolling Palace Avenue on the plaza. Imagining will have to do; Maloof hasn’t taken many vacations in
the past 20 years. There’s been no time for marriage or a family, and the opportunity might have passed him by. “If I had been married, I don’t know if
I would have ever had the flexibility to do all this stuff,” he says. “But I would be interested at some point to have a family. It’s gotta probably be pretty
quickly here.”
But Maloof has other things on his mind. The Palms next month will host the MTV Video Awards—a first for Las Vegas—and Maloof is busy
overseeing the second phase of a $750 million expansion. Phase one included the Pearl, a 2,500-seat concert venue that MTV will use for its Sept. 9
awards show. There, surrounded by 18 VIP skyboxes, the detail-oriented Maloof immediately zeroes in on some problems. Four small bulbs, three
levels up, cast a slightly bluer hue than the other 300 or so bulbs lining the ceiling of the theater. “Can we fix that?” he asks his director of
entertainment, H.C. “Absolutely, we’ll change those out,” H.C. says. “Those plasma televisions should really be behind the bar,” Maloof remarks.
“When someone is in line at the bar, they still want to see the show.” “I’ll get right on that, George.” To anyone catching a show at the Pearl, know that
George Maloof has climbed over cables, ducked under scaffolding, and gotten dust on his pants inspecting the view from your seat.
Outside the Pearl, across the casino, and behind the reception desk in the lobby of the Palms hangs a large, framed black-and-white photograph of a
man standing at a construction site. The image is slightly faded. The man’s suit is dated. The photograph seems out of place amid the splendor of the
Palms. The picture couldn’t hold the slightest significance to those rushing through the casino looking for a blackjack table, another cocktail, or a
Hollywood celebrity. But to Maloof, the man in the photograph gazing into the distance, posing proudly at the construction site of his Classic hotel in
Albuquerque, is Dad, and he belongs there.
“George!” one of the guests standing in line for the Playboy Club calls out. “George! It’s Philip. Do you remember me?” Of course Maloof remembers
Philip. “How are you?” Maloof says, extending his hand. “What can I do for you?”
Dean Blaine has pursued the legend of James Bond in Jamaica, been slathered with greasepaint by the Blue Man Group in Vegas, and stalked wily
celebrities in Los Angeles.