LV casino sues defecting host

Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2000 | 10:53 a.m.

The Hard Rock hotel-casino in Las Vegas sued to stop a former casino host from breaching a non-disclosure employment agreement.

In a Clark County District Court lawsuit, the hotel-casino said it fired Debra Oddo on Oct. 18, 2000, after it discovered she had, without authorization, allegedly e-mailed its confidential information from her office computer to her personal computer on Oct. 16, and that she had interviewed with a competitor, New York-New York hotel-casino, for a casino host job.

The information includes Hard Rock clients' names, playing patterns, various memos, budget information from its slot and marketing departments and several spreadsheets analyzing past promotions.

The suit said Tim Williams, Hard Rock's information systems director, became suspicious when he discovered an e-mail message from a Hard Rock e-mail address was rejected by the receiving e-mail system because the message was too large.

Williams, the suit said, rarely encountered situations where Hard Rock employees transferred e-mail messages that are too large for its server to process. He opened the rejected e-mail and found Oddo allegedly had successfully sent three e-mail messages containing one or more file attachments to her personal e-mail address.

The defendant could not be reached for comment on the allegations.