Gimme Money (That's What I Want)

Binion's Horseshoe, the Vegas casino where the World Series of Poker began, used to have a display of one million dollars in cash in the lobby.

The bills ($10,000 gold certificates, a denomination no longer made) were laid out in a grid 20 bills high by 5 bills wide, something like Warhol's painting. The whole thing was enclosed in bulletproof glass mounted vertically within a giant horseshoe-shaped arch. Spotlights were trained on it, and armed guards kept watch over it.

When I visited Las Vegas in 1995, I played poker at Binion's and had my picture taken in front of the million bucks. That is as close as I, or most people, will ever get to one million dollars cash, which is why most people who went to Vegas and knew about Binion's had their picture taken in front of the money. Including Charles Manson. (More on that in the link at the end of this post.)

The Binion's bundle does, in a way, intersect with the art market. The $10,000 bills eventually became worth so much more than their face value that in 2000 Binion's sold them to a private collector for an undisclosed sum.

Reporter David Strow of the Las Vegas Sun wrote an interesting story about the display and its history. Here is how the story concluded:

An uncirculated $10,000 bill goes for about $75,000 on the open market, said Mark Scott, owner of Sahara Coin in Las Vegas. But the value of the Binion's bills would be dragged down substantially by the glue used to hold them in the case.

"That's kind of like selling a Picasso that's been shellacked," Scott said. "The value because they came from Binion's is another story."

Scott expects the bills could be resold at auction for about $20,000 apiece.

(You can read the complete story at http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/
sun/2000/jan/20/509739003.html)