BILOXI, Miss. -- Emerging from the Waffle House, well-fed and hyped for an afternoon of feeding the slots, Charlotte Lee paused in the parking lot and gazed up -- way up -- to the top of a cream-colored high-rise across the street. Slick but elegant in design and really, really big -- taller than anything in Mississippi -- the building seems conspicuously out of place along a strip lined with jumbo-lettered neon and shoddy souvenir shacks.
"This may be out of its league," said Lee, of Birmingham, Ala., on a weekend gambling sojourn to Mississippi's Gulf Coast. The building, she said, "looks like Las Vegas."
This structure, this beautiful and imposing thing that is the talk of Biloxi, may as well be a piece of Vegas that somehow floated up the Gulf of Mexico and landed on the white-sand beach here: It is the $650 million Beau Rivage casino resort, the latest venture of former Marylander Steve Wynn's Mirage Resorts, which owns five casinos in Nevada.
Wynn is known for bringing elegance and pizazz to Las Vegas, once a flashy gambling-town-in-the-desert that he has helped transform into a theme-oriented travel destination. Industry analysts say he may be about to perform similar magic on Mississippi's coast, once a blighted strip in the nation's poorest state -- making this area the first solid gaming alternative to Atlantic City and Vegas.
When the Beau Rivage opens at 12.01 a.m. Tuesday, it will be the largest casino-resort outside Nevada, and it is a clear sign of how this industry has exploded. Legal in only two states a decade ago, casinos now operate in 26 states.
But in no other place has the craze taken off so quickly. With the Beau Rivage, Mississippi is home to 31 casinos. Gambling has, in fact, helped this state to financial equilibrium. Since 1990, when dockside gambling was approved, the state has raked in more than $1 billion in additional tax revenue, and its general fund has ballooned by more than 63 percent.
But with Mirage and other industry giants knocking, Mississippi residents are facing tough choices about how pervasive they want gaming to become, and about whether the economic benefits are worth changing the identity of a community.
No city is wrestling more with the dilemma than Biloxi. On the brink of bankruptcy eight years ago, the city is now flush with the money collected from a 4 percent gaming tax on its eight casinos.
From the weedy shipyards to city hall, everyone here talks about drawing the line to retain Biloxi's fishing-village charm. But whenever a casino is proposed, all but the most strident gambling opponents remain quiet. And the welcome mat -- even the red carpet -- is out for the Beau Rivage.
"It's an honor. In the southeast part of the U.S., this will be the best hotel there is," said George Sekul, a 61-year-old waterman whose family has been shrimping for so long that an enormous schooner at the Biloxi Seafood Museum -- the Mike Sekul -- is named for his father. "I can't wait to get in there."
Drawing line somewhere
But Mayor A. J. Holloway, who supported the Beau Rivage, warns that the line will have to be drawn somewhere if Biloxi's 53,000 residents are to hold on to their cherished identity as a small fishing village.
"You can't have it both ways," he said. "If you want to be a gambling mecca, you're not going to be able to keep the small-town ambience."
Holloway tried to draw the line at a proposal that would dwarf even the Beau Rivage. President Casinos, which already has a casino here, wants to fill in 54 acres of Gulf of Mexico waters to build 12 hotels and six casinos.
The City Council overrode the mayor's veto last month to approve the proposal, despite its own serious reservations about the environmental impact. The project now needs the approval of state officials.
Meanwhile, Wynn's venture is believed to be the largest commercial investment in state history. The 32-story, 1,780-room hotel is Mississippi's tallest structure.
Over beers at Mary Mahoney's, a happy-hour watering hole, local residents refer to the Beau Rivage as "the You-Know-What." Billboards everywhere announce the opening saying, simply, "It's time." Beginning opening day, airlines will nearly double their passenger capacity into Biloxi.
Marc Falcone, a gaming analyst with the New York investment firm Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc., said that while Mississippi coast casinos generate $800 million a year now, they will be hard-pressed to match the $4 billion made on the Las Vegas Strip and in Atlantic City. But with the arrival of Mirage, he said, the area becomes the nation's third major gaming hot spot and could hit the $2 billion-a-year plateau in a few years.
Sharp contrast
If Beau Rivage doesn't give an immediate Vegas-style makeover to Biloxi, it certainly brings an unprecedented degree of splendor and grandiosity here.
There ar eight casinos in the Biloxi area. They use their signs to advertise buffet prices. One, the Isle of Capri, has a 25-foot purple bag of fake gold coins in front of its building. Another, Treasure Bay, is shaped like a pirate's ship.
In contrast, Beau Rivage boasts a $10 million marina that Mirage says is the most expensive in the world. Yachtsmen who tie up can even order room service to their boats.
The Japanese restaurant is encircled by 10,000 bamboo stalks that, at a cost of $40,000, were painted green.
The steak house displays 4,000 tropical fish in tanks that cost $2 million. Four full-time aquarists care for them after they are released from the quarantine across the street, where new arrivals are tested for disease. The fish aren't on the menu.
Sixty-six luxury suites have two bathrooms for each bedroom -- a "his" with a shower and a "hers" with a soaking whirlpool tub. Suites start at $199 a night.
Some of the expensive adornments are aimed at giving Beau Rivage an aura of Southern charm. Mirage lined the driveway with 35-foot, 75-year-old oak trees -- trucked in from a ranch on the Alabama border and replanted -- to resemble the canopied approach to a Southern plantation.
The lobby is dotted with 40-foot magnolias that were lowered through the roof by crane.
Beau Rivage Chairman Barry Shier said visitors will be charmed by his 4,200 employees. "I look at these folks," Shier said, "and I see individuals who can deliver the promise of Southern hospitality."
The casino mailed a slick videotape to community leaders, inviting them to a VIP dinner and tour. The tape mixes images of the casino with those of shrimpers heading out to sea at sunrise and expansive lawns where little girls in sun dresses play on swings. A message at the end of the clip reads, "Stephen and Elaine Wynn invite you to a night of Southern hospitality."
One longtime resident who received a copy is Wanda Stewart, a member of a small but vociferous minority opposed to gaming. She said the videotape sickened her.
"Maybe it looks like Tara. Or Twelve Oaks before the Yankees came," she said. "Whatever they do, the reality is people are playing slot machines, shooting craps and playing roulette. The worst is yet to come if Beau Rivage indeed attracts others."
Unlike the other casinos, the resort almost mocks the state law that gambling must take place on a barge. A seamless carpet passes over the spot where land ends and the barge begins. The barge is so fixed to the shoreline that it shifted only one-sixteenth of an inch when Hurricane Georges slammed the coast last year.
Operators of the other casinos seem sanguine about Mirage joining the market. "They'll draw some of our customers, and we're prepared for that," said William H. "Billy" Creel, director of operations at the Isle of Capri. "But we'll be recognized all over the country."
Wynn, 57, started in gambling in the 1960s, running a family bingo parlor in southern Anne Arundel County. By 1969, he was in Las Vegas. There, he shocked industry bigwigs by doing the unthinkable: pouring money into his Golden Nugget casino in the seedy downtown and then expecting people to come see grand shows and spend big bucks.
But they came, and they spent. Today, many in the industry watch Wynn closely. Hilton Hotels, another industry powerhouse, recently acquired two casinos on the Gulf Coast and plans to upgrade and expand them.
At least one parcel of Biloxi land is on the market if a casino is interested. The spot belongs to Jack Covacevich, who runs a family boat-repair business that is 103 years old. But if a casino wants his land, he's ready to buck family tradition and deal.
"There's no two ways about it," he said. "It's economics. And times change."
Pub Date: 3/13/99