A tale of friendship and fabulous deals

By Jon Ralston (contact)

Friday, March 28, 2008 | 2:01 a.m.

When I sat down a couple of days ago to read “Double or Nothing,” Tom Breitling’s memoir of how he and pal Tim Poster made two hundred-million-dollar deals, I didn’t expect much.

Indeed, what I expected was a “two whiz kids start a travel company, make a lot of money, buy the Golden Nugget, sell it for a lot of money and then live happily ever after” story. You’ve heard one whiz-kid-makes-good story, you’ve heard ’em all, I figured.

I figured wrong.

The book, written with Esquire writer Carl Fussman, is a delightful and insightful travelogue, tracing an odd couple’s journey from a frozen lake in Minnesota to Glitter Gulch. Along the way, Breitling presents a tale of a remarkable friendship interwoven with indelible portraits of various players here and elsewhere and set against a backdrop of the Internet age in business and the corporate era in gaming.

Breitling’s self-effacing style he calls himself “the bumpkin from Barnsville,” dedicates the book to Poster and credits his partner with being the visionary of the pair is nonetheless illuminating as he talks about many familiar names in the Las Vegas firmament. Many locals will nod as he gives evidence of Elaine Wynn’s gracious eloquence leavened by an unfailing bluntness, of Jack Binion’s no-nonsense common sense about business and of Lorenzo Fertitta’s quiet, generous loyalty to his friends.

But the book is more than a series of memorable characters who bridge the old Las Vegas with the new or a story about how the Vegas hustler (Poster) partnered with the Minnesota square (Breitling) to meld those two worlds. It also provides details of gigantic transactions that make you a fly on the wall of boardrooms with legends such as Barry Diller, illuminates just how intrusive Gaming Control Board investigations are and intimates that if Tilman Fertitta were not so determined to compete with his cousins in their back yard, Breitling and Poster might still own the Golden Nugget.

One of the many telling details Breitling provides is that Poster’s cell phone had the theme from “The Sting” as its ring tone. That made me wonder less who was Redford and who was Newman and more about whether Breitling’s partner had the wrong George Roy Hill movie.

These guys seem right out of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” You can almost hear Breitling turning to Poster, after he had come up with an idea, and saying with a smile, “You just keep thinking, Tim. That’s what you’re good at.”

Or as Breitling nicely distills it in the book: “He (Poster) had vision, and I had the ability to open doors, bring people and information inside, and help make his ideas a reality.”

The partnership began shortly after college when Poster, sensing Breitling would be a great partner, insisted on a trip to the Land of 10,000 Lakes and offered the Minnesotan $25,000 to work with him in his fledgling travel reservation business. That eventually morphed into Travelscape as Breitling saw the potential for the Internet to revolutionize reservations, which they sold to Expedia in 2000, their first $100 million deal, which gave them the cash to buy the Golden Nugget.

Breitling recalls what happened when lawyers in the Expedia transaction asked for the document showing the 50-50 split between the two. “We had nothing to hand them,” Breitling recalls. “We’d never written one up ... It was impossible for them to believe that all we had, that all we needed, was a handshake on a frozen lake.”

Both men, the book makes clear, long for the old days when a handshake was enough, when casinos were less impersonal. “It drove (Poster) crazy to see blue-haired ladies sticking their cards in the slot machines, trying to get enough points for a free buffet,” Breitling writes.

Their lives, though, were intertwined with the family that has made a rather large fortune from those blue-hairs. Starting with Breitling’s college friendship with Lorenzo Fertitta and continuing with the sage wisdom imparted by Frank Fertitta III and Frank Jr., the Fertittas loaned the pair money and gave them guidance. The Las Vegas side of the clan almost bought the Golden Nugget from them in fact the deal was done until cousin and Landry’s boss Tilman Fertitta offered to pay so much for the downtown casino ($325 million) that Lorenzo and Frank III released them from the bargain.

“Double or Nothing” is a story of friendship, of loyalty, of success. But it’s also an unfinished story, and something tells me the next chapter will find Butch and Sundance with a new venture, maybe on the Strip.

And no one in the sequel will ask: Who are those guys?