Special Report: Brit who is taking Las Vegas upmarket

Thursday, May 05, 2005

Andrew Sasson is cleaning up with clubs for the MTV generation willing to spend 500 a night.
(Timesonline – June 5, 2005)
Report by John Arlidge

DREW BARRYMORE is sipping from a 600 bottle of Napa Valley Opus One wine in Fix restaurant. Mickey Rourke is downing a 500 bottle of Grey Goose vodka and dancing with a Paris Hilton lookalike in Light nightclub. Spiderman star Tobey Maguire is betting $5,000 a hand at poker in the high rollers’ suite, next to Caramel bar.

It is Saturday night in Las Vegas and, for one man, the stakes could not be higher.

Andrew Sasson is pacing the floor, making sure that the stars’ night is “a blast.” In his pinstriped suit, Sasson looks like the hero of the latest Vegas crime caper. But this is not the follow-up to Mickey Blue Eyes. The man with the “Briddish” accent and tousled brown hair is a 35-year-old from Walton-on-Thames in Surrey.

Sasson runs the fast-expanding Las Vegas based Light Group, which has gone from being a one-man band to a 400m 200-employee outfit in the past four years. It runs Light nightclub, Fix restaurant and Caramel bar in the Bellagio hotel, and Mist bar in the Treasure Island casino. And it is about to open a new club called Jet, a restaurant called Stack, and a lounge bar called Mink, all in the Mirage hotel. Next year Light will expand into the booming Vegas property market, with the first of four 100m apartment blocks.

Forbes magazine, America’s business bible, recently hailed Sasson as Sin City’s “up-and-comer… who is on his way to the top.” Veteran Vegas casino boss, Steven Wynn, who has just opened the most expensive hotel in North America, the 1.5 billion Wynn Las Vegas, said Sasson was “very talented.”

Sasson may not yet be making a jackpot-sized fortune – his personal stake in Light is worth 50m, a modest sum in a city where casinos turn over billions – but he is feted because he is one of a select bank of entrepreneurs who are transforming Vegas’s image.

The dusty desert town, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in May, is desperate to shed its seedy image and become the new American capital of upmarket chic. Every newspaper in town is full of ads for the kind of modern, fashionable hotels, bars, restaurants and entertainment you can find in New York or London.

Sasson kick-started the trend when he opened Light five years ago. The club continues to attract the new breed of young celebrities. Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt and Cameron Diaz are regulars. The masses follow in their wake.

British acts such as Sir Elton John may have been playing to sell-out crowds for years but, when it comes to business, Britons have lost out to American rivals in Las Vegas. When the casino giant London Clubs International tried to break into the market six years ago by opening the 900m Aladdin casino, the group lost its shirt, racking up debts of 100m.

How has Sasson made it big where others have failed? “I’ve been psycho for bars and clubs ever since I was 15 and, unlike a lot of Brits, I don’t look down my nose at Vegas,” he said. “I work 24 hours a day until I get my clubs and bars right.”

Sasson’s determination to succeed grows out of a classic misspent youth. Born in Surrey and expelled from school at 15, he moved to Spain, where he got a job in Benidorm, running a string of bars. After three years “getting drunk, chasing girls and turning into a total degenerate,” he returned to Britain where his father told him to get an education.

Sasson had recently seen the teen movie Porky’s. Impressed by scenes of American spring-break debauchery, he told his father he wanted to go to America. “My old man said that it was too expensive. I told him: ‘You start me off and I’ll take care of the rest.’ I don’t think he believed me, but he is very proud of me now.”

With 2,000 in his pocket, Sasson moved to Miami. He went to a community college, got a high-school diploma, and went on to take a marketing course. After college he started hanging out on South Beach, just as Miami was beginning to emerge as a fashionable tourist and clubbing area.

He landed his first job working the door at a nightclub called Velvet, where he got to know the New York fashion and club crowd. “There were all these models and celebrities coming down for the weekend and here I was, a little fat English guy, deciding whether to let them in or not.”

Soon he moved on to work for the Miami club owner Greg Brier at his new club, Groovejet. “I learnt book-keeping, finances and marketing.” By 25, he wanted to open a club of his own, so he moved to New York in 1995 and borrowed 30,000 from his father and 30,000 from a friend to open a club in SoHo called Jet Lounge.

After a year Sasson had enough money to open Jet East in the Hamptons, to cater for New York’s elite, who head out of Manhattan every weekend from June to September. “It went ballistic,” he said. So, too, unfortunately, did Sasson.

That summer his then girlfriend, New York nightclub publicist Lizzie Grubman, drove her Mercedes 4x4 into a queue outside a nightclub in the Hamptons, injuring 16 people. Sasson rashly drove her away from the scene, but later co-operated with the police and testified that Grubman had been drinking. She served a short prison sentence for drink-driving. Sasson said he regretted the incident and learnt that it is always best not to make a problem worse — “an important lesson that I will never forget”.

By now, Jet Lounge and Jet East were attracting investor attention. Shortly after Sasson’s 26th birthday, Jason Ader, a leading Wall Street gaming analyst at Bear Stearns, telephoned. “He said, ‘you are building a brand but you are in the wrong city’,” Sasson said. “I had no clue what he meant, but he invited me to Las Vegas and, since I’d never been there, I agreed to go.”

Two hours after stepping off the plane at McCarran airport and walking to his hotel on the Strip, Sasson decided he wanted to make his name in the Nevada town. “In those days people thought Vegas was cheesy, but I could see a unique opportunity.”

Sasson began showering Vegas casino bosses, in particular Mirage and Bellagio creator Steve Wynn, with proposals for clubs and bars. “I knocked on every door, but Vegas is a corporation town. Everyone turned me down.” His break came when Bobby Baldwin took over the Bellagio from Wynn. “I met Bobby and he said, ‘the kid’s got talent’.”

With his financial backers, Christopher and Keith Barish, co-founders of the Planet Hollywood restaurant chain, Sasson persuaded Baldwin to let him set up Light for £2m. Sasson took a 45% stake, with Mirage Resorts, owner of the Bellagio, controlling the other 55%.

It was the first club in the Bellagio and one of the first in Las Vegas to have a dress code and offer bottle service, with a minimum spend of £500 per table. Gaming and hotel analysts, who could not see beyond the blue-collar slot-machine punters, gave Sasson little chance of success.

He set himself and his staff tough targets. “Everyone from me to the doorman, to the cocktail waitress to the guy who did the ice cubes had to keep a database of clients and bring in 10 regulars every week. If they failed, they lost shifts.”

The strategy worked. The club’s sales exceeded forecasts by 300%. Caramel and Fix soon followed, again split 45%/55% between Sasson and Mirage Resorts.

Sasson is the first to admit he was lucky with timing. Light opened at around the time that hit Vegas films, such as Swingers and Ocean’s Eleven, rekindled interest in the town. But he said he knew from his first visit that it would be only a matter of time before it began to boom.

“The town was here for the taking. There was no good nightlife. 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.”

And come they have. Las Vegas is among America’s top three tourist destinations, last year attracting 37m visitors who spent £20 billion. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority predicts 43m annual visitors by 2009, 1m of them from Britain. Las Vegas is the fastest-growing city in America. Some 5,000 people move there each month.

As Vegas has grown, Sasson’s Light Group has expanded with it. The opening of the new bar, club and restaurant in the Mirage later this year will coincide with the firm’s first property venture. Frustrated with the Identikit suburban homes and retirement communities that dominate Vegas, Sasson teamed up with the French financier Laurence Hallier and struck a deal to build four 30-storey towers overlooking the Strip.
The first, Panorama Towers, will open in February and apartments worth more than £500m have already been sold. Sasson has bought a £1m penthouse that he will share with his girlfriend, Michelle, and their newborn son, Cash.

So what’s next? Sasson draws hard on his Marlboro Light and glances over to make sure that Mickey Rourke’s waitress is mixing his Grey Goose martinis correctly. “I will keep on building products for the MTV generation in real estate, food and beverage and hotels.”

Hotels? Sasson isn’t saying anything yet, but he is about to try to do what nobody else has successfully done in Vegas: open a small, boutique hotel — without a casino. The big-spending MTV generation don’t gamble, they party. More than £15 billion of the city’s revenue now comes from entertainment, restaurants, clubs and bars, and just £5 billion from gambling. Sasson wants to create an Ian Schrager-style hotel. It seems improbable in a town built on sequins, sex and seven-card stud, but Vegas is an improbable place. If it can happen anywhere, it can happen in Vegas, and few would bet against the barman from Surrey.