Yahoo Finance ‘It was always about the people,’ say MS Coast casino Hall of Famers who led from start
What stories were told over the last week as Tim Hinkley and Jon Lucas returned to South Mississippi, where they made such impacts on the Coast, the casino industry and the people who worked with them.
They, along with the late William Gresham Jr., who served on the first Mississippi Gaming Commission, and his son Thomas Grisham, who served on the commission for eight years, were inducted Thursday into the Mississippi Gaming Hall of Fame. The awards were presented by the Mississippi Gaming and Hospitality Association at the Beau Rivage Resort and Casino.
They came first and led the way — Hinkley as the manager of Isle of Capri, the first casino in Biloxi and the South, and Lucas as the general manager of Imperial Palace Casino, now IP Casino, the first to reopen in South Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina.
They were honored not only because they were first, but because of the way they led and shaped Coast casinos and the people they rallied.
“It was always about the people,” Hinkley said.
One of the advantages of opening first was being able to hire the best staff, Hinkley said.
“We got the cream of the crop,” he said.
The people and strategy
Billy Creel was the second or third hired in Mississippi, and was heavily into tourism. He made sure the cameras were there when the two riverboats that would become the Isle of Capri arrived in South Mississippi and were paraded to the site by a flotilla of fishing and pleasure boats on a “beautiful, clear day,” Hinkley said. It was the first and enduring image of Mississippi’s launch of casinos.
At the time, there were only casinos in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, tribal casinos and a few small casinos in other states.
Isle of Capri Biloxi opened on Aug. 1, 1992. “We had a monopoly for two weeks,” Hinkley said, until other casinos began opening. These early operators had some leniency with the Gaming Commission, he said, since everything was so new. Mississippi set the standard, Hinkley said, and legislators all over the country looked at Mississippi to see how casinos were set up, what was working and how much staff were getting paid.
“We worked hard but we had fun,” said Rich Westfall, one of the original employees of the Isle of Capri, who followed the riverboats to Mississippi.
“Tim was a great leader,” he said, establishing a positive impression of casinos and a link between the casinos and the community that continues 32 years later.
“That was the strategy,” Hinkley said. He got on lot off boards for local charities, met a lot of people and handed out a lot of checks to community groups and nonprofits. The Isle staff was encouraged to also volunteer, he said, and spread the positive impression.
“I always credited Tim with being the face of the industry,” said Chett Harrison, general manager of Golden Nugget Biloxi, which purchased the Isle of Capri. “He legitimized the industry early on,” Harrison said.
There was loyalty. Duncan McKenzie said when the Harrah’s merger happened and word got around that he would soon be out of a job, “Tim Hinkley called me with that week — and he hired me.” Both were graduates of Michigan State University.
The Isle of Capri, owned by Bernard Goldstein’s, opened a casino a year for at least 15 years, Hinkley said, based on everything they learned in Mississippi.
Coming back from the storm
Roy Anderson, whose company built many of the Coast casinos, called Hinkley and Lucas “Good people persons.”
“Tim was a great leader. He pushed the philosophy of giving back to the community,” Anderson said.
“Jon was the ultimate casino guy. He always had a suit and tie on, just like the movies,” he said. Dressing for success was just one of his traits that have served him well now that he is chief operating officer for Hard Rock International, where he oversees 13 casinos, 34 hotels, 238 cafes and Rock Shops all over the world.
He was hired to manage IP Casino Biloxi just six weeks before Hurricane Katrina flooded the building with 14 feet of water.
There was never a question they would come back, Lucas said, and the ambitious target date was Dec. 22, which typically is one of the slowest days of the year for casinos and less than four months after Katrina.
The resort had six elevators for 1,000 hotel rooms. Martin, the elevator repairman, told Lucas it would take until Memorial day to get them running again.
Lucas said he wanted three shifts, working seven days a week to get the necessary 11 elevators operational before Christmas.
When the man told Lucas it would cost $2 million extra, Lucas replied, “When can you start?”
The elevators were ready on Dec. 22 and the $1.2 billion Coast casino market was on its way back.
Staff made it happen
Katrina was an “amazing, life-changing experience,” Lucas said. One of the first things he did after Katrina was call all the 2,000 employees who were able to come back to work. Most would not be doing their regular jobs, he told them, but they all could contribute to the reopening.
Next he sent people to Mobile and Pensacola to buy grills and set up a kitchen in the parking garage.
“We fed anybody and everybody,” he said.
Lucas said he learned a long time ago to surround yourself with great people, some of them smarter than you, “and I did that here,” he said of Biloxi. He called the people who worked for him “superstars.”
On his last day of work, after the IP was sold to Boyd Gaming, Lucas’ employees lined the way and applauded and cheered him all the way from his office to the door.
Best in service
Lucas was working for Caesars in Tunica and Lee Bond on the Coast before they joined forces at the IP.
“One of the many great things I remember is every New Year’s Eve, Jon would bring us all together after the midnight hoopla — around 12:30 — and he would make a toast to his team and talk about how much he appreciated the focus by each of us on service and on being the best.”
Bond said what impressed him most about Lucas was how “he stood strong and uncompromising on how the focus needed to be on making sure we had he best service,” Bond said.
“Jon was known to be great at perfecting operations, but what also really set him apart was his vision and understanding of all areas like human resources, construction and design, marketing, finance — and especially customer service — better than most anyone,” Bond said.
He drew on all those skills to get the IP Casino back open first and they remodeled and reopened each area of the resort over the next year.
Looking back and ahead
“Casinos have been good for Mississippi,” said fellow Casino Hall of Fame inductee Tom Grisham.
When people come to Mississippi for the casinos, “They leave with a very positive impression,” he said. “You can’t buy that.”
Mississippi did it right, establishing a three-person Gaming Commission, said former chairman Jerry St. Pe. It’s impressive that here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast this industry has operated with total integrity, he said, with the gaming commission focusing on both promotion and compliance.
The casino industry they founded and worked isn’t the same as when Hinkley and Lucas worked in South Mississippi.
“Certainly Covid changed the workforce,” Lucas said, and Hard Rock is hiring younger workers who are starting to use artificial intelligence for cyber security and other issues.
Hinkley said he’s glad he retired before AI became part of the casino industry. “There’s a lot of human element in what we do,” he said.
The inductees into the hall of fame were all casino pioneers on the Coast, in Tunica and on the Mississippi River, said Larry Gregory, executive of the Mississippi Gaming and Hospitality Association.
All of them had the attitude, “I knew it would work in Mississippi,” he said. They invested their money and their sweat equity to make it happen, and returned Thursday “so we could thank them for what they’ve done.”
