Vol. 5, No. 5, May 2008
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Back Home Again
Casino exec Howard Dreitzer thought he’d settled down in Australia. Then an old Trump crony called—with an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Howard Dreitzer has never been afraid of the Big Dice Roll. The Florida native has made a career of timely moves. The first led him to Las Vegas in the 1970s. The second brought him to the Sands, the Golden Nugget, Trump Plaza and Showboat in Atlantic City from 1980 to 1993. Then came New Orleans and Australia, where he worked for Harrah’s. Now an Atlantic City connection has brought him back to the States.
“I was calling Jim Allen to refer a friend to him,” Dreitzer says of his colleague and former Trump boss who runs the Seminole gaming operation in Florida. “He asked me to fly in for a talk.”
Allen made him the senior vice president of table games, responsible for supplying the newest dimension of tribal gaming to several properties. When the house Down Under is sold, Dreitzer’s wife Alana will rejoin him.
“We have dual citizenship; we’ve made a lot of friends back in Australia and so this isn’t what you would normally consider an easy decision to make,” Dreitzer says. “But the project is exciting. I grew up in Florida, which makes it another plus. To me, this is the same feeling that existed in the early days of Atlantic City.”
Dreitzer had moved to Las Vegas and broke in as a dealer before Atlantic City expanded the gaming pie. He leaped into gaming’s second jurisdiction, aware of the value placed on Nevada experience.
“In the early days, Atlantic City recruited both from Vegas and northern Nevada,” Dreitzer says. “The Vegas group was more into the game protection and customer relationships. The northern Nevada people brought more accounting and analysis. Atlantic City melded them together in the best way.
“AC was nonstop. I never saw crap games like the ones we had at the Golden Nugget. You take that place on a Saturday night, Sinatra’s in, you’re seeing $10,000 limits and triple odds—there was nothing like it. It was a legendary thing. You had to respect Steve Wynn for his talent and the enormous courage of his convictions. If he saw something he wanted to change—boom—he would move a wall or knock something down. He was passionate about his customers. There was quite a frenzy at the Nugget for three to five years.”
Dreitzer climbed the ladder. He worked as pit boss, dual-rate supervisor, assistant shift manager, assistant casino manager, VP of casino operations and finally, vice president and chief operations officer at Showboat. He learned several sides of the business, including one that puzzled him.
“I never quite understood why the properties got so wrapped up in the marketing wars,” he says. “You’ve got 50 million people living within 300 miles and yet everybody thought they had to discount to steal the customer. The Taj Mahal made a big statement about that. Here is this big, beautiful property and it still struggled.
“In Atlantic City, they should take that money (for comps) and reinvest into properties. I think they will do that more, but right now the markets are tight.” Atlantic City provided more than a foundation for Dreitzer’s future success. It made him more practical.
“At Showboat, the previous management team had left en masse,” he says. “The new president had a financial background and he looked at the business more objectively, whereas I was more emotional, especially about the table games. But slots were taking over. I learned a whole different side of the business. You look at your product like you’re in a supermarket. If something isn’t working, you take it off the shelves.”
Dreitzer left Atlantic City when New Orleans got into gaming. That didn’t pan out. The next opportunity was with Harrah’s.
“When I told my wife the job was in Australia, she got real quiet,” he says. “But we knew we wanted to go somewhere quite far away from New Orleans. We figured to do it for a year or two and then come back. Well, it led to a lot more than two.”
And it took another adventure to bring him back.
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