MotorCity Casino opens; Marian Ilitch sits down with reporter

7.07.07

Her casino growing, she tells of life with Mike

BY TOM WALSH
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

For 48 years, as the Ilitch family business empire grew from Little Caesars pizza joints to include hockey and baseball teams, the Fox Theatre and more, it has been headed by Mike and Marian Ilitch.

Mike's name almost always came first, whether as front man in deals to buy the Detroit Red Wings and the Fox, or as sole owner of the Detroit Tigers -- even if it was wife Marian's sharp eye for finance that helped keep the Ilitch enterprises profitable.

Today, Marian grabs the spotlight as MotorCity Casino, which she owns, unveils expanded gaming areas to the public in its new Detroit hotel-casino project.

In a rare interview this week with the Free Press, Marian Ilitch, 74, predicted that MotorCity and two other hotel-casinos under construction will transform Detroit's hospitality industry, luring tourists from faraway cities and drawing suburban families downtown for weddings, bar mitzvahs and other events.

She also talked about how she and Mike hash out key business decisions, how they once put their seven kids to work peddling Red Wings tickets, why they bought the Fox and what moved her to become Detroit's queen of casino gaming.

"It's important to me that one of the casinos is Detroit-owned by someone that really wants to invest in the area," said Ilitch, who purchased a controlling interest in MotorCity in 2005 from Mandalay Resort, which had merged with MGM Mirage. She had been a minority shareholder since the casino's inception in 1999.

MGM owns the Detroit casino with its name on it, and the third, Greektown Casino & Resort, is owned by the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians.

And make no mistake: Marian Ilitch is a very hands-on owner. Her prints are all over the $275-million hotel-casino project, from the swooping curved roof design on the hotel to the swank Signature Club for the casino's 1,500-or-so biggest spenders, who get their own restaurant and VIP marking entrance.

"I want it to be a destination spot," she said. "I want people talking about us, saying, 'Whoa, you've got to see MotorCity.' "

Gregg Solomon, MotorCity's CEO, said extra expenditures for things like the roof and a half-acre purchase to make room for the new Signature Club would not likely have been made by a publicly owned firm like Mandalay.

"Public corporations are risk-averse, not willing to do some of those gut-feel type of things" that Ilitch has approved for MotorCity, Solomon said.

Ilitch fully expects that spending on extra touches to create a four-diamond hotel with a luxury spa will pay off handsomely.

How the two differ
Indeed, Ilitch said she learned early in her business life with her husband that she was the more bottom-line-oriented of the two. She told a little story to make the point.

In 1959, at their very first restaurant, Little Caesars Pizza Treat in Garden City -- she wanted to call it Little Caesars, he preferred Pizza Treat, so they compromised -- the Ilitches also sold chicken and fish dinners.

Their first customer ordered a chicken dinner. As Marian brought the dinner out, Mike jumped up and said, "This is on the house, you're our first customer." When the second order was for a fish dinner, Mike did the same thing. Marian showed her disapproval and Mike responded, "Well, it's our first fish dinner."

Soon afterward, Marian recalled, Mike came out of the kitchen carrying a pizza. "I snatched it out of his hand, gave him a little hip thing, took it to the customer and said, 'That'll be $2.39, please.' "

And so it has always been with the Ilitches, Marian watching the numbers and Mike, now 77, spouting ideas for new products, new businesses, new marketing gimmicks.

The theme crops up even in discussion of the family's estate planning. There's no easy way to estimate the value of the Ilitch holdings. Forbes magazine guessed Mike's net worth at $1.5 billion last year, and Marian reportedly paid more than $500 million for MotorCity.

The Ilitches intend to keep their various enterprises family-owned, rather than selling off pieces for cash or selling stock to the public.

"We've talked about it at length, and as we speak today, we have no intent at this time of making any changes as far as all the holdings that we have," Marian Ilitch said. "I'm just trying to curb Michael so we don't add any more."

Marian and Mike, both children of Macedonian immigrants, started the pizza chain in Detroit's suburbs after marrying in 1955 and spending a couple of years on the minor-league baseball circuit until an injury cut short Mike's playing career.

They reconnected with the city of Detroit, where Mike was raised and Marian had worked for Delta Airlines as a young woman, in 1982 with the purchase of the Red Wings, then the doormat of the National Hockey League.

"They were awful back then," she said. "All seven of my kids, we put 'em in the box office, on the phones, calling people and begging them to buy tickets. I said I wanted to show them how glamorous the sports business was."

Although the Wings were dreadful in the mid-1980s, the concert business at Joe Louis Arena was lucrative. But then the Ilitches heard about Bill Davidson's plan to build the Palace of Auburn Hills as a new home for the Detroit Pistons.

"We knew that once the Palace was built, we would most likely lose a lot of our concert business," Ilitch recalled. So when someone pitched them on buying and renovating the ornate, but dilapidated, Fox Theatre, they saw it as an opportunity to hold onto some concert business. To reduce the risk of investing in the Fox, Marian suggested that the family abandon plans to build a new Little Caesars headquarters in Farmington Hills and instead relocate to the Fox in downtown Detroit.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Mike Ilitch bought the Tigers in 1992 and moved the team to Comerica Park, a new ballpark across the street from the Fox, in 2000.

When he bought the Tigers, "we didn't know casinos would happen in our lifetime," Marian Ilitch said, noting that Major League Baseball frowns on direct ownership connections between its teams and gambling interests.

"When this opportunity came" to invest in MotorCity, she said, "I thought, why not me? Why shouldn't I invest? He had his own business and so, now, it just made a lot of sense to me."

So that's how Marian Ilitch became Detroit's queen of gaming. And why Mike and Marian, married for 52 years, parents of seven children and partners in many a business venture, must be careful about mixing business with baseball. Or is it poker with profits? Or pleasure with playoffs?

As their Macedonian parents might have said, "Ah, what a country."

Contact TOM WALSH at 313-223-4430 or twalsh@freepress.com