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John Ascuaga: Frycook who ruled the roost
Barbwire by Andrew Quarantino Barbáno / Expanded from Wednesday 6-30-2021 Sparks Tribune / Updated 7-2 & 7-7-2021 GMT / Expansions in blue

John Ascuaga died this week at 96. His passing was met with the usual fawning remembrances, all of which he deserved. But newspapers are the first draft of history and this hometown paper will do its job. Herewith, a classic obit in the old style, one for the history books. John was a hardassed businessman and I think he'd expect no less. Neither will I when I punch my ticket to what poet e.e. cummings called "a helluva good universe next door."

I met John Ascuaga a few times over my 50 years in these parts. He was quite personable and called me by name long before the Tribune went daily in 1988.

Good politicians remember people's names.

Like me, he started out as a frycook. I wonder if he still had his tools in his kitchen when he died. Old cooks are that way.

He built a neighborhood downtown casino into a behemoth. In retrospect, maybe he shouldn't have gone so far. It was only after he built his first tower in 1982 that he began to have cash flow problems paying the mortgage.

Reno's Cal-Neva did it the smart way for decades, sponging off traffic created by Bill Harrah across the street without having to build a hotel.

John was a union buster and Sparks City Hall has long reflected his attitude, rather surprising for the "Rail City" built by unionized railroads starting in 1904.

Like his Reno soul brother Don Carano at the Silver Legacy/Eldorado/Circus, John had no choice other than building his major projects with skilled union labor. Big jobs need quality work delivered on time and on budget. I still have Don Dondero's photos of me and future Assemblymember Skip Daly, D-Sparks, in the air during construction of the second Nugget Tower in 1996.

John ran a union hotel until the early 1970s. Indeed, the 1927 Reno Chamber of Commerce's official book commemorating the 1927 Transcontinental Highway Exposition in Idlewild Park stated "all trades in Reno are on a union basis," touting the abundance of qualified union labor in Washoe County.

That event brought Idlewild's venerable California Building and created the original Reno Arch which still stands on Lake Street.

There was no Interstate-80 back then. U.S. 40 West ended west of town and snaked along Reno's 4th Street and Sparks' "B" Street, continuing out east.

When I drove my tricked-out Buick Riviera into town in January, 1971, the first thing I saw coming into Sparks from Vegas on I-80 East was John Ascuaga's Nugget, which I drove right through.

When I told gambling execs in Gomorrah South that Ascuaga had a freeway built around his casino, they were duly impressed.

By the 1970s, Sparks was again a company town. Bill Harrah's Auto Collection was here, as was Southern Pacific Railroad. But John ruled.

He got city hall to deed the sidewalks in front of the Nugget to him, something the late Sheldon Adelson copied at the anti-union Las Vegas Venetian. (Thanks to former Sparks Tribune reporter Steve Timko for digging that up.)

When the American Public Transit Association convention was picketed by wheelchair-bound demonstrators in 1989, the Nugget forced the wheelchairs off the sidewalks and into the streets with traffic. I blasted the Nugget for its obtuseness on my radio show all over the west coast.

Working through a front group called Citizens for Private Enterprise, John took control of the Sparks City Council back from Mustang Ranch brothel owner Joe Conforte in 1975.

Nugget employees, still in their black-and-whites, were seen placing flyers endorsing the Nugget/CPE slate on windshields in both the Nugget and other Sparks parking lots.

For the next eight years until the voters cleaned house again, the council deliberated mostly in secret with little debate or discussion in public meetings.

They built the four-foot "Berlin Wall" down the middle of "B" Street, renamed it Victorian Blvd. and even planned to have cops costumed as British Bobbies walking the downtown beat. (Blimey.) The unlamented slanted brick planter did a hellluiva job making sure pedestrians couldn't cross the street without walking a block or two to find a gap.

I wonder if John would have liked turning Victorian Square into the Tokyo-style rabbit warren apartments of today. (Built by under-skilled non-union labor with city hall's blessings, natch.)

Sparks would have been better off with some adult supervision from the Nugget executive suite.

Alas and alack, the man who had a solid gold rooster mounted in his casino as a tourist attraction was all too human.

He met his opposite number and they went to war.

Cigar-smoking, mustachioed, red-headed ruddy Irishman Al Bramlett was John-sized, about 5-foot-4.

They have been compared to two banty roosters getting into the ring.

When the Culinary Union's contract was up for renewal in the early 1970s, Bramlett told Ascuaga "you're gonna do this, dammit."

Ascuaga said "the hell I am!"

John formed a consortium of hotels and restaurants from Washoe to Carson to South Tahoe. All colluded and refused to sign new union contracts.

Rather than pay his workers well, John paid lawyers. The legal battle continued from 1974 to 1992. The union finally won a hollow victory. With the exception of the Nugget and one or two others, all the employers had gone out of business over the intervening years. The local union by then was a shadow of its former self outside of Las Vegas and remains so. The Nugget stands non-union to this very day.

ERRATA: Another notorious union buster, Ferenc Szony (Sparks Plantation/Rail City Casino, Flamingo and Reno Hiltons, Sands Regency), told the Reno Gazette-Journal that he "believed Ascuaga was one of the key people who put Sparks in Reno-Sparks."

Not quite. John Ascuaga's Nugget advertised itself in California as located in "East Reno" well into the 1980s. Rail City fathers chafed but shut up.

SHORT-TERM THINKING. Not long after my old friend Bob McGowan became Washoe County Assessor, local casinos, starting with the Nugget, began applying for and winning major property tax cuts. They argued that their value should be based on their cash flow, not actual property values.

Combined with all the corporate welfare our state and local governments like to pass out like cookies, that policy continues to cripple local parks, schools, roads, police and fire protection budgets.

When I first met Bob in 1971, he was staff photographer at the Nugget. I hope Bob was waiting with a drink and a joke when John joined him this week.

Ironically, based on the cash flow value system, when the Ascuaga family sold the Nugget in 2013, the sale price was purportedly a paltry $27.5 million. Probably based on cash flow, not the value of the property and towers.

THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS. As with Don Carano, John left his store with his idiot kids. Not long after selling, Michonne Ascuaga resigned from the Nevada Gaming Commission after the Nugget got busted for not following federal anti-money laundering rules in the casino cage on her watch.

Carano's idiot kids did one better, taking the company into bankruptcy, stiffing a lotta folks Trump-style, then wheeling and dealing their way into taking over Caesars, the biggest gambling outfit in the world. Who says dumb jocks can't play this business game?

They are also trying to bust out the Culinary Union at Reno's Circus Circus. And unlike their old man, they don't do union construction.

Requiescas in pace, John. You made this a much more interesting place on your journey thru.

FEEDBACK/BLOWBACK: "My only complaint about the Nugget was that in 1959 when I moved to Sparks, my Mom (who was a waitress at the Nugget) used to walk down and have lunch in the shade of the beautiful large tree green belt that lined B Street. Then the Nugget cut down the trees to make more room for asphalt and cars. Maybe that was before Ascuaga's time, but I hated to see B Street ruined." — Tod [Editor's note: John ran the place in the 1950s and acquired the club from Dick Graves in 1960. The tree removal continued to cause ill will decades into the future. Trees, bad. Ugly 30-foot fiberglas gold miner statue, good.)

HOT AUGUST STRIKE? The Regional Transportation Commission's mass transit system contract with Teamsters Union Local 533 expires at midnight, June 30. Monitor NevadaLabor.com for breaking news.

Take care of each other and be careful out there.

CWA 9413/AFL-CIO