G. Michael Brown, whose mandate as a New Jersey prosecutor was to safeguard Atlantic City’s embryonic gambling industry from predatory organized criminals, and who later presided over the nation’s most profitable casino, died on Oct. 6 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 82.
His daughter Kristin Brown, with whom he was living, said the cause was complications of colon cancer.
After law school and Army service in Vietnam, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star, Mr. Brown began his rise as a prosecutor for the State of New Jersey in the 1970s. He attracted attention in 1980 for a case that unseated the leadership of the Genovese crime family in the state.
In that case, a state jury convicted four New Jersey men of conspiracy for operating what prosecutors described as a criminal cartel that furthered murder, extortion, gambling and loan-sharking. The convictions proved, Mr. Brown said at the time, that the Mafia is not “a figment of Hollywood’s imagination.”
The economist James K. Sebenius wrote in 1999 in The Harvard Business Review that Mr. Brown, known to friends and colleagues as Micky, “was instrumental in toppling the family’s leadership and diminishing the power of the mob in New Jersey.”
He was so instrumental, as he later recounted to The New York Times, that one defendant told him, before being taken away to serve a 10-year sentence: “You’re a very good lawyer. If you ever decide to come over to the other side, give me a call.”
Around that time, New Jersey’s Casino Control Commission granted Resorts International the state’s first permanent license to run a casino. New Jersey was the second state, after Nevada, to allow casino gambling.
Mr. Brown, who was deputy director of operations for the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice and the chief trial counsel in the state’s first casino license application hearing, raised concerns about earlier links between Resorts International and organized crime.
But when he was asked by a commission member just before the vote whether the company had any current connections, he replied, “Not at the present time, no.”
“Some of the companies, I started to realize, had developed a corporate attitude toward gaming,” he later told The Hartford Courant. “They were run by people with M.B.A.s, not broken noses.”
In 1980, Gov. Brendan Byrne of New Jersey named Mr. Brown director of the state’s newly formed Division of Gaming Enforcement. In that position, he oversaw the licensing and operations of casinos and gambling companies in Atlantic City. He supervised the opening of seven casinos and oversaw the initial licensing hearings for five.
He left the division in 1982 to practice law privately on behalf of gambling interests in the Bahamas and Australia.
From 1993 to 1997, as the lawyer for, and founding chairman of, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Gaming Commission and the president and chief executive of Foxwoods Resort Casino, Mr. Brown represented the Mashantucket Pequot tribe in its negotiations with Connecticut officials; arranged a $60 million loan from Genting International of Malaysia; and transformed a bingo hall in Ledyard, in the southeastern corner of the state, into what analysts called the nation’s most profitable casino.
As a Native American entity, the casino, which opened in 1992, was exempt from taxes. Mr. Brown persuaded Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. to allow slot machines in the casino-hotel complex in 1993 by agreeing to give the state 25 percent of the revenue they produced.
Mr. Brown resigned suddenly in June 1997, apparently because of conflicts with the tribe, whose chief only two months earlier had characterized him as “the finest chief executive officer in the gaming business.”
He rebounded quickly. In 1998, he became the president and part owner of New York City’s first licensed high-seas gambling ship, the Edinburgh Castle. For $99 on weekdays and $199 on weekends, passengers could gamble overnight on the ship once it passed the three-mile limit and ventured into international territory, and be back at a Manhattan pier by morning. The venture, which began in January 1998, did not last long; by May, it had been by May for lack of business.
Mr. Brown remained a consultant to other gambling operations; from 2000 to 2006, he was president and chief executive of the Seneca Niagara Resort & Casino in Niagara Falls, N.Y.
Gerard Michael Brown, the youngest of five siblings, was born on Nov. 3, 1942, in Orange, N.J. His father, Edmund, was a real estate agent. His mother, Mae (Conroy) Brown, managed the home.
After attending St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark, Mr. Brown graduated from Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1964 and received a law degree in 1967 from Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey.
The next year, he married Sharon Palmere; she died in 2021. In addition to his daughter Kristin, he is survived by two other daughters, Gretchen Piskura and Tiffany Brown; a brother, Thomas; and two grandchildren.
In a 1998 interview with The Times, Mr. Brown was asked if he ever second-guessed himself about not taking up the offer to put his legal work in service of organized crime.
“I couldn’t handle that,” he told the newspaper, which described him as “a famous straight arrow in the casino business” and noted that he made more than $1 million a year while at Foxwoods. “Anyway, now I enjoy business.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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