Double or Nothing: How Two Friends Risked It All to Buy One of Las Vegas' Legendary Casinos Read Online Free

Vegas is going down to the coffee shop as a six-year-old, meeting Eddie the host, and asking if it were okay to get some breakfast. Eddie would call over to the person in charge, hold up his right arm, and point at Tim. It meant hold the check. The meal was free. That magical sensation never left Tim. When he picked up the phone in his room, asked for pancakes, and twenty minutes later a guy rolled them in on a cart, he felt like the most important first grader in the world.
    He saw the name Dean Martin on billboards, heard the name over the television news, and the next thing he knew Deano was lifting him up and putting a $100 bill in his hand.
    It took Tim a little while to realize it wasn’t Dean Martin who’d handed him the C-note, but Bob Martin. And a little longer to realize what a legend Bob Martin was in his own right.
    Bob was one of the great sports bookies of all time. To this day, Tim can recite the wisdom Bob passed down over the years in a gravel voice that was flavored by nonfiltered Camels and pours of Jack Daniel’s. “If you think you’ve got the best of it,” Bob would say, “take dead aim and hold onto your balls.”
    That’s how a man came to wear $900 silk shirts in Las Vegas.
    â€œIf you lose, learn to shrug your shoulders and say, ‘I’m still gonna have the same breakfast tomorrow.’”
    But above all, “Don’t ever forget the single most thrilling thing in the world is to gamble and win. And the second most is to gamble and lose.”
    Uncle Jack’s buddies added other gems like “Have a couple of thousand in your pocket at all times. When you get up in the morning to take a piss, bring your bankroll to the bathroom just in case something happens along the way.”
    Tim inhaled these mottos until they were his own. His entire world was framed by gambling. A great Sunday morning as a boy meant a trip to the buffet at The Golden Nugget with his parents after mass. A sad Friday night meant that a family vacation to Disneyland had been canceled without a word because his dad had lost a big bet. When Tim’s dad left home, his Uncle Jack and Uncle Jimmy stepped in to help raise him. They continued his education with stories about the famed restaurateur Joe “The Pig” Pignatello, who learned how to cook from Al Capone’s mother and was a personal chef to Sam Giancana and Frank Sinatra. Joe was a degenerate gambler who’d scratch out the prices on the fancy menus at his joint and scribble in higher ones to compensate for unfortunate rolls of the dice.
    It was only natural that Tim would become best buddies with a kid named Frank Toti, whose dad, Big Frank, ran the Barbary Coast. Big Frank would take the two boys up on the catwalks above the casino where men with binoculars spied on the blackjack players to see if they were counting cards. This was back in the day before the cameras were honed.
    â€œHow do you count cards?” Tim asked.
    â€œIt’s not that hard,” Big Frank said. “I can show you.”
    â€œReally?”
    It was an education that you couldn’t get at Bishop Gorman High School. But the school offered something else that was truly amazing. It’s almost impossible to believe the connections available to a kid who simply walked through the doors of Bishop Gorman in 1983.
    In a single classroom you could find:
    Lorenzo Fertitta, who’d become one of the principal owners of fifteen casinos as the vice-chairman and president of Station Casinos, who would also go on to own the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and whose older brother, Frank, would guide the family empire with him.
    Tim Poster, who’d come up with the concept for a travel-booking company that would take off with the Internet and be bought by Expedia for more than $100 million.
    And Perry Rogers, whose best friend was Andre Agassi, and who’d come to make multimillion-dollar deals down the road as an agent