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.” 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. (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.

Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, had bought the land in 2006, for seventy million dollars, and sunk about $1.2 billion into the project. 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. Atlantic City has a Bermuda Triangle effect it can confound a compass.

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. 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. 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 piece of real estate seemed to test the proposition.

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. 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. Photograph by Andrew Moore for The New Yorker

Revel was supposed to be the most opulent casino the place had ever seen. If not for zany schemes, Atlantic City would be a sand dune.

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