December 26-2014
Sam Nazarian made his name in nightclubs in Los Angeles and now wants to move into the gambling industry in Las Vegas.
But he developed a bad name with the authorities in Nevada and three of the four members of the Nevada Gaming Commission said they would not issue him a gambling license.
Last Thursday, Nazarian appeared before the commission and wowed them with his presentation, which basically amounted to apologizing for anything and everything and promising to conduct himself better.
It worked.
The Gaming Commission voted 4-0 to license him. But it was caveated. The commission approved a one-year limited license with a slew of conditions, including that he not have any involvement in the casino’s operations. The conditions also include testing his hair and urine for drug use every three months.
Nazarian owns 10 percent of the SLS Las Vegas Hotel & Casino, which is the new name given to what was once famed as the Sahara, one of the original casinos that made Las Vegas after World War II.
Seated before the commission, Nazarian apologized for past dealings with Derrick Armstrong, a convicted felon from Los Angeles who allegedly extorted $3 million from Nazarian by threatening his family and his company’s employees.
As reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nazarian apologized for not being truthful about past use of illegal drugs. Nazarian said he is working with a specialist to determine if he has a drug and alcohol problem.
And Nazarian apologized to his family and longtime friends for the public airing of his personal failings. “My parents are disappointed, but they are very supportive,” Nazarian said of his family, which fled Iran in the 1980s.
“It’s not been easy looking into the mirror,” Nazarian told the Gaming Commission, saying that he was speaking from the heart and soul. “I apologize to the gaming agents for not being candid. I also apologize to the board members.”
Nazarian, 39, is CEO of the Los Angeles-based nightclub and restaurant operator SBE Entertainment. SBE stands for Style, Luxury, Service. He is noted in Los Angeles for driving a $1.9 million Bugatti, a vehicle most people keep locked up most of the time.
“All I ask for is a chance to regain your trust,” Nazarian told the Nevada commission. “You have my commitment, and I apologize for the mistakes I made,” he said—again.
Nazarian admitted past use of cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana, and said he is undergoing treatment with a specialist.
Nazarian has been named one of the 100 most powerful people in Southern California by Los Angeles Times Magazine, one of “the influentials” by Los Angeles Magazine.
He’s a husky 6-foot-4. He also comes from one of the most prominent Persian Jewish families in the world — his father, Younes Nazarian, is a co-founder of Qualcomm, making Sam one of the heirs to a fortune estimated at as much as $2 billion.
Nazarian owns hotels scattered around the US. What made him famous, however, were his opulent Los Angeles nightclubs. Over the years he’s been constantly opening, closing and reinventing a steady stream of nightspots that have a habit of becoming the place to be seen.
Nazarian was born in 1975 in Tehran, the youngest of four siblings. With the eruption of the revolution in Iran, his family moved briefly to Israel, and then to Los Angeles when Sam was three. His father, Younes, had grown up poor in Tehran, worked in Israel in the 1950s, and then returned to Iran, where he and his brother, Parviz, made a fortune importing construction equipment.
In Los Angeles, the Jewish Journal reported, the Nazarian brothers used money from their savings accounts in Israel to buy Standard Tool & Die. But their big break came when they invested in a communications company called Omninet, which later merged with the technology outfit Qualcomm. When Qualcomm went public in 1991, the Nazarian brothers, Qualcomm’s fifth and sixth largest shareholders, became billionaires.
Sam starting working when he was 12. Instead of summer camp, he worked the floor at his father’s factory, and throughout his youth held a variety of summer jobs: cleaning toilets at a deli, selling tickets to Ripley’s on Hollywood Boulevard and selling antiques at his maternal uncle’s Manhattan store.
Nazarian told the Jewish Journal these experiences were so formative that in his mind he didn’t grow up pampered, he grew up working class.
Yet, the rest of the year he went to Beverly Hills High School, where he made a name for himself as a sports bookie and a jock. Deals, more than academics, were his calling. He bounced from New York University to the University of Denver and the University of Southern California, before dropping out.
His first venture out of college was to start a cellphone company with $25,000; two years later he sold his stake for just under $1 million. He was 22 when he joined his father and brother in the family investment house, where he worked on the real estate holdings. He began investing in mixed-use and multifamily housing, then hotels. He also got into the habit of flipping high-end residential real estate; he bought Jennifer Lopez’s mansion, including her furniture, for $11.5 million, got it into Architectural Digest, and then sold it 18 months later to Gwen Stefani for $13 million.
It was around that time that he bought his first two nightclubs.
His mother, Soraya, is a sculptor who studied art at the University of Judaism and in Italy. She is the family matriarch. And being Persian means a lot to her youngest son, though he doesn’t like everything about it.
“I think there’s a lot in the Persian culture that’s gorgeous and rich in tradition, but there’s a lot of negativity in the culture,” he told the Jewish Journal five years ago. Then he lists: “Superficiality, insincerity, doing things because you have to and not because you want to — like having a wedding for 2,000 people because you want to show everybody how important you are.”
A few years ago, Nazarian was the speaker at a conference organized by the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA). Nazarian spoke to the Persian parents in the room, urging them to “Let children dream,” and not to pressure them into pursuing livelihoods that would make them rich instead of happy.
But as much as he loathes that wealth is the Persian com-munity’s barometer of success, he is, after all, the standard-bearer.