Mike Unger was born June 6, 1947 in Queens, New York. He spent most of his childhood in Long Island, New York, growing up in a predominantly Jewish and Italian community. As a young adult, Unger was running one of his family’s restaurants after school. When he was in high school, his family moved to Los Angeles, California to accommodate his father’s health needs, and eventually ended up in Las Vegas, Nevada by 1967. Over the next two decades, Unger worked at nine properties in the city.