Anthony A. Marnell III
Chairman and CEO / Marnell Companies
In the lore of Las Vegas, Steve Wynn was always the wizard, hurling up castles and dreamscapes. Sheldon Adelson was the ambassador, who took the mega gaming resort business model global. But what about the guy tasked with keeping the lights on and all those outsize buildings standing as visitors from around the world come to ogle, chill, and play? Silly question: Marnell. CEO NA looked into the backstory of the legendary surname behind the chiffon curtain.
Forget for a moment the blazing LED lights, the seas of slots, the girlie shows, and everything else you think you know about Las Vegas. From highbrow sourpusses like Umberto Eco to the sendups of HBO Max’s hit series “Hacks,” this dateline in the desert has attracted its share of snobs and discontents.
But beyond all the clichés is another city, whose soaring skyline, bold design, and aggressive enterprise are meant not only to dazzle but to engage visitors and investors alike with dependable production values of tradition, efficiency, and solidity – a cocktail that has turned the heads of countless developers and transformed this signature entertainment destination into a hub of top tier engineering and innovation.
Many hands have gone into building the city’s contemporary foundations, but arguably none so palpably as those of the Marnell family, who for three generations have shaped the town with bricks and mortar, steel girders, reinforced concrete, tech savvy solutions, and financial acumen. If Wynn was modern Vegas’s unrivaled monarch, the king’s hand has always been a Marnell.
“One thing my father always says – and when he has something to say it’s usually very important – is the constant reminder that our company has to deliver a higher value than everybody else. Always.”
The founding father was Anthony, a hardworking Italian-American artisan, who pulled up stakes in California in the 1950s and decamped with his young family to Nevada, before going on to lay much of the masonry that props up the American southwest’s most fabled city to this day. By the early 1970s, he passed the torch to Anthony A. “Tony” Marnell II, a trained architect who designed many known marquee properties, before teaming up with Lud Corrao in 1974 to form Marnell Corrao Associates. It was the first “design-build” firm in the entertainment industry. Tony went on to build monumental resort hotels and casinos, conjuring up 55,000 rooms by the end of last century. He now serves as chairman emeritus of the Marnell corporate group.
Enter Anthony A. Marnell III, the scion and successor, who took the reins of the group of family companies by the turn of the millennium and is now pushing the franchise to the next level with his drone’s-eye vision of a diversifying Las Vegas and a blueprints-to-property management service approach. Architects, designers, builders, consultants, managers, owners, investment partners: pick a trade and a Marnell-run company is on the job, solving problems, modeling new developments, redefining benchmarks, and raising the bar for doing business along one of the U.S.’s most storied strips.
That overarching, “360 degree” business method – as Anthony Marnell III calls it – might be thought of as the master key to running the resort-cum-gaming industry for the 21st century.
“We once had a client who wanted a very specialized, high-end product – Italian marble – on a very short deadline, and there was a substantial hang up. But with all the work we have done around the world, we were able to go directly to the quarry in Italy and get that product on time and for substantially less money. It’s the little examples like this that we try to bring to the table.”
As ambitious as that sounds, the Marnell method is grounded in spadework at least five decades and three generations in the making. They are a family of early starters. The patriarch Anthony, a bricklayer, taught his son and namesake Anthony II − known to all as Tony – the ropes when he was barely out of grade school. (Tony says he got a Social Security card for his ninth birthday and has filed taxes ever since.)
For the next Marnell in line, Anthony III, the heavy lifting began even earlier. “I began working for my father, when I was eight, working construction and pouring concrete,” Marnell recalled in a wide-ranging interview with CEO NA. “My father had worked his way up from architect to developer, and contractor to casino owner.
That example impressed the young Anthony, but before following in his father’s footsteps the Marnell heir had a few dreams of his own to chase – starting on the baseball diamond. After graduating from the University of Arizona, he was drafted in 1995 by the San Diego Padres, playing catcher. Apparently, a flair for the classic American sport still runs in the family. While his oldest son Rex has been working for 5 years in Marnell Gaming Management and has worked his way to the V.P. of Operations, his younger son, Anthony IV, also plays catcher for his college team, San Diego State University Aztecs.
After two seasons in the minor Leagues, Marnell had his eye on an even bigger American pastime. Back in Vegas, he dived into the family company, learning the ropes from building cranes to casinos. “About five years in, my father decided to sell, and I opted to stay on and work for the acquiring company,” he said. “I just fell in love with the business and all things gaming.”
By then he also knew that there was more to the business than pluck and ambition. Smartening up the workplace was critical. “I decided to take a short break and launched a software company,” Marnell said. It wasn’t so much a detour from gaming as a pit stop to a better way to play Vegas. The startup, Tririga, founded in 1999, offered a menu of software solutions for sustainable building and energy management. The business took off, becoming what he calls a “global leader in integrated workplace management.” But Marnell’s heart was still in his hometown’s core business. In 2011, he sold Tririga to IBM for an undisclosed sum.
He returned to the table with a formidable tech-savvy toolkit for calibrating the evolving gaming industry and better serving its eclectic mix of investors, developers, and customers. If Steve Wynn’s magic was all about spectacle and awe (think The Mirage, Bellagio, and the eponymous Wynn), the 21st century Marnell style is grounded in client-first servicing and tailored amenities.
“We can just look at quote on an engineering proposal in a certain market, and say, ‘Okay, that’s not even close to competitive. We can get that done over here, with really good quality, and save the client
up to 80%.”
If not exactly bespoke – an oxymoron in Vegas vocabulary – the family business model stands out for its dedication to projects and shaping properties to patrons’ tastes and needs. Instead of doubling down on the too-familiar Vegas glitz, Marnell sought to lift the customer experience by combining curated design, user-friendly architecture, managerial nous, and operational excellence.
Look no further than the M Resort Spa and Casino, in Henderson, just east of Las Vegas Boulevard. Launched in March of 2009, the sleek, unapologetically upscale property that Anthony III developed and built is sheathed in tinted matte glass where guest comfort and patron-pleasing precision trump flashy exteriors. And that’s not all. Marnell brought the M Resort in on deadline and under budget, a rare bonus in the volatile business of monument building.
By 2024, the family had clocked its 50th year in the gaming sector, with growing interests in half a dozen satellite industries besides. The company reach now stretches from boutique architecture and building to master planning and real estate development for the largest gaming companies in the world.
In recent years, the brand has widened its footprint into the business of Native American casinos and resorts. “The company has always had a foot in the door with the tribal gaming world through its architectural division,” Marnell said. “Lately we are branching out to do more on the construction and project management side, as well as financing, development and gaming operations for different tribes.”
“We have members of our team who have been with us for 20 years, some as many as 30. So, it’s a very tight-knit group. We are all on standby for one another and our clients, 24/7. And we communicate well. In my opinion the biggest gaps in performance that usually arise are directly related to poor communication.”
Orchestrating it all, the 51-year-old Anthony A. Marnell III holds the title of chairman and CEO of Marnell Companies, the holding company of a cluster of family businesses helmed by the flagship Marnell Companies. But he casts a longer shadow in Las Vegas – literally. Over the years, the Marnell group has consolidated its reputation for designing and building some of the city’s signature properties, including the M Resort Spa Casino, the Bellagio, Caesars Entertainment, and Wynn Las Vegas. They were also the majority owner and operator the Rio All Suite Hotel and Casino and the M Resort Spa and Casino.
If much of the family oeuvre owes to Tony Marnell’s decadeslong record for energy and vision, he groomed his son well. And around 2015, when the patriarch began to step back (don’t call it retirement!), the succession was seamless but also distinctive. Anthony stepped up and started doing things his own way, overseeing a cluster of companies and services that spanned Las Vegas and touched almost every aspect of the country’s headline gaming economy.
“I saw it as a unique opportunity to say, ‘Hey, maybe we can bring all of this together so that we can offer something that is truly unique’,” he explained to CEO NA. It was a strategy that involved checking a lot of corporate boxes, on and off the Strip. “I don’t know of many companies that are, at the same time, their own architect, their own contractor, their own developer, their own financier, and their own operator” he continued.
“Here, we run management companies for tribes, counsel private businesses that need help with their own assets, and basically anything that you can do in and around gaming,” he said. In this way, Marnell said, “we can be a one-stop shop − for ourselves but also for our clients, it was the perfect time to bring it all together as an outward offering to our clients.”
“We have some very large clients on Las Vegas Boulevard, and if they want to build a certain new asset, they know they can come here,” he added. “So we bring in our construction group to help make sure the project is priced properly and that they’re not over designing themselves and have to start over again.”
“And then clients will bring in Marnell Gaming Management to make sure that it all functions and works right and ask for our estimates of what the casino’s projected cashflows should be. Everything down to the layout of the casino pit and whether a door swings left or swings right, and how to service all these spaces.”
“Because we are really a services company, our biggest supply chain issue would be around human capital – the challenge of attracting and retaining talent, leveraging this new generation’s style of work to be able to continue to produce a high-quality product for a very demanding customer.”
“I don’t think anybody else has the complete 360-degree view of the hotel casino business that we do. Starting off with land acquisition and entitlement, moving to design development, to architectural interiors, construction, and operation finance. I know of no other place that has all those services sitting under one roof and are offered to outside clients.”
Tony Marnell
Anthony took many of his cues on holistic client management from his father’s playbook. Marnell Senior, after all, had built a career of taking on oversized challenges and remaking vexing problems into his job description.
Much of his success was down to Tony’s knack for creative adaptation and a boots-on the-ground work ethic. Born in Riverside, California to first generation Italian Americans Anthony and Marie Marnell, young Tony moved with his family to Las Vegas in 1952 and took to the town. With a short hiatus at the University of Southern California, where he earned an architecture degree, he doubled back home and soon found himself working for a few of the 20th century’s leading gaming entrepreneurs.
“I think that when clients have the option of going to five companies in a single building for a variety of services, versus say going to different places of business, it gets attractive for them.”
Indeed, if Steve Wynn was Las Vegas’s dreamer, Tony Marnell was the doer. On Wynn’s payroll, he oversaw some tricky extravaganzas as the architect and constructor, including a faux “active” volcano at the Mirage Hotel, and a $120 million manmade “mountain”, wedged between two of the city’s busiest boulevards, Sands Avenue and Las Vegas Strip. That project took nerve, vertiginous logistics and a brace of giant Liebherr and Manitowoc building cranes, each one designed to hoist up to 300 tons of dead weight at tight angles.
Just the artificial mountain reportedly weighed as much as one of the towers of the World Trade Center. But unlike the monument in Manhattan, the Vegas hotel came rigged with some daunting accessories: eight waterfalls and its own jerrybuilt ecosystem, that framed four restaurants and a nightclub. The adjacent manmade “Lake of Dreams” spans three acres, backstopped by a 70-foot wall, and featuring a nightly light show.
“In terms of speed-to-market, but also in savings. By offering more services under one roof, we create synergies, and a substantially better cost structure.”
Under Tony Marnell, building up Las Vegas also meant reinventing the town’s cumbersome and hidebound culture of construction that set clients on edge and sometimes against one another. “The way it usually works is when there is a problem, the architect says ‘I didn’t make a mistake; the contractor did.’ And the contractor says ‘I didn’t make a mistake; the architect did.’ In the end,” he said in a 2016 interview for the University of Las Vegas Oral History Research Center, “the owner usually winds up paying for the problem.”
The breakthrough was his decision to own the problem, creating what he called the “golden triangle” between the architect, the contractor, and the owner. “What we did is to say to our customers, ‘If there is a problem, it doesn’t matter to you…It is our problem, and we will take care of it.’ That was one very appealing thing to the owners.”
Another innovation was the “fast track”. The trick, he said, was to jump start a job by projecting the total cost of a contract once the building was “thirty percent” completed. The crew then sought the requisite permits to build the project in segments: foundations first, structures next, followed by mechanics, electrical wiring, and so on.
The result was to speed up not just delivery times by 25 to 30% but also to reduce costs by the same margin. “That adds up to a lot of money saved when you start building billion-dollar projects like the Bellagio, Mirage, and Wynn. Wall Street really likes that,” Tony explained to UNLV. “We have in 41 years never, ever missed our budget on a project and we have never, ever missed an opening date.”
“For what we do, I don’t know if there’s anybody else that’s more contemporary with what’s going on in the state, with the current trends, the current design, and in synch with the things that are evolving within the gaming world.”
21st Century Las Vegas
When Anthony took over, he turbocharged the Marnell method by simultaneously deploying a diversified team – architects, contractors, developers, financiers, and property managers – on a single contract. “I think this sort of service model brings a lot of added value and not necessarily at an added price,” Marnell explained. “We find that out of the five major things that we offer, sometimes, we start with one, and by the time we’re done with that we have three or four different divisions working for our customers on their different goals and objectives in and around their gaming assets.”
The concept of a single company mastering a variety of products is hardly revolutionary. “There are a number of gaming companies that also handle a lot of those services,” he allowed. “But they don’t do it for other people, they do it for themselves. And so, I think that that’s another differentiator. The market has gotten comfortable over time knowing that what we do for ourselves, we also do for others. That builds trust.”
Of course, Las Vegas is a town that never sleeps. Going forward, the Marnell brand will have to adapt to the churn and whims of a shapeshifting consumer demographic. Consider that nearly half (46%) of the city’s visitors last year were either Millennials (aged 29 to 44) or (7%) Gen Z (13 to 28), according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority’s 2024 visitor profile report.
Evidence of that shift and of the market rush to keep pace with the demands of this new clientele is as glaring as Vegas’s night sky. Hence the abundance of lavish nightclubs, pool parties throbbing to the beat of alpha DJs, Michelin star restaurants, and slot machines reborn as computer games.
To enchant the youth wave, Sin City is undergoing a facelift. The Mirage will become Hard Rock Hotel Las Vegas. The classic Venetian is being “reimagined” to the tune of $1.5 billion as Viva Las Venice, an “immersive experience” harking back to the storied Italian venue. Then there’s the brand new Fountainbleau, a 67-story plinth at the North End of the city, with 4,000 rooms and a concert hall for the contemporary celebrity acts. So long Elvis, Hello Adele.
The Marnells have received the memo. “The market is changing,” Anthony acknowledged. “Baby boomers are slowly aging out and Gen X and the new generations are coming on, and things are changing. So I think we’re very well positioned. We’re in touch with that. I think we are working on this transition with the majority of the major owners on Las Vegas Boulevard to help adapt.”
“Now that the fourth Marnell generation has arrived, I think it’s safe to say as it pertains to gaming and real estate development that we are committed to continue at the forefront of that industry for very long time.”
For Marnell, that means carrying on as his father and grandfather have for the last half a century, with a business model anchored in Las Vegas tradition while keeping an eye on the horizon. “In the forefront of my mind is how can we do things differently and why do we do things the way we do them.,” Marnell says.
“This involves developing a culture of people who understand that it’s not a negative to constantly question how you do what you do,” Marnell adds. “And what’s crucial: you have to keep reinventing yourself, continually. “
The good news is that never have there been so many ways to manage the transition and calibrate the business to shifting markets and technology. “There’s thousands of tools at our disposal today that there weren’t ten or twenty years ago,” Marnell concludes.
Putting those tools to work will not be simple, and many gaming businesses may find themselves left behind as the world turns. But you don’t need a Las Vegas tout to know that the smart money is on the Marnells.
