KVIG Informative

The Elardi family fought a six-year strike by Culinary Workers Union Local 226 at its Las Vegas Strip casino in the 1990s. Nearly two decades after that casino was demolished, the family still owns a 16-acre slice of the site and collects $4 million a year from Wynn Resorts just to lease the empty land.

R.E. Griffith and William J. Moore opened the Hotel Last Frontier in October 1942 about a mile from the El Rancho Vegas on Highway 91, making it the Strip’s second resort, according to a finding aid the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections and Archives maintains for its Frontier Hotel and Casino Collection. The site had previously been home to the Pair O’ Dice Nite Club, the finding aid says.

Moore sold the Hotel Last Frontier in 1951 to Jacob Kozloff and Beldon Katleman, who reopened it with an outer-space theme as the New Frontier in 1955, according to the same finding aid. Later owners included Maury Friedman and T.W. Richardson, the finding aid states, before Warren “Doc” Bayley — who already owned the Hacienda — bought and reopened the property in the late 1950s. Bayley ran it until his death in 1964, when Banker’s Life Insurance Company acquired the property and the New Frontier was closed and torn down, the finding aid says.

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Howard Hughes bought the newly built Frontier Hotel and Casino in 1967, just before its grand opening, and renamed it the Frontier. His Summa Corporation owned the property until 1988, when it was sold to Margaret Elardi, according to the UNLV finding aid.

Culinary Workers Union Local 226 began a strike at the Frontier on Sept. 21, 1991. The walkout did not end until Feb. 1, 1998, after Elardi sold the property to Phil Ruffin, who renamed it the New Frontier, the finding aid says.

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Even as Ruffin took over the casino, the Elardi family kept title to a 16-acre piece of the underlying land and had leased the northern portion of the site to Ruffin in 1998 under a 99-year ground lease, according to Wynn Resorts’ annual report for the fiscal year ended Dec. 31, 2024, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Ruffin sold his interest in the property to Israeli investors for $1.24 billion in 2007, the SEC filing shows. The new owners closed the Frontier on July 16, 2007, imploded it on Nov. 13, 2007, and planned a Plaza-branded resort that never broke ground, according to the UNLV finding aid.

James Packer’s company acquired the stalled site through foreclosure in 2014 and abandoned its own planned resort there, called Alon Las Vegas, in 2016, the SEC filing shows. Wynn Resorts bought the former Alon site and adjacent acreage for $336 million in late 2017.

Wynn now pays the Elardi family $4 million a year to lease that same 16-acre strip, plus the property taxes on it, according to the company’s SEC filing — a rent check written to the same family whose management once drove hundreds of Culinary Union members onto a picket line for more than six years. Griffith’s resort is gone. What is left of it is an empty lot and a lease payment the Elardis still cash every year.