Dennis Gomes, Resorts Casino co-owner, dies at 68

Dennis Gomes, co-owner of Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City and a former gaming commission investigator in Las Vegas, died overnight Feb. 23 at a hospital in Philadelphia. He was 68.

A casino spokeswoman confirmed the death but said the cause was undetermined. A hospital spokeswoman would not disclose details.

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(Wayne Parry/AP) - Dennis Gomes, co-owner of Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City and a former gaming commission investigator in Las Vegas, died overnight Feb. 23 at a hospital in Philadelphia. He was 68.

Mr. Gomes, a certified public accountant, became Nevada’s top casino corruption investigator in the 1970s. He later went to work for the casinos, he told the New York Times in 1995, “because I knew the business from the inside out, and, believe it or not, I liked a lot of the people who were in it.”

Mr. Gomes and New York real estate magnate Morris Bailey bought Resorts in August 2010 and saved the struggling casino from shutting down.

Mr. Gomes had a long career in the casino industry, with management jobs at the Tropicana Casino and Resort (where he famously turned a tic-tac-toe-playing chicken into a top draw), Trump Taj Mahal Casino and Resort, the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas and Hilton Nevada’s properties.

Mr. Gomes was famous for bizarre schemes to attract free publicity for his casinos. While running Atlantic City’s Tropicana, he pitted a live chicken against customers in games of tic-tac-toe.

To promote a casino in Indiana, he hired a President Obama look-and-sound-alike to urge gamblers to bring their “change” to the gambling hall. That earned him a rebuke from the White House and oodles of attention.

It was no different at Resorts. Mr. Gomes erected a billboard showing a dancer’s naked rear end to promote a stage show, leading to a court battle with New Jersey’s transit agency, which owned the billboard location. He staged an adults-only big-top show called “The Naked Circus” and opened the first gay nightclub in an Atlantic City casino.

After “Boardwalk Empire,” the HBO series based on Prohibition-era Atlantic City’s political and vice rackets, grew in popularity, Mr. Gomes re-branded Resorts — whose hotel is an authentic 1920s edifice — to cash in on interest in the show and Atlantic City’s past. A key part of the new image was a skimpy flapper costume that female beverage servers were made to wear.

Servers had to audition and be photographed in the outfits; those deemed insufficiently sexy were fired. That decision, along with pay cuts, spurred three pending lawsuits, one of which is being pushed by lawyer Gloria Allred, alleging age and sex discrimination.

Mr. Gomes worked tirelessly to turn Resorts around. He and Bailey bought the casino for $31.5 million, a fraction of the $140 million former owners Colony Capital paid for it in 2001. Colony walked away from the casino in 2009 after losing money for years and failing to find a buyer.

In an interview in December, Mr. Gomes told the Associated Press that Resorts was still losing money, although its cash-paying businesses — food and beverage sales, and hotel rooms — was up 40 percent over a year ago. For all of 2010, Resorts lost $18.5 million.

Mr. Gomes was born in San Jose, Calif., and attended high school in Las Vegas. He was an accounting graduate of the University of Nevada. He worked early on at the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand.

— From wire and staff reports