Michael Leven is stepping down at the end of the year as president and COO of Las Vegas Sands. At press time, there had been no announcement of a successor, but whoever is named will be measured against a very successful executive. Leven, who had been on the board of LVS, was asked to take over as COO when the company was floundering. The once-valuable stock had slumped to less than $2 per share, and the company had run out of money to fund its Asian expansion. Leven stepped in and engineered a financial turnaround that is remarkable. The stock price in November was around $60, the final Macau casino will open next year (the Parisian), the Las Vegas convention properties are more successful than ever, and strong revenue is still reported in Singapore. Leven spoke with GGB Publisher Roger Gros in his offices at the Venetian in Las Vegas.

GGB: When you first signed on as COO and president of LVS, you did it as a favor to your friend Sheldon Adelson. How long did it take you to realize it was going to be more than a short-term favor?

Michael Leven: The original contract was for two years, and then we had two extensions. It was a favor for Sheldon, but it was also a favor to myself. I was asked by Miriam Adelson to “come and help us fix the company.” She didn’t define exactly what she wanted fixed, but it was to help right the company, put the company back and execute Sheldon’s visions, and it’s a job that never ends, really.

What was your strategy to right the ship?

There were three significant strategies that we had to do. The first and foremost is we had to get our costs under control in Macau, in Asia and in Las Vegas. The second was to develop a plan to essentially monetize some of our Macau assets to develop cash for the company. That’s when we sold off 29 percent of Macau to a public entity. And the third was to get Singapore open properly so that it could start to generate funds for us to be able to finance the completion of two or three more properties in Macau. So, that was the combination of strategies, and what we had to do was put together the various people, the human resources, to get those things done within the legacy systems that existed in the business.

Singapore was an incredibly difficult project, wasn’t it?

Singapore was very interesting because the government was very deeply involved in the project, and everything needed government approval. And we were way behind. We didn’t have a strategy for the roof—for the SkyPark, what was going to be up there. Certain restaurants weren’t contracted for, we didn’t have the art museum finished and we didn’t have the relationship there of how to run it. And there were lots of other things. One of the floors in the MICE center wasn’t completed, so we really put together a lot of effort to get that open. Frankly, the opening in April of ’10 was not the best opening we’ve ever had, but by the time we got to June of ’10 we were off and running, and that place in the first eight months did about $700 million in EBITDA, a massive injection of capital to the company.

The Atlantic City Alliance (ACA) is a private organization controlled by the Atlantic City casinos. Liza Cartmell was appointed the first president two years ago after New Jersey Governor Chris Christie pledged a five-year program to support the city. The ACA was designed to promote the non-gaming assets in Atlantic City, and Cartmell has taken her lead from the ACA board. Last summer, country music beach concerts drew more than 130,000 people to the city, and the “DO AC” campaign has become the signature for Atlantic City. With the decline of the gaming business in Atlantic City, the ACA’s non-gaming promotions have become that much more important. She spoke with GGB Publisher Roger Gros in her Boardwalk Hall office in August. To hear a podcast of this interview, visit ggbmagazine.com.

GGB: There has been a lot of activity this summer. The two country music concerts (Blake Shelton and Lady Antebellum) drew more than 130,000 people to town for the two shows. How did that come about?

Liza Cartmell: It started almost the day I got here. We were talking to Live Nation, about how we feature the beach. We’re very focused on getting people to try Atlantic City, because we know that once they get here, almost 60 percent will come back.

We talked to a lot of the big artists, and they just were really not comfortable with the outdoor environment. We really focused on the country piece, because they perform so consistently and regularly in outdoor festivals. With the two concerts on Thursday and Sunday, we were able to bookend a weekend, because we definitely had people who came and stayed, flying in. We had tickets that were in 48 states.

How would you evaluate the first two years of the Atlantic City Alliance?

The first two years were really focused on helping to improve the perception of Atlantic City and learning about what it takes to move the needle in people’s minds.

The huge amount of bad news that people are seeing about Atlantic City this summer with the gaming properties that are being closed down in order to right-size the gaming market has been a challenge. The question is how quickly those properties will be repositioned as regular hotels. Some of that’s already happened.

The Claridge was sold to a new investor from Florida. They are doing some really interesting things: Repurposing the first floor to be a major art gallery. The second floor will be a children’s museum, and the third level will be a meeting and convention space. And the 500 rooms will be renovated. That investor has also bought the Atlantic Club, so hopefully we see that that property converted, as well.

We’ve done some work with Tourism Economics, a company that does a lot of assessments for various states, including the state of New Jersey, looking at what’s going on in this marketplace. A lot of the statistics that we’re garnering in terms of the growth in non-gaming revenue and the growth in employment in the food service and the retail is really coming out of the work that they’ve been doing, and so there’s growth and employment in tho

At the time, it was a radical idea: a private company performing duties that governments customarily performed around the world—testing gaming devices to ensure integrity.

It was even more radical because the time was the late 1980s, and the place was the United States, where slot machines and other gaming devices and systems were legally operated in precisely two states, Nevada and New Jersey. But with a vision of a much larger gaming industry, James Maida and Paul Magno would develop the concept into the first private laboratory dedicated to testing gaming devices and systems.

Today, as the company started by Maida and Magno celebrates its 25th anniversary, certification of slots and systems by Gaming Laboratories International is recognized as the industry standard, replacing the need for state-run labs in nearly all of the 28 U.S. jurisdictions hosting Indian casinos, as well as numerous other casino and lottery jurisdictions both in the U.S. and around the world.

In all, 45 U.S. states and 455 jurisdictions worldwide accept GLI test results. Government officials in new and planned casino jurisdictions seek the counsel of GLI in setting up their gaming regulations. GLI serves as a clearinghouse for regulators around the world, providing a forum for discussion of new rules, new technologies and new ways to test to ensure the integrity of gaming.

In short, GLI is an integral player in the worldwide gaming industry.

Not surprisingly, the company known as the foremost authority on regulation of the gaming industry had its beginnings in a state that has, over the years, been a model for effective gaming regulation, New Jersey. Maida and Magno, both enthusiasts of competitive sailing, met as youths at the Lavallette (New Jersey) Yacht Club.

In addition to sailing, the two men shared aptitude for mathematics and engineering. Upon graduation from Lehigh University with a computer engineering degree, Maida was snatched up by the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement as a test engineer. Soon, he would tell his friend of an opening for a computer specialist at DGE. Magno, working at the time as a computer programmer for a New York banking systems firm, took the job.

It was 1987, and the expansion of the casino industry was about to begin—a fact both Maida and Magno realized. Meanwhile, New Jersey was gaining an unwanted reputation for its backlog of new slots in the approval pipeline at DGE.

“As a group, engineers, myself and some of the technicians used to talk about how the expansion of gaming was coming about, and that we should consider going out on our own and doing it without government involvement,” Magno, now GLI executive vice president, recalls. “There was a lot of red tape and political reasons why the testing took as long as it did. We all thought if we could do it on our own, we could probably develop a model similar to what New Jersey used, and we could be more efficient and get devices tested much more quickly, and probably better.”

Maida, who is GLI president and CEO, says the first chance to test that theory would arise that year, 1987. “Back then, New Jersey and Nevada were the only two places in the U

The online gaming suppliers in the European market in the early part of the 2000s were tempted by big money coming from grey- and black-listed online casinos and poker rooms. Some succumbed to that temptation, but Game Account Network insisted on only dealing with white-listed operations in preparation for the launch of the U.S. market. It turned out to be a great strategy, according to CEO Dermot Smurfit. The company has a partnership in New Jersey with Betfair, and has blazed the social gaming trail in the U.S. by opening a social casino for Foxwoods that has been an amazing success in producing revenue and bringing new and existing players to the property. Smurfit spoke with GGB Publisher Roger Gros at the Indian Gaming trade show in San Diego in May. To hear a full podcast of this interview, visit ggbmagazine.com.

Smurfit: We’re in year 12 of running the Game Account business. It really started when my family’s paper and packaging business was taken private around 2000—we got some cash, and we wanted to look at other high-growth industries to build a business. I raised my hand and said, what about online gaming?

No, but we took another direction. We wouldn’t do business with bad people or bad companies, and we waited for the market to regulate. Ten years ago there was no meaningful regulation of internet gaming. That led to the “Wild West” days where you just needed a license on some sunny tropical island and you were off and running to crazy profits.

Our mission is to provide the tools and technology to land-based casinos in regulated jurisdictions, because the regulators always favor the land-based incumbents. They are the natural equitable inheritors of the market opportunity. As regulation shines a torchlight on these legal jurisdictions, you begin to see the likely probable value over time.

The Game Account mission over the last two years has been to build a product capability on top of our real-money system that would enable a land-based casino to reuse what we’ve already built in New Jersey to build a social gaming business, on their own website, accessed by their own existing players. It allows the companies and their customers the ability to explore simulated gaming.

Foxwoods has been first to market—we launched in January—and the results are rather astonishing. We’re delighted with the progress Foxwoods has made so far, and we’re confident that business will grow quickly.

Facebook social casinos are effectively games and game applications built on top of the platform that Facebook already offers. They keep 30 percent of the revenues in return for havin

Maybe it took a former land-based casino executive to explain the opportunities of internet gaming to U.S. casino operators, but when 888 Holdings CEO Brian Mattingley arranged a deal with Caesars Entertainment to use the systems built by his company, it was a turning point. Mattingley, who previously was with bingo operator Gala in the U.K., has built his company into a major force internationally, and now in the U.S., 888 is the only company active in all three states in the U.S. where online gaming is legal. He spoke with GGB Publisher Roger Gros from the exhibit floor at the ICE trade show in London in early February. To access the podcast of this interview, which includes discussions about payment processing, branding, and more, visit ggbmagazine.com.

GGB: As an online gaming executive who came from land-based casinos, you know the differences between land-based and online. Why did you make that change?

Mattingley: The opportunity arose when 888 was going public on London’s stock market. I had retired from the land-based businesses, and it’s something which I had toyed with while I was at Gala. I had launched Gala Interactive, which was possibly the first opportunity that the U.K. had to start an online bingo business. We changed ownership, and the new owners of Gala were not interested at all in online bingo, so that fell away, but I still retained an interest.

Once you get involved with iGaming, you see your customers are completely different from land-based. That had a real interest to me—you can immediately identify your customers, you know who they are, you can monitor their play. It gives me the safety of knowing who I am dealing with, so I find the whole thing very fascinating.

Do you think it was an opportunity lost when the British and European land-based casino companies did not get in on that?

Yes, I do. I think we could easily have been at the forefront of what was inherently our core product, which was bingo and land casinos.

What is your impression of what’s going on in New Jersey?

Someone said recently that New Jersey was pedestrian in its start-up. I disagree. I think there were a lot of things which were absolutely correct when you start up a business in a territory where you wanted to be seen to be very clean. And I think what the DGE did there, with GeoComply, and all the technical providers, and the way they structured the regulation I think was absolutely correct.

I think all of the operators, if we were really honest, believe that there still is a long way to go. At 888, we’re not unhappy, but it was a relatively slow start, so if you’re going to make mistakes, it’s best to make mistakes when we’re all making them before a small audience.

But there have been no major technical or verification problems.

Exactly. And therefore, the DGE, in doing that, I think is superb. And they must feel that they’ve achieved what they wanted to achieve.

What are some of the hurdles you see in the U.S. right now?