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Vol. 5, No. 5, May 2008

Cover Story

30 Years
of Gaming

Features

AC,
BC (Before Casinos)

Casino
Control: Setting the Bar

30
Years of Champs & Chumps

From
'Big-Box' to International Appeal

Departments

Features

The
Tides

Global
Gaming Roundup

AC
History

Employee
Profile

Entertainment

Hot Eats
- Chef's Corner

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Mixology

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Where
Are They Now?

Q &
A

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Ground
Breakng

Columns

Early Out

Turning
Thirty

CANJ

Let
Horse Industry Run Its Own Race

Outlook

Acknowledging
the ‘Faces of Atlantic City’

Boardwalk Beat

A Boon
for the Boards

City View

Revving
Up for Summer

City Beat

Meet the
Candidates

Public Forum

Doing
More with Less

Issues

Vol. 6, No. 3,
March 2009

Vol. 6, No. 2,
February 2009

Vol. 6, No. 1,
January 2009

Vol. 5, No. 12,
December 2008

Vol. 5, No. 11,
November 2008

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Podcast

Back Home Again

Casino exec Howard Dreitzer thought he’d settled down in
Australia. Then an old Trump crony called—with an offer he couldn’t
refuse.

by Dave
Bontempo

Howard
Dreitzer has never been afraid of the Big Dice Roll. The Florida native has made
a career of timely moves. The first led him to Las Vegas in the 1970s. The
second brought him to the Sands, the Golden Nugget, Trump Plaza and Showboat in
Atlantic City from 1980 to 1993. Then came New Orleans and Australia, where he
worked for Harrah’s. Now an Atlantic City connection has brought him back to the
States.

“I was calling Jim Allen to refer a friend to him,” Dreitzer says of his
colleague and former Trump boss who runs the Seminole gaming operation in
Florida. “He asked me to fly in for a talk.”

Allen made him the senior vice president of table games, responsible for
supplying the newest dimension of tribal gaming to several properties. When the
house Down Under is sold, Dreitzer’s wife Alana will rejoin him.

“We have dual citizenship; we’ve made a lot of friends back in Australia and
so this isn’t what you would normally consider an easy decision to make,”
Dreitzer says. “But the project is exciting. I grew up in Florida, which makes
it another plus. To me, this is the same feeling that existed in the early days
of Atlantic City.”

Dreitzer had moved to Las Vegas and broke in as a dealer before Atlantic City
expanded the gaming pie. He leaped into gaming’s second jurisdiction, aware of
the value placed on Nevada experience.

“In the early days, Atlantic City recruited both from Vegas and northern
Nevada,” Dreitzer says. “The Vegas group was more into the game protection and
customer relationships. The northern Nevada people brought more accounting and
analysis. Atlantic City melded them together in the best way.

“AC was nonstop. I never saw crap games like the ones we had at the Golden
Nugget. You take that place on a Saturday night, Sinatra’s in, you’re seeing
$10,000 limits and triple odds—there was nothing like it. It was a legendary
thing. You had to respect Steve Wynn for his talent and the enormous courage of
his convictions. If he saw something he wanted to change—boom—he would move a
wall or knock something down. He was passionate about his customers. There was
quite a frenzy at the Nugget for three to five years.”

Dreitzer climbed the ladder. He worked as pit boss, dual-rate supervisor,
assistant shift manager, assistant casino manager, VP of casino operations and
finally, vice president and chief operations officer at Showboat. He learned
several sides of the business, including one that puzzled him.

“I never quite understood why the properties got so wrapped up in the
marketing wars,” he says. “You’ve got 50 million people living within 300 miles
and yet everybody thought they had to discount to steal the customer. The Taj
Mahal made a big statement about that. Here is this big, beautiful property and
it still struggled.

“In Atlantic City, they should take that money (for comps) and reinvest into
properties. I think they will do that more, but right now the markets are
tight.” Atlantic City provided more than a foundation for Dreitzer’s future
success. It made him more practical.

“At Showboat, the previous management team had left en masse,” he says. “The
new president had a financial background and he looked at the business more
objectively, whereas I was more emotional, especially about the table games. But
slots were taking over. I learned a whole different side of the business. You
look at your product like you’re in a supermarket. If something isn’t working,
you take it off the shelves.”

Dreitzer left Atlantic City when New Orleans got into gaming. That didn’t pan
out. The next opportunity was with Harrah’s.

“When I told my wife the job was in Australia, she got real quiet,” he says.
“But we knew we wanted to go somewhere quite far away from New Orleans. We
figured to do it for a year or two and then come back. Well, it led to a lot
more than two.”

And it took another adventure to bring him back.

Dave Bontempo is an award-winning sports writer and broadcaster who
calls boxing matches all over the world. He has covered the Philadelphia Flyers
in the playoffs, as well as numerous PGA, LPGA and Seniors Golf Tour events, and
co-hosted the Casino Connection television program with Publisher Roger Gros.

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Copyright © 2009
Casino Connection Atlantic City - The
Official Magazine of Atlantic City Casino Executives and Casino
Employees.

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