If not for zany schemes, Atlantic City would be a sand dune. Revel was supposed to be the most opulent casino the place had ever seen. Photograph by Andrew Moore for The New Yorker

Mike Hauke opened a pizza and sub shop in Atlantic City in 2009, but only after he had failed in nine tries to rent the space to somebody else. He had bought the building three years earlier on the advice of his father, an accountant who considered distressed real estate a smart long-term bet. This piece of real estate seemed to test the proposition. It was a bedraggled three-story clapboard house that years of neighborhood demolition and neglect had stranded at the edge of several mostly vacant blocks, which together formed an urban badlands reaching all the way to the dunes. This was the South Inlet, a once thriving part of town and now more or less a desolate slum at the northeastern end of Absecon Island, the landmass that is home to Atlantic City and three other municipalities. People from “offshore,” as locals like to call the mainland, tend to think of the island’s Inlet end as north, because it’s upcoast, but locals call it east. Atlantic City has a Bermuda Triangle effect; it can confound a compass.

Three blocks west of Hauke’s place, an immense slab of steel and glass was rising over the badlands: a hotel and casino to be called Revel, destined to be bigger and more opulent than anything Atlantic City had ever seen—two towers, reaching almost fifty stories, nearly four thousand rooms, and parking for more than seven thousand cars. Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, had bought the land in 2006, for seventy million dollars, and sunk about $1.2 billion into the project. (Revel, as some have noted, is “lever” spelled backward.) By the end, the cost of building Revel reached more than $2.4 billion, making it the most expensive private construction project in the history of New Jersey.

Hauke went after the crumbs. Unable to find a commercial tenant for his house’s ground floor (the apartments upstairs were designated Section 8, for low-income tenants), he started selling rudimentary takeout to Revel’s construction crews. Their rush-hour bulk orders overwhelmed his staff, but off hours the place was dead: a trickle of casino workers and, in Hauke’s words, “shitbags, crackheads, hustlers, and pimps.”

Hauke, a recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, had spent a couple of years in Hoboken and Manhattan working in marketing, but he had no restaurant experience. One of his first customers was a neighborhood junkie known as V8 Man (“All the white kids are junkies,” Hauke said. “The Inlet does it to everybody”), who, on opening night, picked a fight at the counter with a male prostitute and another customer; Hauke smashed a pizza paddle on the counter and used the sharp end to scare him off. More than once, a guy came in trying to unload stolen merchandise as the victimized storekeeper came running up the street in pursuit. One morning, a neighborhood kid rode by on a bicycle and threw a crude pipe bomb through the window; Hauke chased him in his car and, after cornering him briefly in an abandoned house, hounded him on foot across a vacant tract called Pauline’s Prairie, named after Pauline Hill, a city planner in the sixties who’d had this stretch of the neighborhood bulldozed for urban renewal, which never came. The kid, looking over his shoulder, ran into the side of a parked box truck. The police appeared and put him in cuffs. His grievance was that cops had been patronizing Hauke’s shop and that sheriffs had evicted his cousins, Hauke’s Section 8 tenants, from one of the apartments upstairs. The tenants, according to Hauke, had been running a welfare scam. They’d also been throwing dirty diapers on his customers and fishing for pigeons from the roof.

Hauke hoped that, in spite of such annoyances, Revel would either provide him with an income stream or else buy him out. A few neighborhood property owners said that it would never happen. They’d been holding on for years themselves, in the hope of selling to a big casino, and in the interim they’d been gutted by rising property taxes and ongoing decay. The problem was that the area was zoned for big casino-hotels. You couldn’t build a house, and the few houses left in the neighborhood—most had been demolished or had burned down, accidentally or not—were old and badly battered by the salt air. One of them, down near the beach, across the street from a run-down low-income housing complex called the Waterside, belonged to a teacher Hauke had got to know named Tony Zarych, who’d moved to Atlantic City as a teen-ager forty years earlier, when his family was buying up property around town. He’d worked as a baccarat dealer at the Sands, until it closed (it was demolished in 2007), and now taught English as a second language at an elementary school. He liked to hunt wild turkey offshore and sometimes had carcasses hanging outside. His property taxes had risen sharply, as the city contended with a steep drop in tax revenues from the casinos. “Get out while you can,” Zarych told Hauke.

Sure enough, in 2009, amid the financial meltdown, Revel, only half built, ran out of money. In April, 2010, Morgan Stanley quit the project, booking a loss of almost a billion dollars. Construction stopped. Hauke’s business withered. “There were no more tourists or construction workers,” he recalled. “Mostly just cops. And crackheads wanting free shit.” But something about the city, and about the Inlet’s seaside squalor, made him want to stay on. Maybe it was the fact that his great-grandmother had attended shul in the Inlet. Or that he’d simply got sand in his shoes, as the locals say about those who take to the place.

After grinding along for another year, Hauke shut down the shop, spiffed it up, and rechristened it Tony Boloney’s. He bought a food truck, which he named the Mustache Mobile, and developed a line of pizzas and novelty subs that he marketed as “indigenous Atlantic City grub,” as though he’d revived an obscure provincial cuisine. Soon, Tony Boloney’s began winning foodie awards and luring in not just gamblers, night-clubbers, food-truck connoisseurs, politicians, and cops but also a procession of casino magnates and real-estate speculators who were visiting the neighborhood, often on the sly, to size up the distressed property next door.

At the beginning of 2011, Governor Chris Christie pledged tax incentives to Revel worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars. (The incentives were tied to certain revenue targets, which, in the end, Revel failed to meet.) Christie had evidently decided that Revel’s success was essential to the survival of Atlantic City, and therefore his gubernatorial track record. His pledge helped Revel secure new financing from an array of hedge funds, including Chatham Asset Management and Canyon Capital, which manage hundreds of millions of dollars in New Jersey state pension funds.

Construction resumed, and Christie came to town. After a photo op at a famous sub shop called the White House and a visit to the Revel site, he dropped in at Tony Boloney’s and urged Hauke to keep the place going. “Listen, you gotta stick around,” Christie told him. The Revel executives were emphatic as well: “It’ll look bad if you close. Please don’t go anywhere.” The head of Chatham Asset Management hired Hauke to cater his annual Halloween party, up in Essex County.

“I understand you’ve spent the summer on someone’s ass. Can you tell us what that was like?” Facebook

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Revel opened in the spring of 2012, with Beyoncé performing a series of concerts in its auditorium. (She also took over the Presidential Suite, relegating Michelle Obama and her daughters to another suite.) The plan had been scaled back—just fourteen hundred rooms, and one tower instead of two. The tower’s midsection had a half-dozen stories not yet built out; you could see clear through it. Still, it was an impressive building, with sleek, airy marbled atriums and lobbies that had little in common with the smoky, windowless, carpeted caverns of the older mega-casinos down the boardwalk. Unlike all the rest, it directed one’s attention to the ocean and had ample outdoor space, a two-acre terrace with firepits and cabanas. Even from the outside, Revel had an ethereal appeal. The reflective glass took on the sky’s hue and became almost invisible at dusk, a stealth casino guarding the edge of town.