Viva Biloxi! Casino entrepreneurs `reno'vate Gulf Coast area

BILOXI, Miss. -- Here in the South's Monte Carlo among the magnolias, casino companies are transforming the Mississippi coast from a strip of decaying motels and dilapidated mansions into the nation's hottest new gambling hub.

Industry executives come to check out their rivals' projects, bump into each other and then waste no time in augmenting their already ambitious plans. Four 1,000-room hotels are now being built, and a fifth is planned. Mirage Resorts, vowing to outdo all comers, announced a $200 million, 1,000-room hotel and casino last fall, raised the stakes in April to $325 million and 1,200 rooms and then upped them again in May to $475 million and 1,800 rooms -- more than any hotel in Atlantic City can boast.

Mirage says the extravagance that succeeded in Las Vegas can triumph again in Biloxi.

"We have never gone into a market and not overbuilt," boasted Barry Shier, chief executive of the company's Golden Nugget division. In a golf shirt and gold watch, he leaned over a model of his Biloxi project -- named Beau Rivage, or beautiful shore -- set up in a room at a rival Grand Casino hotel here that is also expanding.

"Here are the live oaks," he said, pointing. "And we'll have magnolias, dogwoods and azaleas. Formal gardens and fountains."

And that's just the landscaping indoors.

All this and much more is coming to the steamy coastline of a city with no scheduled jet service and whose sleepy downtown still relies mostly on stop signs and blinking red lights to control traffic.

As a backlash slows the spread of legalized gambling, the casino industry is throwing most of its resources into states that welcome it. And Mississippi, desperate and poor, sees the business as its economic savior. It has enacted some of the most liberal gambling laws, with unlimited licenses for dockside casinos, this side of Reno.

The casino industry is also drawn by the state's beaches and year- round golfing and fishing.

"There are only three viable gaming markets," said Sarah Ralston, a spokeswoman for Circus Circus Enterprises, a pioneer in turning casino hotels into family resorts. "Las Vegas, of course. Atlantic City, of course. And now, the Gulf Coast of Mississippi."

The casino companies hail the Mississippi gambling boom -- extending upstate to Tunica County, an easy drive from Memphis -- as a testament to free markets. Politicians here, they say, have avoided the quarrels and meddling that slowed Atlantic City's growth and helped kill plans for the world's largest casino in New Orleans.

Like free markets everywhere, Mississippi's has winners and losers. After casino licenses were first awarded in 1992, major companies like Mirage stood by as smaller, often local operators made their mistakes. But now they are rushing in.

Copyright 1996
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