ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) – The CEO of Trump Entertainment Resorts retired with the transfer of its lone Atlantic City casino to billionaire Carl Icahn still pending.
Bob Griffin stepped down Tuesday, more than a year after he intended to begin his retirement in Colorado, where his family moved six months ago.
Griffin had been overseeing the company’s fourth bankruptcy and the acquisition of its lone casino, the Trump Taj Mahal, by Icahn. But a key court ruling on whether the company will have to restore employee health insurance and pension benefits that it ended a year ago still hasn’t happened, and Griffin said he can’t way any longer. Icahn has said if he loses the ruling, he will cut off funding, forcing the Taj Mahal to close.
“My plan was always to retire at 55,” Griffin told The Associated Press. “But when I hit it, we were in bankruptcy, so I stayed. Then 56 came and we’re still in bankruptcy. This could go on another six months. I’ve tried to hang in there, but it’s time to leave.”
Griffin was hired in September 2010 to succeed Mark Juliano as CEO of the company which at one point was run by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. (Trump said he has had no involvement with the company for at least six years other than a 10 percent ownership stake.)
Griffin oversaw the shutdown of Trump Plaza in September 2014, and was prepared to close the Taj Mahal last fall before Icahn agreed to provide funding to keep it open through its bankruptcy filing.
The company tried unsuccessfully to sell Trump Plaza and the Taj Mahal as Atlantic City’s casino market contracted in 2014. Trump Plaza was one of four Atlantic City casinos to go out of business last year.
A bankruptcy court in Delaware already approved Icahn to be the next owner of Trump Entertainment Resorts. But before that can happen, an appeals court must rule on a challenge brought by Local 54 of the Unite-HERE casino workers union seeking to restore benefits that the bankruptcy court allowed the company to end last October.
Griffin also said harsh criticism from Stockton University over Trump Entertainment’s refusal to waive its legal rights to block the former Showboat casino from operating as a satellite college campus hurt his family as well.
“A lot of our friends that we went to Stockton with now blame us for this,” he said. “We lost friends over it.”
Stockton has since agreed to sell the Showboat to Philadelphia developer Bart Blatstein, but the legal situation with Trump Entertainment remains unresolved.
Griffin said the company will promote someone from within its ranks to succeed him until Icahn takes over. The appointment of an interim CEO should happen by the end of the week, he said.
Wayne Parry can be reached at http://twitter.com/WayneParryAC
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Posted by: Pit Boss on October 15, 2015, 1:39 pm
As they say in poker, If you’ve been in the game 30 minutes and don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.
— Warren Buffett
By now, you may have heard about the insider trading scandal at the two biggest fantasy sports companies. DraftKings employees, based on the bets they saw laid down by their clients, made a killing at competitor site FanDuel.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: This isn’t insider trading, at least as it’s commonly understood. These aren’t trades based on material nonpublic inside information about publicly traded companies. These look to my eyes more akin to one bookie laying off bets on another.
This black eye aside, fantasy sports is becoming a very big business. Family friendly Walt Disney Co. invested $250 million in DraftKings earlier this year; the fantasy sports site then raised another $300 million, led by Twenty-First Century Fox.
There is now a Fantasy Sports Trade Association, and that means lobbying dollars are not very far behind.
Here’s how I look at it. There are two big issues: 1) Is this gambling?, and 2) Is this a sucker’s bet? There is a technical debate about the former question; there is no debate about the latter.
Let’s try to answer whether fantasy sports (professional football dominates the business) is a game of skill or chance? The answer is somewhat nuanced, as we will see below. There are some consistent winners, and that implies there is some skill involved. But there’s a counterargument is based on a simple question: “Can you lose on purpose?” If you can’t, then it’s a game of chance and not skill.
Just by way of background, if you thought online gambling was illegal in the U.S., you are correct. The 2006 Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act(UIGEA) did away with online poker, and other such games. But a technical loophole created an opening for a fantasy sports exemption. In short, the way the companies get around it is that participants don’t bet on the outcomes of real games; instead, participants assemble imaginary teams made up of real players whose actual statistical performance is crunched to come up with a point total.
Timothy Fong, associate clinical professor at the University of California-Los Angeles Gambling Studies Program is one of America’s foremost researchers on fantasy sports. Fong scoffs at “the notion that fantasy football is a skill-based game and thus exempt from larger gambling concerns.” It’s not, he tells The Kernal, in a recent interview, where he observed:
Very simply, it’s gambling…It’s putting money on an event with a certain outcome in the hopes of winning more money.
To call it anything else is really just not accurate. That link hasn’t really been made by the players and the public—that what I’m doing is no different than playing blackjack or craps or betting on sports in Vegas casinos.
Although the legal issue about whether these games should be allowed to exist was settled by statute, perhaps the better question is, Should you bother playing?
The simple reality is that for the vast majority of participants, it’s a losing deal. But that doesn’t mean everyone loses. There is a small dedicated group of players who consistently win: An analysis by Rotogrinders — which bills itself as “The Daily Fantasy Authority” — conducted for Bloomberg Businessweek “shows that the top 100 ranked players enter 330 winning lineups per day, and the top 10 players combine to win an average of 873 times daily. The remaining field of approximately 20,000 players tracked by Rotogrinders wins just 13 times per day, on average.”
In other words, 99 percent of the participants in fantasy sports are the patsy at the table.
In some ways, most players aren’t all that different from amateur stock-market traders. Almost all of them get their clocks cleaned by the professionals. Between the high-frequency outfits and better capitalized and more knowledgeable traders, virtually all the rookies get walloped. But here’s why people keep trying: A minuscule percentage manage to go on to have terrific, lucrative trading careers.
If you are interested in wagering on fantasy sports, I have one piece of advice for you: Don’t kid yourself about who probably you are.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
