Tech billionaire Larry Ellison has added Lake Tahoe’s Cal Neva Resort & Casino, the fabled Rat Pack era hangout once owned by Frank Sinatra, to his collection of trophy properties.
A U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge has cleared the Cal Neva for transfer to the Oracle Corp. founder’s Lawrence Investments for $35.8 million, according to news reports.
Ellison, whose real estate portfolio includes Hawaii’s Lanai Island, a $42 million home in Rancho Mirage in Southern California and a multimillion-dollar “villa” in Japan, hasn’t revealed his plans for the property, whose 10-story hotel and small casino sit shuttered atop the California-Nevada border on the lake’s North Shore.
It could be that Ellison, whose net worth Forbes pegs at $43 billion, just likes Tahoe. He sold a mansion in the Snug Harbor area in 2014 for $20 million and is building an 18,000-square-foot home, also on the North Shore.
“We haven’t heard anything,” said Tom Lotshaw, a spokesman for the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, who added that his office would be “happy and willing and able to work with them to keep a good project going”.
A St. Helena developer, Criswell Radovan, bought the Cal Neva and shut it down in 2013 for renovations. Work on the $49 million project was halted in early 2016, and Criswell placed it under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection a few months later, the latest of an array of plans for reviving the resort that faltered over the years as the Tahoe and Reno markets faded with the spread of Indian gaming in California.
The property actually pre-dates the legalization of casinos in Nevada in 1931, but its heyday came in the early 1960s, when Sinatra bought it and turned it into a playground for his Hollywood pals. Fitted with tunnels for clandestine comings and goings, its visitors included President Kennedy, who reputedly trysted with Marilyn Monroe there. When an FBI agent spotted Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana on the premises Sinatra lost his gaming license and sold out. The Cal Neva never fully recovered.
