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In the bid for Aztar, Columbia Sussex Corp.
owner Bill Yung was willing to go All In By Alex Coolidge and Maureen Hayden Photo by Meggan Booker, Cincinnati Enquirer   Just weeks after Columbia Sussex Corp. knocked off Pinnacle Entertainment, Inc., in a $2.75 billion bidding war for the parent company of Evansville’s Casino Aztar, a reporter called the Cincinnati suburban headquarters of the hotel and gaming company to request an interview with Columbia founder and head William J. "Bill" Yung III. Expecting to be patched through to the public relations staff for the kind of care and handling common in the corporate world, the caller got a surprise: Yung’s secretary picked up the phone instead. "We don’t have any media people," she said. "When reporters call, he talks to them himself." If he’s got time, that is. Yung, a 65-year-old former time-study engineer who brags that he has "no ego" compared to his industry peers, is in the process of transforming the hotel-management business he launched in 1972 – with a 60-room motel in Ohio – into the largest privately held gaming company in the world. Yung doesn’t mind being known as a man of few words and little patience for reporters. Jon Newberry, a longtime Cincinnati-area business reporter who’s covered Yung’s rise, says he appears to be "the antithesis of the kind of pushy self-promoter you’d expect in the luxury hotel and casino business." During the two-month high-stakes struggle for control of Aztar’s lucrative properties, Yung turned away media requests for interviews and was tight-lipped even when Wall Street analysts blanched at his $54-a-share bid, which bought him four casinos, including Aztar’s much-coveted Tropicana hotel and casino in Las Vegas. Yung is known as a man who plays his cards close to the chest, but he can barely contain his glee at besting one of his fiercest rivals, Pinnacle Chief Executive Daniel Lee, by submitting a bid that was more than $100 million over Pinnacle’s offer for Aztar. Yung – a father of seven children, all of whom either work for him or are married to spouses who do – credits Columbia’s privately held status for winning the bidding war over the publicly owned Pinnacle. "Pinnacle’s got a quarterly report to put out, and we don’t," quips Yung, who revels in the reality that he isn’t beholden to the same Wall Street pressures as his rival. "Daniel Lee’s got a harder job than me." Some financial analysts would disagree. Just days after Aztar announced Columbia’s winning bid, gaming industry experts were telling reporters that Yung paid too much to acquire Aztar Corp., and they questioned his ability to get a return on his massive investment. Yung, in a characteristic move, shot back. He told the Cincinnati Business Courier that he’d felt lucky to get such a deal and had been prepared to pay even more. "My breaking point was higher than theirs," Yung told the magazine. "They knew I could outbid ‘em." Yung says his lenders are "very" confident about the Aztar acquisition and predicts Columbia will have no trouble servicing its debt. He’ll do that, he says, by operating its casinos, including Casino Aztar in Evansville, more efficiently, and by expanding the Tropicana complex in Las Vegas and extending theuse of the Tropicana brand to other casinos Columbia already owns. Yung says his only interest in life is "making money." He’ll make it off the Aztar deal, he says, by squeezing operating efficiencies out of Aztar’s existing properties, a technique he says he’s honed as one of the hotel and gaming industry’s leanest operators, and a technique he learned while improving factory efficiencies at the Andrew Jergens soap plant in Cincinnati, where he was employed as an industrial engineer before he broke into the hospitality business in the 1980s. "Our company is very motivated by the bottom line," Yung says. What that means for Casino Aztar in Evansville remains unclear. Yung declines to say much about the Evansville property or his plans for it. Earlier this summer, he told a Las Vegas business magazine that he might expand the Evansville casino because it’s in what he called a "monopoly market." Casino Aztar is already in the midst of expansion, with a new 100-room boutique hotel slated to open by the year’s end. But the Evansville casino also generates the least gambling revenue and admissions of the five Indiana casinos on the Ohio River, according to Indiana Gaming Commission revenue records. And it’s about to face some new competition in the area when the French Lick Resort Casino in Orange County, Ind., opens later this year. In early June, Yung met with Casino Aztar President and General Manager Jim Brown, who’s been widely credited by Evansville officials and state gaming regulators for creating Casino Aztar’s good corporate-neighbor image and winning over the deeply entrenched skeptics who’d first opposed gaming in Evansville. In the past, Brown has made it clear that he loves Evansville and hopes to raise his family here. But Yung declines to say whether Brown will stay with the organization once the acquisition closes. Yung does promise that he’ll be anything but an "absentee owner." He describes the Columbia’s management style as actively engaged, adding he himself mostly deals with regional vice presidents but occasionally checks in on local managers. "All our managers are very hands-on – we’re not like investors," Yung says. "I have no ego, but I have no patience either – I’m very focused." That doesn’t always go over well. Last year, after Columbia took over the Sheraton Baton Rouge Convention Center Hotel and Argosy Casino in Louisiana, there was what the local newspaper described as "a mass exodus" of executive-level employees. The departing executives said they were disgruntled over Columbia’s cost-cutting ways...
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