During the early 1990s, there was no bigger name in Las Vegas than Steve Wynn. The Forbes list-topping executive had launched some of Sin City’s most iconic and most successful casinos, including the now-shuttered volcano-themed Mirage Hotel and Casino, which debuted in 1989, and the swashbuckling Treasure Island Hotel and Casino, which opened its doors to great fanfare on October 26, 1993.
Three months earlier, though, on July 26, 1993, one of Wynn’s two daughters was kidnapped at gunpoint by a pair of masked men who hid outside her home for hours, waiting for her to return from work. The kidnappers then phoned the casino mogul demanding $2.5 million in ransom cash for the 26-year-old’s safe return.
The unsettling abduction of Kevyn Wynn ended up dominating newspaper headlines for weeks after she was found on July 27, 1993, unharmed but restrained inside her own car, which the criminals left parked at Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport.
Within hours of receiving Kevyn’s captors’ demands, Steve, 51 at the time, managed to negotiate his daughter’s release. He took $1.45 million in $100 bills from the vault inside the cage at the Mirage and had his chauffeur deliver the money to the two kidnappers in the parking lot of Sonny’s Saloon, a bar where the kidnappers planned their caper.
Steve, who got his start in gaming in Atlantic City, N.J., did all of this without ever involving the local authorities.
“We do not have a big history of kidnappings and disappearances, despite the mob history, so this was big news,” Michael Green, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “Wynn often was treated very carefully in the local media, because he was a big name with big money and he did not object to throwing his own weight around. Kevyn was not harmed physically, but mentally, I am sure it was a horrific experience—and it was, of course, very difficult for her sister [Gillian] and her parents.”
