CasiNotes: Dennis Gomes relishes challenge of running Resorts

IT'S LOGICAL to think Dennis Gomes and his partner, Morris Bailey, might have a brighter financial future investing in a uranium mine in Asbury Park or some similar harebrained scheme than by acquiring Resorts Atlantic City, among the casinos hardest hit by the double whammy of legal gambling in Pennsylvania and a sour economy.

News reports of the duo's impending purchase of Resorts have overwhelmingly contained positive feedback. Gaming industry analyst Michael Pollock told the Press of Atlantic City, "If anyone can [bring Resorts to profitability], Dennis Gomes can."

This makes sense, because no one of any standing in Atlantic City wants to publicly put on anything but a happy face, given the town's financial struggles. Privately however, there is some whispering among AyCee insiders that Gomes is on a mission that is at best "quixotic."

But Gomes, 65, who happily acknowledges the "doom-and-gloom sayers," would beg to differ. After all, he's been here before.

"When Donald Trump was trying to get me to go to the Taj Mahal [in the early 1990s], all of Wall Street was saying, 'Don't go, it's a white elephant, it can't [be saved],' " he recalled during a Wednesday afternoon chat in his Atlantic Avenue office a block or so from Resorts. "But I looked at it and saw something different. And we went from $84 million in operating profit to $148 million in 3 1/2 years."

As a matter of fact, he continued, it's exactly because his purchase of Resorts seems so irrational that he's convinced he will succeed. "Whenever I have an idea that everyone tells me is crazy, then I know I'm right," he said with a smile.

Crazy idea or not, Gomes has rolled the dice.

He and Bailey - an Atlantic City-born, New York-based real estate developer - recently purchased AyCee's oldest legal casino for a reported $35 million, by far the lowest price ever paid for a New Jersey gambling den.

Now Gomes is moving forward to transform Resorts, the bulk of which is housed in a building that was the cat's meow when Prohibition-era crime czar Enoch Lewis "Nucky" Johnson ruled the roost, into one of the town's hottest properties. That job, he said, will start with something more intangible than concrete.

Sure, he is planning some physical renovations and additions to Atlantic City's first legal casino. But, he promised, Job One for him and his team (which includes his 29-year-old son, Aaron) will be to juice the vibe inside the hotel-casino complex on the Boardwalk at North Carolina Avenue.