Inside the War Over Jay-Z’s New York City Casino

Tens of billions of dollars, thousands of jobs, and quite possibly the fate of New York’s most iconic industry and most awful tourist trap were all at stake. But the closing days of a yearslong fight over whether to build a casino in Times Square seemed to revolve around one man: Jay-Z.

You could see it over the summer, when Al Sharpton headlined a rally just south of Times Square’s iconic red steps. “Say yes time! Yes time! In Times Square! Times Square! Jay-Z! Jay-Z!” he shouted. You could see it last week at the Broadhurst Theatre on 44th Street, the site of a final public hearing on the casino before a do-or-die vote. “For the first time,” promised Marc Holliday, the CEO of the city’s largest commercial real estate firm, “everyone has a seat at this table, with Jay-Z at the head.”

HOV, through his entertainment firm, Roc Nation, poured “hundreds of millions” into a stake in the project, according to its CEO, Desiree Perez. Then Roc Nation joined Holliday’s company, SL Green, and Caesars Entertainment in spending millions and millions more promoting it to sometimes-wary lawmakers, municipal bureaucrats, and the public at large. The goal: secure one of three licenses for casinos in the New York City area.

On Wednesday, everything fell apart. Before a bid could even be considered by the state’s regulators, it had to capture four of six votes from a community advisory committee, all appointed by local politicians. That vote finally happened after years of buildup, and the committee decisively rejected the bid—four to two against Jay-Z’s big play in Times Square. Despite support from the mayor and the governor of New York, the Times Square casino is dead.

It’s a massive loss for all of the partners in the Times Square casino project—including its most famous one, whose up-from-nothing, keep-close-to-the-streets story was at the center of the closing argument. “We from these neighborhoods,” Jay-Z told the advisory committee members as they sat across a conference table over the summer. “We hear a lot of talk about community. We are the community.”

“We’re not saying, ‘Give it to us because we happen to be Black, Hispanic, and female,’” Perez tells me, right before the big vote. “No, that’s not what we’re saying. Of course not. But we are saying, ‘Don’t ignore who we are, what we stand for, where we come from, where we’ve been, everything that we’ve accomplished. Please don’t ignore that.’”

And as for the forces opposing the casino? The theater types, who worry that tourists might gamble away their Broadway money? Or that a casino might poison Broadway’s delicate ecosystem? Create traffic armageddon in midtown? Well, to borrow a phrase from a different rapper: not like us. Jay-Z’s allies argued that opponents weren’t just a bunch of finger-wagging hall monitors standing in the way of thousands of Black and brown people getting casino jobs. They were, according to Sharpton, “oligarchs.” It was an ironic choice of words, given Jay-Z’s billionaire status.

But the opposition had its own case to make—and that case ultimately prevailed. Casinos weren’t just dangerous to the theater community, they argued. They rarely bring the revenue they promise—one of the casinos in upstate New York, for instance, is pursuing a deal with the county right now worth up to $585 million to stay afloat. So, lots of risk with little reward. What’s more, casinos tend to bleed money from the sorts of communities Jay-Z says he represents. Promises to the contrary were empty and even harmful to the community—kind of like the ones coming from the former casino owner who’s now in the White House. And in New York City, that man is hated more than Jay-Z is loved.

Jay-Z’s interest in a casino goes back more than 15 years. At the time, New York State was looking to build a slot parlor near the decrepit Aqueduct horseracing track. One of the bidders tapped Jay-Z for informal “marketing and community advice.” That bidder eventually won, beating out companies like SL Green. But after that deal collapsed, Resorts World, a subsidiary of a Malaysian firm, was given the Aqueduct contract instead. Today, that depressing slot parlor not far from JFK Airport is the most lucrative gambling hall in America outside of Las Vegas, bringing in nearly a billion dollars in annual gaming revenue.

Jay-Z and Roc Nation continued to explore casino deals. Then in 2022, SL Green chief Marc Holliday was chatting with Jay-Z courtside at a Brooklyn Nets game. Maybe, they discussed, they could try together to get into an even higher-stakes contest, for one of the licenses for a full-blown casino in or around the city. Holliday and Perez were both honorees at a local charity dinner a few days later. They started ironing out the details. Roc Nation announced its involvement in the Times Square casino bid at the end of that year. Not long after, the Broadway League, which represents theater owners and producers, began mobilizing support against it.

What unfolded was a miniature political campaign, similar to what was happening at almost a dozen different sites. On one side: the promise of more work and the buzz that comes with billions in economic activity. On the other: fears that a casino would leech more from the neighborhood than it would add. Every casino bidder promised hundreds of millions in improvements to the community around them; each casino bid faced opponents who noted those payments were a rounding error compared to the money to be made. The ultimate goal for those campaigns was to persuade those six people on the community advisory committee to vote their way.

Early on, the Times Square group approached State Senator Liz Krueger. She may have been a die-hard gambling opponent—“I voted against bingo in church basements,” she once told me—but she controlled one of the six votes on the Times Square CAC. In a Zoom meeting, she said, the casino team asked her if she wanted to meet Jay-Z. “Why? I don’t like his music particularly,” she recalled saying. “They’re like, ‘You don’t want to meet Jay-Z? Well, you know who he’s married to?’”

She didn’t meet Beyonce, nor did she get together with Mr. Carter—not even when Jay-Z went up to the State Capitol in Albany this May. But the Times Square casino crew used other ways to make their plan more convincing. They recruited former NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton, who came up with an $78 million plan to secure the neighborhood with drones and cameras and a private security force. They pledged to buy tens of millions of dollars’ worth of theater tickets to boost the Broadway economy, and pour cash into local charities. And they made the point, over and over again, that operating a casino in Times Square isn’t like doing it anywhere else. “It’s not like we’re trying to stick this casino building in between some residential neighborhood that is, like, super quiet,” Perez says. “This is supposed to be live and loud.”

But there are still plenty of locals in the neighborhoods around Times Square. On October 16, 2023, the Times Square casino team hosted an eight-hour free buffet for locals. The rapper Fat Joe, a Roc Nation client, showed up to lend his support. One prominent local community advocate told reporters she wasn’t that impressed. “I think it’s really a predatory business,” said Aleta LaFargue, president of the tenants’ association at Manhattan Plaza—a massive apartment complex with subsidized units for people working in the arts. LaFargue grew up in Atlantic City, she explained, where casinos promised to lift up the local economy but did the opposite instead. The association joined the Broadway League’s No Times Square Casino Coalition.

The following September, LaFargue struck a more conciliatory tone. “We are to listen to what they have to say, what they have to offer,” she said, as executives from Roc Nation and SL Green prepared to make a presentation. Shortly thereafter, local news outlet The City published an unsigned $20,000 monthly contract for LaFargue to “provide strategic counsel” to the casino project. Perez, from Roc Nation, says LaFargue never signed the deal, but that “we continued to speak to her,” and LaFargue continued to be a conduit to the community. It was one of many such offers, Perez added. “We have another community leader that did take a consulting fee, and did sign up for us to work with her so she could lead us.” (LaFargue initially gave several conflicting explanations in response, but today maintains that she has never consulted for the casino.)

This July, Perez announced that the casino would give $22.5 million over 15 years to Manhattan Plaza, and put a half-percent of the casino’s profits into a “trust controlled by the residents.” Considering the projected bill to remodel 1515 Broadway into a casino would come out to $5.4 billion, that stake could prove to be beyond-lucrative. Alicia Keys—a Roc Nation client who grew up in Manhattan Plaza—reportedly met residents later that day to talk up the deal. The tenants’ association withdrew from the anti-casino coalition a few days after that.

Residents’ reactions were mixed, however. More than a few worried that the grant had hidden strings attached. There were disagreements about whether to accept the casino funds. So the $22.5 million was withdrawn, redirected to a more broad-based community fund.

All the while, bold-face names continued to join the casino cause. The Wire’s Wendell Pierce signed on, after a $10 million pledge to support traditionally Black theaters. Sharpton, who has long supported casino projects, got on board with this particular one early in this summer; months later, the casino team made a $15 million pledge to build a civil rights museum. Charlamagne tha God popped by a CAC hearing and expressed his support. So did Fat Joe, who introduced himself with his given name and his Bronx zip code, “Joseph Cartagena, 10456.” Other casino bidders have some measure of star power; Nas made his own trip to Albany on behalf of Resorts World, which is trying to expand its slot parlor into a full-service gambling hall. But nothing like this.

They weren’t the only backers. Several of the city’s most powerful unions supported his (and pretty much every other) casino project, because of the jobs they’ll provide. They helped convince mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani to table his previous opposition to casinos.

But there has been consistent, ingrained community opposition to pretty much all of the Manhattan projects. Saks Fifth Avenue dropped its longshot bid to convert the top two floors of its Fifth Avenue flagship store into a casino in April. Wynn Resorts withdrew in May its $12 billion proposal for the Hudson Yards development, just a few blocks from Times Square.

This neighborhood had additional concerns, despite it being New York’s closest analogue to Vegas. The first is its peep-show history. Despite Bratton’s “guarantee” that a “five-star resort” like this will not bring back Times Square’s sleaze, residents who attend these community meetings say they’re scared. Then there’s the traffic, which is already a nightmare. Most important are the fears that it could screw up Broadway’s theater scene; it’s enjoying a post-COVID boom, but the community worries they’re never that many flops away from a bust. They don’t want the added risk. “All of our theaters are here,” LaChanze, the Tony Award–winning actress and producer, told me over coffee at Sardi’s last year, “a casino can go somewhere else but we can’t go anywhere else.”

She’s part of the Broadway League opposition, which used Times Square itself to troll the Times Square gambling project. When Sharpton spoke at the pro-casino rally by the red steps last June, the League placed anti-casino messages on the giant billboards surrounding the site. When the community advisory committee had its last meeting, at the Broadhurst on 44th Street, the League replaced the marquees of the theaters next door with red signs reading “No Crime, No Chaos, No Casino.” (The teasers for the Kristin Chenoweth musical currently up at the St. James might have competed with the message a bit, but that’s showbiz.)

Inside the Broadhurst, far more people testified against the casino than for it. Holliday lashed out at the “self-interested Broadway League” that has “been running an underhanded smear campaign” against the casino. And he lambasted an unnamed “wealthy multigenerational theater owner” for “protecting its own interests at the expense of the community.” Outside, black-clad protesters held up signs that read “Broadway Cares for the Shuberts” (the Shubert Organization, which plays a heavy role in the League and runs 18 of Broadway’s 41 stages)—an apparent dig at Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, the industry’s most important philanthropy. A spokesperson for the casino team said they weren’t involved. Going after an AIDS charity isn’t the kind of move you’re trying to do something big on Broadway.

Sharpton, for his part, brought things back to HOV. He stressed at the Broadhurst that Roc Nation would give the casino “diversity at an ownership level,” and added: “You’re not just given a token. Jay-Z is nobody’s token. He’s the token booth.” It’s a great turn of phrase, especially for New Yorkers of a certain age who remember when it took a coin to get on the subway. It didn’t get the project out of the station. Casinos need “a uniquely strong degree of community buy-in,” Erik Bottcher, considered the swing vote on the project, said in a statement. “Despite extensive outreach by the applicants, that level of support has not materialized.” The appeal to Jay-Z as aspirational avatar and genius businessman wasn’t enough, not in a place that’s inseparable from Broadway and the theater. Around New York—around the world—Jay-Z is an icon. In this neighborhood, he’s just another business, man.