Maverick for Mayor : Brash Candidate Unsettles Las Vegas Establishment

Southern Nevada’s political and commercial establishment--the folks who have sweated blood to persuade the rest of the world that this is a well-rounded, booming Sun Belt city, not just the Western capital of sin and neon--have been shaking in their boots.

Out on the horizon, armed with a mischievous grin and an endless bankroll, is their worst nightmare: a rich, freewheeling, eighth-grade dropout-turned-casino-owner who is spending about $700,000 of his own money in an effort to become mayor of Las Vegas.

His name is Bob Stupak. He calls himself the Polish Maverick and he promises voters “business as unusual.” He drops his ‘g’s, tends to stammer in public speeches and says the smartest man in the world is Popeye “because he said ‘I am what I am.’ ” He describes his interest in the arts by saying that he reads the Sunday comics. His favorite answer to voters’ questions is a vow to “take City Hall back from the special interests.” His second favorite answer is “I don’t know.” He’s a high-stakes poker player who calls this election “the biggest poker game I’ve ever been in.”

Stupak stunned everybody, including himself, when he finished first in the city’s mayoral primary last month. Today he confronts a veteran City Council member in a runoff election to succeed retiring Mayor Bill Briare.

His message is a collection of anti-politician bromides aimed at the distrust many voters feel toward anyone connected with any level of government. “If you want to make a change,” he told a mobile home park audience Friday, “I’m the biggest change you could make.”

Fearful that a Stupak victory would make it harder for Las Vegas to dilute its kingdom-of-glitz image, Briare and a wave of other public and civic officials, including Democratic Gov. Richard Bryan, have endorsed Stupak’s opponent, Ron Lurie.

No Time for Carnivals

“I’m interested in Las Vegas having a genuine mayor, not a carnival man,” said Briare, who withheld endorsement until after the primary.

“Las Vegas wants to put its best face on,” said Grant Sawyer, former Nevada governor and a Democratic Party national committeeman. “We think it’s important that the mayor create the true image of Las Vegas, one of stability.”

Stupak and Lurie together will spend about $1 million on a mostly ceremonial job that pays $33,500 a year. Nothing close to that kind of political spending has ever occurred in the city, which has only had two mayors in the last 28 years.

Serious discussion of issues, such as the often-vilified bus service, the pace of development or the city’s economically depressed Westside, has been buried by the campaign antics of Stupak, a rough-edged but likable figure who has long been regarded as one of the town’s best self-promoters.

Stupak, 45, who came here from Pittsburgh by way of Australia, opened his first casino in 1974 and immediately began offering the biggest slot machine jackpot in town. Five years later he gambled by building Bob Stupak’s Vegas World hotel and casino in a raw section of town where the Vegas Strip fades into a collection of wedding parlors and cheap motels.

All-Ugly Award

He splashed his name and picture throughout the hotel, a building so garish that a newspaper poll recently called it the ugliest in town. But Stupak profited and expanded the building. He offered a million bucks to any stunt man who’d jump off the top of the 23-story hotel. (The bet was taken and the stunt man is suing for nonpayment.) He offered a half-million to any poker-playing computer that could beat him at cards. (He won that one.)

His campaign, run by a Los Angeles political consulting firm, has saturated local television stations with folksy ads about “ Our Las Vegas,” hammering at the theme that City Hall cares more about tourists and developers than the city’s 200,000 residents.

Last December, in what was ostensibly a promotional gesture, Stupak created a new corporation and mailed 100 shares of stock--valued at a tenth of a cent per share--to 40,000 residents. But once his campaign began, the stockholders began receiving vote-for-Bob mailings. And as Stupak’s notoriety grew, the stock’s traded value soared to as much as 35 cents a share.

Those weren’t the only gifts voters received. Hundreds of senior citizens received free baskets of fruit from Stupak.

Stupak, who has turned down many news media interview requests in what he said was a calculated attempt to generate more interest (“they played right into my hands,” he bragged), skipped the campaign’s only scheduled radio and television debates last week. He didn’t need it, he said. He’d already bought his own hour of prime-time television the night before.

Not a Normal Field

When the campaign for the nonpartisan office began, Stupak was regarded as the richest flake in a field that also included a prostitute, a disc jockey and a guy with the nickname “Vegas Vampire.” The favorites were Lurie, a 14-year-veteran of the council; Clark County Commissioner Thalia Dondero and former County Commissioner Tom Wiesner, a Republican national committeeman.

Stupak, a Democrat, beat them all, taking 33% of the vote to 26% for Lurie, also a Democrat. The panic began.

“I was shocked,” said Dondero. “It’s scary.”

Dondero and other primary losers accused Stupak of bribing voters with stock and fruit. But what really got under their skin was the feeling that a guy so ignorant about government could con his way to the top. Stupak had made no public appearances. (His first, made after the primary, was to a class of fourth-graders.)

Stupak didn’t dodge the rap. In fact, he said often, one of the best things about a Stupak victory is that it would keep Lurie on the City Council, where Stupak would badly need Lurie’s expertise.

“I’m running a non-politican campaign and I don’t lie,” Stupak said in an interview. “If I don’t know the answer, I say I don’t know.”

A Familiar Answer

He said this kind of thing so often in the first joint appearance between himself and Lurie that the Lurie campaign edited a videotape of Stupak’s “don’t know” answers into a Lurie television commercial.

That first joint appearance also produced an agreement by both candidates to take drug tests after a man calling himself the Rev. John 3:16 Cook stood and requested it. Stupak took a television reporter to witness his urine test, then criticized Lurie for poor judgment when Lurie produced his urine specimen in private.

None of these spectacles would have occurred had not Bob Stupak, a twice-divorced father of three who estimates his wealth at $54 million, become bored.

“I needed this challenge,” he said. “I can make the hotel a little bigger, but that’s it. With my life style, I couldn’t get into trouble (running out of money) unless I lived to be 400.”

Stupak was born in a Polish neighborhood on the south side of Pittsburgh, the son of a bookmaker. He got tired of school and quit. Finally, after a series of short-lived jobs he used a few thousand dollars from an auto accident settlement to set up a business distributing dine-out coupon books. It worked in Pittsburgh. He took the business to Australia, where he did better.

His Kind of Place

Eventually, Las Vegas beckoned. He remembered passing through for the first time in 1965 and having a waitress ask him, at 2 a.m., if he wanted breakfast, lunch or dinner. “I said, ‘Oh my, have they created the place for me?’ I got completely mesmerized by the city.”

Stupak first tried to become mayor four years ago, throwing $100,000 of his own money into a Vegas-needs-more-pizazz campaign against incumbent Briare, who easily won a third term. He said he would not have run again had not Briare, an extremely popular politician, stepped down.

Despite his primary victory, Stupak is an underdog today, according to most political observers and a recent poll conducted by a local television station. However, predicting elections here is another form of gambling, because so few people vote. Only 24% of the population is registered (compared to 42% in Los Angeles County) and of those, only about 60% are expected to turn out today.

Andrew Tuttle, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, political science professor, said he believes Stupak profited in the primary from a significant bloc of voters who voted for him “just for the heck of it” but will “get a little more serious” in the runoff.

“I know at least two people like that,” Tuttle said with some embarrassment. “Myself and my wife.”

Lurie planned to spend the last hours of the campaign walking precincts. Stupak, meanwhile, bought more television time to rebroadcast his hourlong promotional spot that was first shown Thursday night on Las Vegas’ ABC affiliate.

Best and the Worst

The amateurish hour illustrated the worst and best of Stupak. There he was, on live television, getting upset at not being able to figure out how to throw the switch that allowed the audience to listen to telephone callers’ questions. There he was, stumbling over his words, running out of breath, exposing his anxiety and his unfamiliarity with government, answering specific questions with rambling cliches about “the do-nothing politicians.”

And yet, there he was, as the final minutes of time expired, groping earnestly for a way to express his motivation, talking emotionally about what it felt like to have so much money “that it doesn’t matter any more. . . . My business is past-tense. I have 600 rooms, if I had 6,000 it wouldn’t make any difference. . . . I need a challenge. . . .

“The citizens of Las Vegas have finally had enough,” he said to the camera. “I’m now. I’m new--and I’m you.” Then he walked over to his 11-year-old son, named Nevada, and put his arm around him.

The next night, on a nightclub stage of the Dunes hotel on the Strip, a fast-rising off-color comedian named Sam Kinison was in the middle of a remark about giving sheep the right to vote when he paused for a minute and threw in an aside.

“It might help Bob Stupak,” he said.