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Hilton, BET May Build a Casino Aimed at Blacks

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Hilton Hotels Corp. and the parent company of Black Entertainment Television said Thursday that they will explore the possibility of opening a Las Vegas hotel and casino designed to lure more African American visitors to the nation’s gambling capital.

The joint venture would blend the entertainment savvy of BET Holdings Inc. and Hilton’s hotel and gambling expertise to boost the city’s relatively small number of African American gamblers, who were once banned from casinos and hotels along the Las Vegas Strip, gambling industry experts said.

“In the past, black customers have not been particularly welcomed,” said I. Nelson Rose, a gambling expert at Whittier College of Law. “It’s . . . a very intelligent move on the part of Hilton because this is a market that has been ignored.”

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BET, which creates and distributes entertainment programs targeted at African Americans, would handle entertainment and marketing for the proposed BET SoundStage Casino. BET Chairman and Chief Executive Robert L. Johnson sits on the board of directors at Beverly Hills-based Hilton, which would manage the casino’s hotel and gaming operations.

“We’ve got an excellent team that can make this happen if the [financial] numbers look right,” Johnson said from his company’s headquarters in Washington. He said the companies will study the feasibility of the project for about six months before making a final decision.

Johnson said African Americans are underrepresented among Las Vegas visitors compared with their numbers in the general population. Although about 15% of the U.S. population is black, only an estimated 7% of the approximately 30 million people who visit Las Vegas annually are.

Las Vegas “is not within driving distance of [many] major black urban markets, and it’s just not been a place where black [conventions and conferences] have taken place,” Johnson said. The proposed BET SoundStage Casino would “make Las Vegas one of the top cities that blacks” visit, he said.

“We intend to work together to offer a top-notch gaming facility in Las Vegas designed to meet the needs of this target market,” said Stephen F. Bollenbach, Hilton Hotels president and chief executive.

The venture would continue efforts by Las Vegas gambling operators to target their marketing to specific groups to boost business. After long courting high rollers by offering generous lines of credit and free hotel rooms, casinos in recent years have started to woo other segments of the population--such as middle-class Asians and Asian Americans--with tailor-made marketing campaigns and more popular table games.

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The operators have also taken note of the success of the $90-million Las Vegas Hard Rock Cafe Casino, which has attracted a young, affluent clientele since it opened in early 1995.

“The name of the game in the casino business is marketing,” said gambling industry observer Marvin B. Roffman of Roffman Miller Associates, a Philadelphia-based money management firm.

However, when it comes to African Americans, Las Vegas casinos have had a checkered past. Shortly after Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel opened the Flamingo Hotel on the then-fledgling Strip in 1948, he told black singer Lena Horne not to leave her suite between performances at the new casino, according to Roosevelt Fitzgerald, chairman of the ethnic studies department at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, in a 1992 interview with The Times.

At least two Vegas casinos catered to an almost exclusively African American clientele that was denied access to whites-only casinos. And the now-shuttered Moulin Rouge hotel near the predominately African American Westside of Las Vegas housed the many black entertainers who performed on the Strip.

“They could entertain on the Strip but they could not stay on the Strip,” said William Thompson, a professor of public administration at UNLV.

Casinos dropped their ban on African American customers in 1960 after the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People threatened to protest on the Strip. Nine years later, the casinos pledged to boost their black hiring after riots broke out in the city.

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