Brit of glitz
Meet Andrew Sasson, the Englishman who’s made a fortune in Las Vegas without ever stepping foot inside a casino
Within two hours of walking along the famous Strip, club owner Andrew Sasson fell in love with Las Vegas. And Vegas fell right back in love with him
Words: John Arlidge
ELTON JOHN BELTS out Pinball Wizard at Caesars Palace. The Beatles’ All You Need is Love is the finale of Love, the latest must-see Beatles musical at the Mirage. The Who and the Rolling Stones are hitting Las Vegas later this year to add some glitz ‘n’ glam to their acts.
Britain’s showbiz elite may be the biggest names on the Strip, but today the hottest UK import in town is a 36-year-old from Walton-on-Thames. It’s Saturday night and Andrew Sasson is standing in Jet, one of six nightclubs, bars and restaurants that he owns in Las Vegas. He runs his fingers through his tousled brown hair, straightens the hand-stitched lapels on his Canali pin-striped suit and surveys the scene.
Leonardo di Caprio is downing a £1,000 bottle of Napa Valley Montebello Ridge Cabernet Sauvignon. Paris Hilton is sipping a limited edition Grey Goose vodka and dancing with her girlfriends. In the VIP room, Michael Jordan is chatting with Mark Wahlberg.
As Sasson walks past, the starry elite flash Hollywood smiles. After all, Sasson is the toast of Sin City. He owns the chicest clubs, Jet in the MGM Mirage and Light in the Bellagio. He also runs Stack restaurant in the Mirage, Fix restaurant and Caramel Bar in the Bellagio and Mist bar in Treasure Island. Next year, he will open two new restaurants, Diablo’s and Munch in the Monte Carlo and a new bar called Mink in New York, New York.
If that were not enough, he is about to do what no other Briton has successfully done in Vegas – open a hotel on the Strip. Six years after London Clubs International sunk £500m into the Aladdin and lost its shirt, work on the $250m 40-storey Harmon Hotel, on the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Harmon Avenue, is about to begin. By the time the tower, designed by Sir Norman Foster, opens, Sasson’s company, Light Group, will be worth an estimated £300m.
Forbes magazine, the “bible” of American business, has hailed Sasson as “a Las Vegas up-and-comer who is moving up … on his way to the top”. He is “hot” because he is one of a select band of entrepreneurs who are transforming Vegas’ image. The dusty desert town is desperate to shed its seedy image and become the new US capital of upmarket chic. Every magazine and every newspaper in town is full of adverts for the kind of modern, fashionable hotels, bars, restaurants and entertainment venues you might find in New York, LA and Miami, and Sasson runs the best of them.
How has the fast-talking Brit kid on the block become one of the handful of people to make – not lose – a small fortune in Vegas? “I’ve been mad for clubs ever since I was 15,” he says. “I’m mad for Vegas. I don’t look down on it like so many outsiders do. And I work 24 hours a day.”
Sasson’s determination to succeed grows out of a classically misspent youth. He was born in Surrey, dropped out of school aged 15, and moved to Spain, where he got a job in Benidorm handing out fliers for local nightclubs. After three years (“getting drunk, chasing girls and turning into a total degenerate”) he returned to Britain, where his father told him to finish his education. Sasson had recently seen the American teen movie Porky’s. Impressed by the image of hormonally-fuelled debauchery, he told his father he wanted to go to the States. “My old man said that it was too expensive. I told him: ‘You start me off and I’ll take care of the rest’.”
With £5,000 in his pocket, Sasson wasted no time in moving to Miami. He attended a local community college, where he got a high school diploma, and went on to take a marketing course. After college, he landed a job working as a doorman at a nightclub called Velvet. “There were all these models and celebrities coming down for weekends and here was I – a little fat English guy – deciding whether to let them in or not.”
Sasson used his position to make “a lot of cash”. At 25, he wanted to open a club of his own. So he moved to New York in 1995 and convinced Miami club owner Greg Brier to lend him £80,000 to open a small, 12,000sq ft club in SoHo called Jet Lounge.
After a shaky start, Sasson soon made enough money to open Jet East in Easthampton, to cater for New York’s elite. “It went off the scale,” he recalls. So, too, unfortunately did Sasson himself. That summer his then-girlfriend, New York nightclub publicist Lizzie Grubmann, drove her Mercedes 4×4 into a queue outside a club, injuring dozens of people.
Sasson drove her away from the scene, but later cooperated with the police.
By now, Jet Lounge and Jet East were attracting investor attention. Jason Ader, a leading Wall Street gaming analyst, invited Sasson to Las Vegas and since he’d never been, he agreed. Two hours after stepping off the plane and walking along the Strip, he decided he wanted to make his name there. “In those days people thought Vegas was cheesy but I could see a unique opportunity.”
He explains: “The hotel owners’ attitude towards young people was: ‘Stick ‘em in a room, give ‘em a bar and they’ll be fine.’ While a lot of young people are happy with a fake Irish pub, I knew many others – the MTV generation – had money and wanted the best drinks, the best service, the best music. I’d seen them in Miami and New York and I knew that they would start coming here.”
The new kid on the Strip began showering casino bosses, in particular Mirage and Bellagio-creator, Steve Wynn, with proposals for clubs and bars. “I knocked on every door but everyone turned me down.” His big break came when Robert Baldwin took over the Bellagio from Wynn. “I met him and he said: ‘The kid has got talent’.”
With new financial backers, Christopher and Keith Barish, co-founders of the Planet Hollywood restaurant chain, Sasson persuaded Baldwin to let him open Light in the Bellagio, at a cost of £2.5m.
It was the first club in the Bellagio and one of the first in Las Vegas to offer bottle service with a minimum spend of £500 per table.
The self-confessed “arrogant and hard” businessman set himself and his staff tough targets. “Everyone from me to the doorman had to keep a detailed database of clients and bring in 10 regulars every week. If they failed, they lost shifts.” The strategy worked. The club’s sales went on to exceed projection by 300%. The other clubs and restaurants soon followed.
By a combination of graft and good luck – Light opened around the time that hit films such as Swingers and Ocean’s Eleven were re-kindling interest in Vegas as a fashionable destination – Sasson is now the reigning king of Vegas nightlife. But he knows he has to keep evolving if he is going to stay on top.
Which is why he recently signed a deal with the giant MGM Mirage group to open the Harmon hotel. It will be a minimalist hotel with 400 rooms – little more than a motel in a city which has the biggest hotels in the world. The MGM Grand has more than 5,000 rooms.
There will not be a single roulette wheel, nor a blackjack table, nor one twittering “slots-‘o’-fun” one armed bandit. The hotel will have a strict entry policy and will operate more like Vegas’ first private club than a hotel. “Nobody gets in unless they are a guest or have a bar or restaurant reservation. We don’t want the shorts ‘n’ t-shirts brigade,” says Sasson.
A boutique hotel-cum-private-club, without a casino on the Las Vegas strip? It seems improbable in a town built on sequins, sex and seven-card stud but Vegas, created by a mobster who bet that a strip of desert highway could become the world’s gambling capital, is an improbable place.
If it can happen anywhere, it can happen here, and few would bet against Andrew Sasson being the man to pull it off.
