Casino Connection: There are a lot of misconceptions about Revel in Atlantic City. Some people think it’s mothballed, but it’s still under construction and going great guns. Tell us what’s the next goal.

DeSanctis: I created a little confusion in January when I announced we were going to stage the project. Some folks thought we would stop or stall the project. We meant we were staging it in alignment with the funds we had. The best way to do that was to complete the structure and the enclosure for the three primary elements and hold off on the interiors until we had the final funding. So we’re almost completed on the hotel structure. The parking structure is complete. The structural steel is complete, and the podium and the enclosure are going up. In the next four months or so, we’ll be in real good shape.

Your partner is Morgan Stanley, so you have access to Wall Street investment. How has this credit freeze affected you?

If you had asked me that question two or three months ago, it would be a different answer than it is today. Frankly, no one was issuing credit two or three months ago. We’re pleasantly surprised that credit has started to be issued again. It’s a good sign. Unless there’s a relapse in the economy, we think it’ll be very possible to go out and secure the financing maybe in the fourth quarter of this year. Now, there’s a silver lining to all this; because we had a strong financial backer like Morgan Stanley, even when we were unable to secure the last piece of financing, we continued to de-risk the project. So now, it’s no longer, can you build it for this amount of money? Fundamentally, the project is built. We understand exactly what the cost is, so the only real question now is what, from a profitability perspective, can this project do?

Should the financing proceed as you hope, what’s the opening date?

From the point where we know we have the financing, it will be a 16- to 20-month period to complete the interiors. If we were to receive financing by the end of this year, we would be open by May of 2011.

How will your project be different than other Atlantic City casinos?

I don’t think the industry has ever used the most important natural resource it has—the ocean—to its best advantage. That’s one of the reasons I’m so confident that Atlantic City can be successful if the proper projects are built here. Our primary goal was to embrace the ocean. We won’t fool anyone into believing we’re in the Bahamas anytime soon, so the goal was to create a destination that could only be created in Atlantic City, taking advantage of its urban beachfront location and building something that really integrated with that.

Tell us about access. It’s a challenging location, the last casino on the northern end of the Boardwalk. People have to drive through the whole city to get there.

We felt that if you built the right facility, people would get there, but clearly from a customer’s viewpoint, being able to get in and get out easily and hassle-free was really important. So we worked with the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority and designed a great roadway system that essentially leverages on the tunnel connector, which was built prior to Borgata.

And when you come off the connector, we’ll have a six-lane roadway that’s three lanes in, three lanes out, directly into the South Inlet and our property. So it not only unlocks the South Inlet and creates just a great sense of arrival for Revel, it also unlocks the potential of the South Inlet to other development. We think we’ve taken a negative and turned it into a positive. That roadway has been approved. We expect it to be started sometime later this year and take about 16 to 18 months to complete.

There are a lot of challenges here with all the out-of-state competition, even though it’s just pure gaming. What does Atlantic City have to do to distinguish itself?

First, we have to recognize that the convenience customer is no longer a customer that Atlantic City can depend on. It was a great run, but it’s over.

Second, there are a lot of good things that have happened here, and I’m disappointed when people don’t recognize how Atlantic City has changed over the last few years. You have the Borgata, the Walk and the Pier. You have the Quarter and the Chelsea. The Taj just completed a remodel. Harrah’s completed the Pool and a new tower.

We don’t take advantage of the critical mass of amenities in Atlantic City. From my perspective, Atlantic City has to start working together as opposed to against each other to attract more people. The industry should be thinking of itself as a unit of properties, as opposed to fighting each other. That’s a directional change that should happen.

From a city and state perspective, we should focus on improving the infrastructure and the in-town transportation, because the town does face gridlock, especially seasonally in the summer and in concert season. There is clearly blight that could be very easily cleaned up. That takes will, more than anything else. Another piece we need to work on as a group, whether it’s the jitney drivers or the cab drivers or the people in the industry, is a customer service program to improve the reception for customers when they come in, and let them know we’re happy to see them. This is a resort, and we need to put our best foot forward.

Last, we need to do everything we can to attract group business, because group business is the future of this town. I see this as a town where you have group business mid-week and tourists on the weekend. It’s always been that way, but we’ve always fought that, for whatever reason.

The last point—and it’s a huge point that nobody ever talks about it, like the big elephant in the room—is that the industry has never accepted the community, and the community has never accepted the industry.

Nobody is going anywhere, so how do we make this work together? We can coexist, and we will, but we have to open up a dialogue and get that moving. Frankly, if we could get everybody on the same page, it would go a long way to accomplishing all the other things I mentioned.

There’s fault on both sides. I’m guilty, everybody is guilty. Sometimes we don’t take enough time with people. Sometimes we’re so focused on results that we don’t recognize the impact on others. We have to be more sensitive to that. And the community has to recognize that they need this industry to be successful if they want to lower their property taxes and if they want the services. We can’t do it apart. We have to do it together.

What will it take to get a job at Revel? What kind of person are you looking for?

There’s a great book called The Four Obsessions of Extraordinary Executives that characterizes the perfect employee as humble, hungry and smart. I’m a big fan of that. I think people should be humble and ego should be put aside, although when I talk about that, people I work with don’t think I mean it for myself. People have to want to succeed. They have to be hungry. They have to be relatively intelligent. We don’t need brain surgeons, but it’s really important that people are aware what’s going on.

There are two other qualities we’re looking for. We want people who keep things simple, who think of quick ways to get things done without overcomplicating them. And the last thing, we want nice people. That may sound a little trite, but I’m always put off when I walk into a business and someone makes me feel like they’re doing me a favor by talking to me.

We’re looking for people who understand that the entire reason they’re there is to make sure our guests have a great time. Frankly, most of the hiring will be done behaviorally because most of what we do, we can teach. If we start with people who have the right thought process, it’ll go a long way to being successful.