The bad PR from the fire didn’t help, either, especially after another fire broke out at the Hilton. On November 21, 1980, a fire had ripped through the MGM Grand, killing 87 guests word got out that Vegas wasn’t safe, and that Nevada’s famously light touch when it came to regulations meant there weren’t even fire sprinklers in buildings where, let’s face it, someone could be assumed to be smoking in bed basically 24 hours a day. The city’s casino industry had been crumbling for years, hit hard by the double-dip recession of the early ’80s and the legalization of gambling in Atlantic City. That was how Steve Wynn built the Mirage, the casino that transformed Las Vegas.įrom the outside, the ’80s looked like a bad time to be plowing money into the Strip. Shockingly for a major construction project in Nevada, the resort went over budget it finished somewhere north of $600 million. Milken sold $525 million worth of bonds to cover what the executive initially thought would be $565 million in construction costs. In the late 1980s, shortly before he was indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and securities fraud, Milken, who was then the most powerful financier in America, helped an upstart casino executive finance his first resort on the Las Vegas Strip. Las Vegas is a city where many otherwise cautious people have discovered many wildly incautious forms of debt, so let’s start with Michael Milken, the junk-bond king of Wall Street. But all will entertain an immovable idea that when things die, there is someone or something that pulled the trigger.

Others will be less trodden and perhaps more speculative. Over the next week at The Ringer, in honor of the release of Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage, we will explore events that changed the world as we knew it-specifically ones that marked the ends of established eras and triggered the beginnings of then-unknown futures.

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