KVIG Informative

Every major resort on the Las Vegas Strip today answers to shareholders, a board and quarterly earnings calls, not to a single owner or a silent partner skimming the count. That wasn’t inevitable. It took specific public corporations deciding, one at a time, that Nevada gaming was worth letting regulators see their books. One of the earliest and largest of those bets belonged to Hilton.

Kirk Kerkorian built the hotel that made the purchase possible. He took over an existing concept from Marvin Krattner, who had envisioned an “International Country Club Estates” on the site of the old Las Vegas Speedway, and completed construction in 1969 of what was then the largest hotel and casino in the world, according to UNLV Special Collections and Archives’ description of the Martin Stern Jr. architecture collection, which holds the property’s design records. A 1969 site map for the project is catalogued in the same UNLV collection. The hotel opened with Barbra Streisand on its stage, and Elvis Presley followed with 58 consecutive performances, continuing to play the International Hotel until 1976, the same UNLV description states.

Hilton did not build the International. It bought it. In 1970, Hilton Hotels Corporation purchased International Leisure Company, the entity that owned both the International Hotel and the Flamingo Hotel and Casino, according to a UNLV Special Collections finding aid for its Hilton Hotels Corporation collection, compiled by archivist Kyle Gagnon. The International was renamed the Las Vegas Hilton and the Flamingo became the Flamingo Hilton, according to UNLV Special Collections’ own historical timeline of the property. The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation’s published account of that purchase states that Barron Hilton, Conrad Hilton’s son, secured his company’s board approval in 1970 to buy the Flamingo and the International from financier Kirk Kerkorian.

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Hilton’s own published historical fact sheet describes the acquisition as making the company the first New York Stock Exchange-listed corporation to enter the domestic gaming business, and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation separately describes it as the first time a publicly traded company had acquired a casino. Both are the company’s own framing of its history, but the timing fits a legal shift already underway in Carson City. Nevada’s 1955 Gaming Control Act had no real mechanism for a corporation selling stock to the public, so the 1967 Legislature passed Senate Bill 470, enacted as Chapter 534 of the Statutes of Nevada, letting a public corporation hold a gaming license without licensing every shareholder, and the 1969 Legislature followed with Senate Bill 353, Chapter 220, tightening the state’s oversight of the corporate licensees the first law had let in, according to the Nevada Legislative Counsel Bureau’s Policy and Program Report on gaming regulation. Hilton, MGM, Holiday Inns, Ramada and Hyatt entered Nevada gaming once that framework existed, according to a Nevada gaming law textbook published through UNLV’s gaming research program.

The property Hilton bought kept making news under its new name. A 1981 arson fire at the Las Vegas Hilton, set just 90 days after the MGM Grand fire a few blocks away, killed eight people, according to UNLV Special Collections’ description of the property. Heavyweight Leon Spinks beat Muhammad Ali there in 1978, and the Navy’s Tailhook convention — later the subject of a nationally reported military sexual-assault scandal — met there in 1991, the same UNLV description states.

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Hilton’s own gaming division eventually left the parent company altogether, spun off in 1998 as Park Place Entertainment, according to the same UNLV Special Collections finding aid on Hilton Hotels Corporation. The company that once ran the Flamingo under an owner the Nevada Tax Commission suspected of taking mob loans had, within a decade of Hilton’s purchase, helped make a publicly traded balance sheet the normal way to own a casino. Every resort company that answers to Wall Street today, instead of to an owner nobody could fully vet, is operating in the market Hilton’s 1970 purchase helped open.