Transcript of interview with Michael J. Signorelli by Claytee D. White, Stefani Evans, August 4, 2016

i AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL J. SIGNORELLI An Oral History Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2016 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Editor: Stefani Evans and Vishe Y. Redmond Transcribers: Kristin Hicks, Frances Smith Interviewers: Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White Project Manager: Stefani Evans iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of the UNLV University Libraries. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank the university for the support given that allowed an idea and the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader’s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University Nevada, Las Vegas iv v PREFACE Michael Signorelli, long-time Las Vegas resident and builder of many local homes, apartments and hotels, describes his upbringing, career, and stellar reputation as part of the “Building Las Vegas” oral history project. Raised in Rhode Island, the only child of an Italian-American father and a Southern Baptist mother, Michael’s early life was influenced by his father’s disability as a World War Two veteran and his non-English speaking paternal grandparents, who owned and ran a grocery store. Talking of his experiences in helping them run the grocery store he says, "I became a businessman at the age of twelve." His military service during the Vietnam War landed him at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas. Once here, Michael furthered his education at UNLV, obtaining both his MEd and PhD degrees. In Las Vegas Michael began his work in the housing arena working for Sun Home Builders and his non-profit work, helping to raise funds for the newly formed Rape Crisis Center. Signorelli went on to work for Howard Hughes's Summa Corporation, where he successfully fought against a discrimination lawsuit brought by twenty-one female dealers. In 1978 Michael started his own company, Nicro Corporation, and began building homes in the Las Vegas valley with land he acquired on a hand-shake and a verbal contract. He vi continued his non-profit work, which included coordinating Lady Bird Johnson’s Green Thumb project for Nevada and the Pacific Northwest. In the 1980s Signorelli was recruited by the Fitzgerald Group, where he was involved in non-gaming operations for their many hotels, cattle ranch, and an in vitro clinic. In this interview, Signorelli describes his non-Las Vegas building projects in Mesquite and Laughlin. He built the Mesquite Star hotel and casino by overcoming multiple hurdles around water access and money. Despite twice obtaining a loan for one hundred million dollars, he was never able to successfully complete the Laughlin hotel and casino, due to legal issues from his partner’s family trust. Signorelli also shares his idea for a unique hotel and casino called the Nev Star that involved his successful negotiation of a waiver to Senate Bill 208. Signorelli concludes his interview by talking about his ownership of the world-famous Golden Steer Steak House restaurant, which opened in 1958. Under Signorelli’s ownership the Golden Steer has been featured in national publications and claims many legendary fans such as NACAR driver Mario Andretti, who in 2016 celebrated his seventy-six birthday at the Golden Steer. Signorelli’s love of Las Vegas and its many positive traits come forth as he talks about his daughter and her achievements and suggests Vegas promoters should do a better job about what great schools, medical care, and government we have in Las Vegas. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Michael J. Signorelli August 4, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Claytee D. White and Stefani Evans Preface………………………………………………………………………………….………..iv Childhood in Alexandria, Louisiana; grandparents grocery store; University of Rhode Island; Nellis Air Force; William Carlson; graduate school at UNLV; Carolyn Goodman; John McCarthy; Ron Lamb; Seymour Brown; working with the Department of Housing and Urban Development………………………………………………………………….………………1–10 Sun Home Builders 1971–1975; Rape Crisis Center; Hughes Corporation; Doctoral degree UNLV; women’s blackjack dealer lawsuit; building business; constructing roads and bridges in Nigeria 1980–81; Fitzgeralds Las Vegas…………..……………………………….….……11–20 Building casinos in Mesquite early 1990s; partnering with Richard Tam and Dr. Richard Kelly; Golden Steer Steak House; NevStar IPO ………………………..………….…..….…….…21–30 Beating Senate Bill 208 in Nevada; taking over the Golden Steer; second Special Purpose Acquisition Corporation IPO; daughter’s accomplishments; exotic cars…………..………..30–38 1 S: Today is Thursday, August 4, 2016. Stefani Evans and Claytee White are with Michael Signorelli. How are you today? I am doing fine today, thank you. S: Excellent. Can you please state your first and last name and spell them both please. My name is Michael J. Signorelli. M – I – C- H – A- E – L. J is my middle initial, for Joseph. My last name is Signorelli S – I – G – N – O – R – E – L – L - I. S: Thank you. We would like to start by asking you to tell us just about your early life, where you were born, where you were raised, siblings, what your parents did, that kind of thing. My pleasure. I was born on October 7, 1945 in Alexandria, Louisiana and brought into this world by a midwife. My parents were driving through the state of Louisiana on the way to Wakefield, Rhode Island, which we arrived at about seven days later, where I was raised most of my adult life until I entered college in 1963 at the University of Rhode Island. S: Did you have siblings? I had no siblings. I am an only child. My father was a Roman Catholic Italian and my mother was a Southern Baptist Scottish and English lady raised outside of Memphis, Tennessee, in a little town. My father was a World War Two highly decorated United States Army soldier medic, who served in the South Pacific in the front lines. He left the war as a one hundred percent disabled veteran and my mother and he met at the VA [Veterans Administration] hospital in Memphis, Tennessee where she was a candy striper. They married and moved to Rhode Island and she became a housewife and ever since she lived on a pension from the government. For most of their lives they lived with my father's parents who came over from Italy who owned the grocery store. We lived above that grocery store in that small town. 2 I went to Catholic school the first eight years of my life, private Catholic school, and the last four years I went to a public school, and then was admitted, as one of the youngest students in history, into the University of Rhode Island in the state of Rhode Island as a freshman. In the Rhode Island system we had community college, four year college system, and university system. It was unusual for someone my age to be in the university system with graduate students and their graduate programs, but I did. I spent five years there instead of four years because I had to leave for a year to take care of my father. While I am was there I made the national basketball team for the university and I also was on the national cross country team for the university. I was on their debate team in college and I was in their ROTC [Reserve Officers Training Corps] program for Army infantry for officers’ training school. I graduated on the dean's list in 1968 from that university. I then proceeded during the Vietnam era to teach. Instead of going to Vietnam I was allowed to teach one year of math at a private school in Warwick, RI, which was a Catholic school, which gave me a deferment for a year and then I decided after a year that I needed to be in the military so I actually volunteered and instead of going into the Army I went into the Air Force in June or July of 1969 and was sent to San Antonio, TX to Lackland Air Force Base where the basic training occurred. I was then moved from base to base for a while and ended up in Las Vegas, Nevada, at Nellis Air Force Base in October 1969. That is how I really got to Las Vegas. Just before I left Rhode Island I was best man at the wedding of one of the richest men in the state of Rhode Island, the Sinclair family wedding. I was the best man for the wedding. That was in June 1969, about seven days before going into the military and the attendees and invited guests at the wedding were Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Secretary of the Navy John Chafee, who was 3 also the U.S. Secretary of the Navy, and people of that ilk. I was asked to be the best man for the groom by the bride. That is one of the events I attended before I left Rhode Island for the military. In the state I also spent a lot of time fishing as a young adult and playing basketball and achieved many basketball records and recreational leagues in the state of Rhode Island, which to this day have never been surpassed. C: Did you work in the grocery store? As a child I worked in the grocery store that my grandfather owned all the time and never got paid. I actually had to take time out of school, even in my elementary and junior high years of school because my grandparents were uneducated and my grandfather was ill often. I would actually take time off with permission from the schools and be a businessman at the age of twelve, operating a business and being responsible for my grandfather, grandmother, my mom and my father, as a child. I have essentially been working since age twelve or earlier, my whole life. C: Is that when you started to learn about food and cooking and all of that? I learned about cutting meats and things like that because we had a butcher shop in the grocery store. I was responsible for cutting meats and doing various kinds of activities within the store. In the grocery store/deli business I learned about money as well and how to make a profit. As H. L. Menken said in Chicago, 1957, "You never go broke making a profit." I knew I had to make a profit to feed the family. It exposed me to be very responsible at a very young age, I think. S: It's 1969 and you are in the Air Force and you are stationed at Nellis Air Force Base. Yes, and I was assigned with special orders that my father had arranged through a friend of his, who was a four star general that he knew in World War Two. Because of that, it just gave me a 4 little more flexibility. They asked me what assignment I wanted. They assigned me to a sort of semisecret squadron as an administrator for the fighter pilots who flew in Vietnam in very advanced airplanes known as the F-111. It was actually the 474th Tactical Fire Wing. I spent my time as an administrative person, not an officer at the time, because I refused to go to officer's school, although I was asked twice. I was trying to spend the least time as possible in the military. I found out that I wasn't suited to military life, but I had volunteered. I spent my time at Nellis doing what I had to do, making sure we were supporting the fighter pilots who served in Vietnam. During that period I also spent some time at UNLV taking some graduate classes, preparing myself for school after I left the military. I also spent quite a bit of time snow skiing, which I love to do, at Brian Head, Utah. I also became the liaison for a U.S. non-profit out of Washington, DC, called American Field Service (AFS). What they do is provide monies for students who are juniors in high school to spend a year overseas as transfer students. They lived with a family overseas where I assigned them and I selected which children of certain families in Las Vegas would be involved in this program. My word was final in Washington at that time so if I picked a family member to get full financial assistance to live with a family in Europe that was what I did. I accomplished this as I served at the military base. I also took care of my parents somewhat too because my father was disabled and lived here in town. So I was doing that at the same time in 1969 and 1970. Then I got an early out from the Air Force because of my father's medical condition so I didn't have to serve the four years. I got out after eighteen months. In 1971 I became a civilian. The military gave me something unusual. They gave me a letter which stated that I had served my four years and I didn't have to serve the additional two years of reserve commitment as well. Every male 5 individual has a six year commitment under the constitution to serve our country. They waived that and they also gave me VA rights, which gave me the money to go on and go to UNLV and then start my master’s degree when I left the service. Unfortunately, just as I started graduate school my father had a freak accident, fell into a swimming pool, drowned, and died at age 55, due to not drowning, but hitting his head before he fell into the pool so he was unconscious. I didn't know he was in the pool. I walked outside of my apartment and saw a body at the bottom of the pool, jumped in and saved him, pulled the body out and turned him around, and he died in my arms. That was the beginning of my survival training for living in Las Vegas because I was taking care of my mother and myself because we had very little financial resources. That was how I started my work and my social life and my educational life in Las Vegas and my exposure to Vegas other than my military time I had experienced the previous eighteen months. S: That was in 1971? Yes. In 1971 I applied for a fellowship at UNLV which allowed me to teach and also get a financial stipend, and I also had the GI bill to work with so then I did both at the same time. I was selected among many candidates so I was lucky to be chosen so I got to be an assistant to five different professors at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, one of which was William Carlson, which was the first dean of UNLV, which is equivalent to who is the president today. I had the privilege of working with him and a gentleman named Dr. Thomas Cassese, who went on to become a very important professor at the university. Also, Dr. Verdun Trione who had served in WWII, who had two PhDs out of Berkeley, became my supervisor. I met some fascinating people due to him. I think I mentioned Dr. Jack Vergiels, who was also at the university, who then went on to be in the state legislature and speaker of the house for the state 6 of Nevada. These men became a mentor to me. They would arrange for contracts for me to work with them. So whenever they received state money to go on trips to conduct studies they would help out by having me go with them on these trips. I ended up researching major studies in Nevada for the governor and state legislature and the university and wrote many studies with these folks who were very intelligent and very special people in our state and this city and major players at the university. At that time, when I was going to school, was when I met Dr. LeOre Cobbley, who was the principal at the elementary school across from the university. She was good friends with a woman named Carolyn Goodman, who then went on to start the Meadows School here in town, and is presently our mayor for Las Vegas. Carolyn Goodman and myself and John McCarthy, who at that time was a policeman who ran against Rob Lamb for sheriff, and Seymour Brown, who became a municipal judge in town all attended graduate school together at the same time at UNLV. Seymour Brown was not an attorney but wanted to run for judgeship and I helped finance his campaign and he won and he became a municipal judge. I helped finance a campaign for John McCarthy, who did defeat Rob Lamb and became sheriff. Carolyn Goodman went on with her life with Oscar, her prominent attorney husband, and their children and she started the Meadows School along with Dr. [LeOre] Cobbley. We all received our master’s degrees together and spent a significant amount of of social time together. That is how I attended the master’s program at UNLV. S: Is your master's degree in education? Right, but it was in research primarily. I did a lot of testing with the California Psychological Inventory test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, and many other testing instruments. I became one of the certified persons in Nevada at that time to administer tests. I did 7 the Stanford-Binet and the Wechsler, which were the only two oral administrated tests in those times for IQ testing in NV. The only way you could get certified was through a professor who was certified. You had to go to school for that. I don't know how it is today, but in the 1970s in order to do that you would have to be supervised and I was trained in both exams, so I was allowed, for example, to administer these tests and my records would be accepted in court as an expert witness. There are only two exams in the U.S. officially recognized as true IQ exams, for giving accurate IQs, because they were administered individually by a certified expert. They were administered one on one. Stanford-Binet was primarily for the lower level students and the other exam was primarily for older individuals high school age and older. I did this work up to 1973 and then I found my finances needed improvement. So I took a job that was offered by a major building firm in town that owned Section 236 housing in North Las Vegas, which is primarily occupied by minority families. Sun Home Builders were having trouble finding people to collect rents from their minority housing HUD projects. Nobody wanted the job. Being as I was very motivated since I needed money to live, I took the job because it was based on commission only and I went out and started knocking on doors and collecting rents. Most of the apartments were occupied, primarily by black families, I would say 98%. There were very few Mexicans and very few whites at the time. The collection rate at the time among the families was maybe 20% and I raised it to about 70% and got recognized for being able to do that with minority families. C: So where were these homes? These were apartments primarily, that were Section 236 housing [HUD subsidized housing]. One of the apartment complexes was 156 units and it was called Centennial Park Arms in North Las Vegas. I had a little bit of an edge with the families because I was very close to the minority 8 community in North Las Vegas, even though I was not black. Due to my friendships I had developed at the university, they paved the way for me and I became very, very close to the minority community in North Las Vegas which helped them and helped me at the end of the day. C: So who were some of your friends at UNLV that you developed within the African-American community? There were several people. One was a black professor, who since has passed. C: Was that Fitzgerald? No. There was another professor who went on to be quite successful, whose name is not as important as the fact he was very important after that in the community college system here in Nevada. I did get friendly with Judge Guy here in NV and he and I became involved with the Rape Crisis Center here in Nevada. We both played a large role in getting that started along with Sandy Petta and Florence McClure, both have since passed since setting up that program. These two ladies should take all the credit for what they did. We just tried to spearhead the raising of the funds and help them with setting up the board and also helping with the grant programs. It is a fine program that is now obviously elevated itself in this town to be one of the best non-profits, I think, in Nevada. C: Where did you and your mom live? What part of the city? My mother and I lived in the Northwest side of Las Vegas after my father passed, in an apartment. We did finally move to the Las Vegas Country Club, where a friend of mine arranged for an apartment there. We were in a one bedroom, one bath, and I slept on the couch, because we had no money at the time, until I got my feet on the ground. We lived there for a while, until the 1970s, and then my mother lived there for quite a few years and then she met a gentleman 9 and they got involved until he died and she eventually bought a condominium and she moved to Maryland Parkway until she passed away in 2007. I proceeded on in the 1970s of moving up in the world from collecting rent to become a vice president of the building firm Sun Home Builders. I ended up having two hundred fifty people working for me. This company built thousands of homes in Las Vegas. The founder was Bob Campbell, who just recently passed, a very prominent man in the state. He was chairman of the contractor's board and also chairman of the organization that oversees the police force in town. He was also on the national board of directors of the building association for the entire United States. His associate was Key Bandley, who was a Bishop in the Mormon Church here in town. Mr. Campbell was not Mormon. I mostly was head of operations and responsible for overseeing the apartment complexes we built and operated, the housing, sales department, and everything that went on in that company for the next four years. C: Where is this housing? The housing was primarily on the west side of town, off of Flamingo and Tropicana area, between Decatur and Jones. Some housing was in North Las Vegas, near Cheyenne Road. We were also discussed in Time magazine, I think it was early 1970s, during the time I was there. We were selected to build the largest, I don't know if it was a [Section] 236 at the time, but it was a HUD-operated apartment complex. In other words, HUD put the money up, and at that time it was the largest apartment complex ever built by HUD in the United States. It was called Sierra Nevada Arms. It was built off of Craig [Road] in North Las Vegas. It has since been torn down. It is a sad story because it was a great project. It had a huge pool, Olympic size, it had a childcare center, and it was a modular construction project. The people involved were General Electric Corporation (the General Electric of the United States, on the NY Stock Exchange), HUD, and 10 Sun Home Builders of Las Vegas. So it was a major project and it was a pilot project for the United States HUD because they wanted it to be a diversified project so that white and minorities could live there and there would be a reasonable amount of both ethnicity involved in that project. I, in turn, volunteered to live in the project. I found that to be a real challenge but I was able to achieve a ratio that no one else had achieved in the United States at that time between minorities and whites. What we did with the childcare center, which was tough to operate, I ended up donating the operation of it to the Community College of Southern Nevada. They operated it so it became very novel and successful. They were able to start their childcare program because of it. They didn't have to build a childcare center, it was already built. I went to the recreational center here in town and I had them operate the swimming pool. I put all that together and I worked with a black gentleman appointed to HUD by President [Richard] Nixon. At that time he became the highest appointed black official in history of the United States. C: Was he from Las Vegas? He was from Washington, DC. He was an apartment builder and he became the highest black official, Cabinet member, in the history of the United States. The second person after that, who became higher than him, was the mayor from Atlanta, Georgia, who became the ambassador to the United Nations. My friend was H. R. Crawford. That man was responsible for us getting the HUD project in Las Vegas. He knew Mr. Campbell. I became so friendly with him he decided to ask me to be his assistant in Washington in the Nixon administration. I was obviously very excited to have that opportunity, as I was only twenty-seven years old, but Mr. Campbell asked me to stay in Vegas, and my mother lived in town, so I turned it down. Mr. Crawford asked me three different times to come back and serve with him as his chief adviser in Washington, DC. He was one level below the chief of HUD, which is one level from the president of the United 11 States. I would have been two to three steps away from the president, at that time, in housing, but I turned down that position. S: Your time with Sun Home Builders was? 1971 - 1975. During that same time I was pursuing my master's degree at the university. I had finished most of my classwork but I was writing my thesis. I was still doing some classwork, primarily working on my thesis, because I took an M.S. [degree], and not an M. Ed. Because of that, the thesis was time consuming versus the classroom. I also did some adjunct professorship work at the university, non-paying for the university at the time. I represented the university in testing, which they felt I was very skilled in, so I did that as well. At the same time I was helping out with the Rape Crisis Center and other non-profits in town that I was highly involved with, I can't remember them all at this time. I was quite busy doing that and supporting my mother and going to school and working and primarily that was what I did up to 1975. In 1975 I realized I needed to get on with my life and applied for a job at the Hughes Corporation corporate offices to work for the Howard Hughes Summa Corporation, which is what they called it at the time. They had several hotels at the time, one in the Bahamas; they controlled eighty percent of all the satellites in the sky; the Hughes helicopter division; an airline division; and a lot of other companies. I asked to work at the corporate division in the computer division. They had large IBM computers. I was rejected numerous times. I kept applying politely for several months until one day I got a call and they asked me to lunch and I was surprised to receive an offer. I accepted. They asked me if I could come to work for them based on the fact that I sent them an article from Harvard Business Review, where someone had written a story of how a twelve-year-old boy stole major work from a major company, and that intrigued the 12 Hughes Corporation. So they in turn offered me a job with the understanding I could go to school and still work for them. I received my doctor's degree from UNLV at the time. So I started working for the Hughes Corporation and within a few months they realized they needed my services in an area other than computers, because they were sued by the government for discrimination against female blackjack dealers in downtown Las Vegas. The lawsuit evolved against all the hotels in Las Vegas. The irony of this whole thing is Hughes was a contractor for the federal government. We worked with different various agencies, I should say, within the federal government. We received at least a million dollars a day for work we did. That was a lot of money in those days. They assigned me the job of working with the attorneys to defend their lawsuit for discrimination. Because I knew the research portion of how to put together the briefs I had about a half dozen attorneys working for me and I was about thirty years old. They then changed my job description, gave me an office, a secretary, and a private plane. I now was going to school full time at UNLV but also became a consultant to the Hughes Corporation at the corporate level. C: Tell me more about that lawsuit. The lawsuit said that female blackjack dealers were not being allowed, after many years of dealing on Fremont Street, to move up to the Strip as dealers. Strip properties were where you got larger tokes. I don't know which division of the government was leading the suit. The justice department was leading the lawsuit but it was under another division. I really represented all the hotels in Nevada because they all got involved at that time. I got to meet all the players in town who owned the hotels because this was very disconcerting to everybody because it pertained to everyone in town. To make a long story short I worked with the attorneys furiously over the next couple of years to put together a response to the federal government showing that we had not 13 discriminated, no hotels in Nevada had. By using the research that I developed, I was able to research 55,000 files at the Hughes Corporation, and by use of a table of random numbers, which very few people were familiar with at the time. I said we would use a table of random numbers, which has ninety percent accuracy vs pulling every file, which saved years of work. Because of that technique and strategy we used, which was accepted by the judge in San Francisco, we talked to the government in that manner, and we won our case. C: You were able to prove that women were not discriminated? Did you believe that? I had done the research; the way I developed the research that appeared not to be happening. I don't know if I really felt comfortable with my own research results but the results were certainly very well received by the business community in town. C: Did you realize that at one time women could not deal? I have heard that but also know that having come from a small community back East and having come to Las Vegas, what I found was a very segregated town when I came here, which was very disheartening to me, more than most people, I think, primarily because I was raised, even though I am not black but white, but because my father's life was saved by a black man in World War Two. I had a different attitude toward the minority community and I played on a black basketball league as a teenager. When I came here, I didn't recognize color, I only recognized the person. Therefore I was more flexible and more understanding of the treatment of minorities, all minorities, in Nevada and elsewhere. My mother had been raised down South and she had a different view of minorities than I did or my father. I saw the views of the Northerners and Southerners as a child, and then coming out West, which is 3,000 miles away from the East coast, I almost found myself being a duck out of water. 14 During this period of time I realized that the type of work in a corporate environment wasn't for me so I finished my doctorate and I was offered, it was a big surprise to me, to be the president of Hughes Corporation for the state of Nevada, which is quite an honor and would have been quite a job at age thirty-three. Not having a mentor and being an only child, I think I was very foolish in that I turned down the position. I went on with my life and started my own business in 1978 and entered the building business, building homes, and passed the state of Nevada general contractor's test, and proceeded to build homes. With my good credit and the entrepreneurial flavor of Vegas at that time, I was able to actually obtain loans from banks, by using just my personal credit and land holdings, which I received from families who allowed me to pay them later after the project was built. Literally I started in business within six months, and in 1978, my first loan was for $550,000. S: What was the name of your company? The name of the company was Nicro Construction. After starting the company, I then realized I needed some expertise in the building business. I could pass the test but I wasn't that knowledgeable so I made friends, again, which is ironic, with a black gentleman from Southern California who was a major developer, named Kenneth Crockett. He in turn became my partner and is one of my dearest friends to this day and actually ended up being best man at my wedding in 1981. C: Where is Mr. Crockett now? Mr. Crockett is in California, semi-retired, but he was a major developer and he built homes in Clark Gable estates. When Clark Gable passed away his real estate holdings were divided up and he built multi-million dollar homes in that ar