Courting Lady Luck With a Dose of Superstition
Among high-rollers, superstitions can quickly escalate from the demanding to the absurd. Some millionaires will sleep on the couch because they believe a bed with a headboard will beckon bad fortune. Others crowd themselves with citrus—often with holes poked to “unleash the luck”—scattering pierced oranges and lemons around the suite, letting them rot during longer stays. Also lucky for clients from the Far East: filling water basins to the brim. That’s how one high-roller flooded his bathtub … and the suite underneath.

It gets weirder: Some guests are completely phobic about having anything thrown away, lest the discarded object be something lucky. Hot winning streaks may be accompanied by mounds of cigarette ashes, crumpled paper, or random assortments of trash. It’s so common, most butlers know never to remove anything from a gaming table without triple-checking. Once, a high-roller wanted to rescue an “auspicious” piece of used plastic wrap his wife had accidentally tossed, and sent his butler rifling through the hotel’s trash system.

Of course, some quirks are fully individual. One notorious guest, for instance, requests glass after glass of scotch on the rocks while he’s on the gaming floor—not for drinking, but to moisten a tiny brown “medicine bag” that hangs from his neck. No one’s ever figured out what it is, but Mantle is sure the guest practices some kind of Santeria. “Once, we found a room service cart in his penthouse, half-melted by hundreds of candles,” she says. “I’m honestly surprised he didn’t burn the hotel down!”

Hosts With the Mosts
Boulevard Penthouse guests get pampered by two legions of staff: butlers and hosts. Hosts are like banker-bestie hybrids who liaise between high-rollers and casino: they extend interest-free, seven-figure lines of credit and learn how much players are willing to throw down and how risk-prone they are.

Each of the Cosmopolitan’s 25 hosts nurtures a portfolio of 300 to 500 clients who’ve demonstrated the propensity to play hard. Almost all of the clients are men, ranging in age from millennials to 70-year-olds, and they stick around for three to five years before going dark—usually due to bad investments, dips in the economy, or divorce.

Only 15 to 20 of a host’s contacts can be deemed “worthy” of an open invite into the Boulevard Penthouses—and managing that VVIP list is among a host’s most important tasks, since penthouse invites are on a “whenever you want” basis, rather than for particular dates or times.

It’s no wonder, then, that hosts often become engrained in their client’s personal lives, being invited to weddings, birthdays, sports events, and kids’ graduations. They get to dip into the casino’s coffers for gifts that will cement the bonds, says Kelly Van Aken, vice president of national marketing. That can be anything from a fabulous bottle of wine to an $18,000 Birkin bag, or a hand-delivered platter of Peking Duck from their favorite Vegas restaurant.

Tips that Tip the Scales
Seven-figure bets often mean sky-high tips. It’s standard for a weekending penthouse guest to leave between $300 and $500 for housekeeping—plus a few hundred dollars a day for the butlers. The record-setter, however, was a $40,000 gratuity for a couple of days of service, left by a famously generous repeat guest. Like all other tips, it was divvied up amongst the butlers, based on their hourly work commitments.

But butlers don’t get the biggest tips; dealers do. In fact, a gig at the Cosmopolitan’s casino is so coveted that auditions are by invite only. That’s because its gamblers commonly make wagers with the intent of giving the dealer the winnings, as a tip.  The Cosmopolitan's largest bet of this kind, a $150,000 wager, would have yielded $300,000 in winnings for the dealer, had it not been a bust.

Not-So-Petty Theft
That giant vault in the basement of the Bellagio that Clooney and his crew masterfully emptied in Ocean’s 11? There’s no such thing. Casinos quickly move their liquid assets to banks and secondary locations—though almost $91 million worth of chips was exposed on the casino floor while I was on staff.