KVIG Informative

Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta built their fortune on the backs of Las Vegas working class residents. They donated more than $6 million to Donald Trump. Federal labor authorities found them guilty of some of the largest labor law violations in American history. Their cousin, a sitting U.S. Ambassador appointed by Trump, just announced a $17.6 billion acquisition of Caesars Entertainment while serving in that diplomatic role. This is not a story about one family. It is a story about how money, political access, and institutional power work together in Nevada.

Frank Fertitta Jr. arrived in Las Vegas from Beaumont, Texas in the 1960s and opened a bingo hall on West Sahara Avenue in 1976. He named it the Bingo Palace. It later became Palace Station.

He built Station Casinos from there, one locals casino at a time, and handed it to his sons Frank III and Lorenzo when he retired in 1993. Frank Jr. died in 2009 at 70.

His sons inherited the empire and expanded it aggressively, taking it private in a 2007 leveraged buyout that loaded the company with $6.5 billion in debt. When the financial crisis hit, Station filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009. Some lenders and bondholders alleged the Fertittas manipulated the bankruptcy process to prevent a fair auction. A bankruptcy judge approved their reorganization plan over those objections.

The brothers emerged from bankruptcy in 2011 with $4 billion less in debt and still in control.

Frank III and Lorenzo today hold approximately 48 percent of Red Rock Resorts, the publicly traded parent company of Station Casinos. Red Rock posted its highest quarterly net revenue in its 49-year history in the second quarter of 2025, $526.3 million. Net income in 2023 was $338 million. The company employs 9,385 people.

Its workers have been fighting for the right to unionize for nearly a decade. The federal government has ruled that the owners committed massive labor law violations in that fight.

The Trump Investment

Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta began investing heavily in Donald Trump before the 2020 election. Their documented political spending, measured only through disclosed FEC records, tells a clear story.

In 2018, each brother donated $1 million to America First Action, the super PAC designated by Trump as his primary vehicle for large donor spending. Their combined $2 million donation made them among the largest early contributors. On the same day the FEC recorded those donations, flight records tracked two Fertitta-owned private jets traveling to Charlottesville, Virginia, where the Trump Organization owns an estate and winery managed by Eric Trump.

Together with their wives, Frank and Lorenzo also made eight separate donations to the Republican National Committee totaling $812,400. Frank Fertitta and Fertitta Entertainment contributed a combined $707,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee in 2017.

By 2018, the brothers, their families, and their company had contributed approximately $5.3 million to Republican candidates and groups that disclose their donors since Trump’s election.

Together with his wife Jill, Frank Fertitta III contributed $721,200 to Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, per FEC records cited by Forbes. Frank and his wife have given more than $9.8 million to Republican candidates and committees from 2009 to 2020, making them among the largest political donors in Nevada history.

During the 2022 midterms, Frank and Lorenzo plus their two wives collectively poured more than $1.5 million into GOP political action committees. The Culinary Union subsequently challenged 25 separate FEC filings, pointing to donations that listed Lorenzo’s employer as the UFC and his occupation as UFC CEO, a position he had vacated six years earlier when the brothers sold the promotion for $4.3 billion in 2016.

What the Money Bought

The Fertitta-Trump relationship was not one-directional. It produced concrete returns.

Steven Cheung, who had been the UFC’s director of communications for public affairs while the Fertittas owned the promotion, became the White House’s director for strategic response under Trump’s first administration. Michael Britt, formerly a lobbyist for UFC, worked as a senior adviser in the Department of Transportation under Trump. Britt subsequently became a lobbyist for Fertitta-owned Station Casinos.

The revolving door between the Fertitta business empire and Trump’s White House, documented in 2018, established a pattern of personnel movement that has continued into the second administration.

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which the brothers cited as a primary reason for their political support, delivered significant benefits to high-income corporations. Red Rock Resorts is a publicly traded C-corporation. Station Casinos operates as a joint venture beneath it.

The Trump administration’s posture toward the National Labor Relations Board has also been materially favorable to Station Casinos. The first Trump administration was noted for reduced NLRB enforcement activity. The current administration has moved to limit the agency’s authority. Station Casinos is fighting some of the largest NLRB enforcement actions in American history, cases the Biden-era NLRB pressed aggressively and that the current administration has inherited.

The Labor Record

Station Casinos’ relationship with its workers is documented in federal court records, administrative law judge rulings, and NLRB decisions spanning more than seven years.

Culinary Workers Union Local 226, which represents 60,000 workers in Las Vegas and Reno and has unionized most major Strip and downtown properties, has been attempting to organize Station Casino workers since 2018. Station and Red Rock properties remain the largest non-union gaming operations in Las Vegas. The company has never entered a contract with the Culinary Union.

In December 2019, Station Casino leadership rolled out free family healthcare and an improved 401(k) plan for Red Rock employees in the weeks before a union election, then threatened to take those benefits away if workers voted to unionize. Workers also received steaks imprinted with the phrase VOTE NO.

The union election was held December 17, 2019. Workers voted against unionizing. An NLRB investigation concluded those votes were obtained through coercion and unlawful interference.

In 2020, Station withdrew recognition of the Culinary and Bartenders Unions at Palace Station and Boulder Station. Documents produced during subsequent hearings showed management text messages coordinating efforts to organize employees against their own union.

A federal administrative law judge issued a ruling in 2022 finding that Station Casinos violated the National Labor Relations Act. A three-member NLRB panel unanimously affirmed that ruling in June 2024.

The panel found that Red Rock Casino’s extensive coercive and unlawful misconduct between September 2019 and June 2020 stemmed from a carefully crafted corporate strategy intentionally designed at every step to interfere with employees’ free choice.

The NLRB’s June 17, 2024 decision stated that the most important unfair labor practices were planned and executed by Red Rock Casino and Station Casinos’ top management and owners. It issued a Cemex bargaining order and a Gissel bargaining order, both extraordinary remedies reserved for cases of severe and pervasive employer misconduct.

Rather than comply, Station Casinos appealed. A federal Administrative Law Judge ordered Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta to appear personally at trial after the company lost its effort to block that order. The trial covered 39 scheduled NLRB hearing days in 2024 alone.

The Cousin and the Casino

The Fertitta family’s political reach extends beyond Frank and Lorenzo. Their cousin Tilman Fertitta operates from Houston and has built a separate but parallel empire.

Tilman Fertitta is the chairman, CEO, and sole owner of Landry’s Inc., one of the largest restaurant and hospitality conglomerates in the country, operating more than 600 restaurants, hotels, and entertainment venues under brands including Morton’s The Steakhouse, Chart House, and Bubba Gump Shrimp. He owns the Houston Rockets. He owns the Golden Nugget casino chain with properties in six states.

In 2022 he purchased a plot of land on the Las Vegas Strip for $270 million. In 2024 and 2025 he accumulated a stake of up to 12.5 percent in Wynn Resorts, approved by Nevada regulators.

He has been a longtime Republican donor with what Houston Public Media described as a more than decade-long business relationship with Trump, including taking ownership of an Atlantic City casino in 2011 that was previously owned by the Trump Organization. In 2024, he hosted a fundraiser for Trump’s reelection campaign at his Post Oak Hotel in Houston.

Trump nominated Tilman Fertitta for the position of United States Ambassador to Italy and San Marino in December 2024. The Senate confirmed him 83 to 14 on April 29, 2025. He assumed the post on May 6, 2025.

On May 28, 2026, while serving as the sitting United States Ambassador, Tilman Fertitta announced that his company Fertitta Entertainment would acquire Caesars Entertainment in an all-cash merger valued at approximately $17.6 billion, including the assumption of approximately $11.9 billion in Caesars’ outstanding debt.

The deal would make Tilman Fertitta one of the largest casino operators on the Las Vegas Strip, with eight Caesars properties along the corridor. Caesars is also Nevada’s largest gaming employer on the Strip.

The acquisition requires approval from Nevada gaming regulators. Key Fertitta Entertainment executives were scheduled to appear before Nevada gaming regulators in July 2026 in connection with that review, according to CDC Gaming.

The Foreign Service Act of 1980 requires U.S. ambassadors to place their privately held business holdings into a trust or under executive control during their service. The Caesars deal raises direct questions about whether a sitting United States Ambassador can negotiate and execute a $17.6 billion commercial acquisition while representing the country’s interests abroad, and whether Nevada gaming regulators will treat that application as they would any other.

What Stays in the Valley

Station Casinos’ customer base is explicitly the locals market. Its properties are embedded in the daily life of the communities around them.

Those communities are the same ones this publication has documented as carrying the highest rates of poverty, the least infrastructure investment, and the greatest dependence on the gaming and hospitality jobs that Station Casinos provides.

Station Casinos generated $1.7 billion in revenue in 2023 and $338 million in net income. Its 9,385 employees generated that revenue. Those same employees are the workers the company fought for seven years to prevent from organizing for collective bargaining rights.

Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta donated more than $6 million to the political infrastructure of a president who has pursued policies reducing NLRB enforcement, cutting Medicaid funding, terminating Temporary Protected Status for immigrant workers, and accelerating deportation enforcement in the labor force that staffs Las Vegas’s non-union properties.

The workers at Station Casinos are disproportionately Hispanic, immigrant, and working class. The political donations that bought the family a seat in every room where Nevada’s economic future is decided were made possible by the labor of those workers.