HANDS-ON HIGH ROLLER

Not five minutes after Boyd Gaming bought the Par-a-dice riverboat casino in East Peoria, Ill., Bob Boughner, then the company's chief operating officer, took a walk to check out the joint.

A large chandelier, black from cigarette smoke, caught his eye. Boughner wanted it cleaned. But instead of calling for housekeeping, he got a ladder and polished it himself.

The story is vintage Boughner, and it has become part of Boyd legend. Boughner, now chief executive of Borgata, the Atlantic City casino that opened last month, is obsessed with details, and he's not above getting his hands dirty to get the job done.

Boughner, 50, approached the $1.1 billion Borgata, the biggest task of his 27-year career with Boyd, no differently. He has been involved in Atlantic City's first new casino in 13 years since it was an idea on the back of a napkin.

He personally chose the casino's barbers, selected the hotel toiletries and auditioned the restaurant chefs. He even slept on different mattresses before settling on the kind he wanted for the hotel rooms -- then bought one for himself.

He is infatuated with refining the processes used to take restaurant reservations, check in hotel guests and retrieve cars in valet parking. He even had the reservations center built across from his office so he can keep tabs on the number of calls and their average length.

It will be months before it becomes clear whether Boughner's approach pays off. Borgata, co-owned by Boyd and MGM Mirage, was billed as a resort-changing casino, one that could help grow the market at a time when Atlantic City faces new competition from surrounding states.

Although it opened little more than a month ago, Borgata already has reported results that put it in the top tier of the industry. In its first 26 days, Borgata said its average slot win was $306 per unit per day, compared with a city average of $262 for last July, and its table win was $4,257 per day, well above the Atlantic City average of $3,122. But analysts are disappointed that opening costs have eaten into margins, and the casino is not expected to contribute to Boyd's earnings until next year.

Some still question whether Borgata can make good on the promise of luring a new type of gambler -- someone younger and more affluent than the typical low-rolling senior citizen -- or whether it will just steal players from its 11 Atlantic City competitors. Boughner said gamblers in the 21- to 40-year-old age group made up 21 percent of Borgata's customers in the first 26 days, but the vast majority were over 50.

Most analysts believe that, at least initially, Borgata will hurt its competitors. After the Trump Taj Mahal opened in 1990 -- the last casino to open before Borgata -- marketing wars ensued. Revenues for the industry jumped 6 percent, but cash flow dropped 3 percent, UBS analyst Robin Farley wrote in a recent report. Without the Taj, cash flow for the other casinos fell 14 percent.

"No matter how much (Borgata) elevates the market, we expect it to eat into others' cash flow when we head into the late fall and winter," Farley said.

Boughner does not disagree. He said the initial goal was to take "significant share from competitors," and then, over time, increase market size.

But he doesn't feel any obligation to other operators -- or to Atlantic City, for that matter.

"We feel no responsibility to transform this city," he said. "What we feel is the responsibility to transform the Marina District."

The Marina District is now home to three casinos: Borgata, Harrah's and Trump Marina. The other nine casinos are along the legendary Boardwalk.

"Any transformation that takes place along the Boardwalk is really someone else's responsibility," Boughner said. "And it needs it."

For all the tough talk, Atlantic City's newest casino boss is an intensely private man who steers conversation away from his personal life to talk business. All he would say about his pre-casino life was that he grew up on Long Island and, as a teenager, moved to Arizona, where he worked in restaurants and later a hotel. He left for Las Vegas in 1976 to attend the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Boughner took a nontraditional route through the ranks. While many casino bosses start as dealers, Boughner has done just about everything but deal. With Boyd, he started as a timekeeper recording workers' hours at the California Hotel & Casino in downtown Las Vegas, then took a job as a fry cook and later became a chef.

Boyd Gaming's chairman, Bill Boyd, remembers the first encounter he had with the then-23-year-old Boughner "very, very vividly."

He asked Boughner what his goals were. "He looked me in the eye and said, 'I want your job,'" Boyd recalled. "I was impressed. That showed he wanted to go all the way to the top."

Boughner did just that, ultimately becoming Boyd Gaming's chief operating officer and a member of its board, and Boyd became his mentor.

Along the way, Boyd said, Boughner committed himself to understanding every aspect of the casino business. In his off-hours, he learned to play craps, baccarat and video poker because he wanted to experience gambling from a customer's perspective.

In 1996, Boyd Gaming was offered the chance to develop and co-own a casino in Atlantic City with casino visionary Steve Wynn. It was a major break for the small Las Vegas casino company, and Boughner was sent to get the project off the ground.

Nearly two years ago, Boyd asked his COO to recommend three candidates for the job as Borgata's CEO. Boughner handed him a list with his name on the top.

Although it is a step down to go from chief operating officer of the parent company to head of a single casino, not everyone -- Boughner included -- sees it that way.

Building a casino from the ground up "is an opportunity afforded to few in our business," said Andrew Zarnett, a Deutsche Bank Securities analyst.

Larry Mullin, formerly the chief operating officer of Trump Marina and now Borgata's executive vice president of marketing, compared Boughner with his old boss, Donald Trump. "Donald gave you the building, and he let you run," Mullin said. "Here, Bob's more hands-on."

Boughner's employees are used to him checking up on them. "I probably get a dozen calls a day," said Joe Lupo, Borgata's vice president of operations.

In an industry that sells opulence, Boughner is more practical, shunning elaborate executive offices. He built the Borgata offices in three sizes; the largest -- the size of his office -- is 10-by-12 feet. None has a private restroom.

But where other casino executives tend to avoid management-speak, Boughner talks in buzzwords. Borgata, he often says, has to be "aspirational yet accessible." They are terms Boughner's underlings often repeat.

Although Boughner is known at Boyd Gaming as the go-to man for getting a project off the ground, Boyd said he expects him to stay in Atlantic City for a while. Still, Boughner keeps two residencies -- one in Las Vegas, the other in A.C.

Borgata "has been Bob's baby," Boyd said. "He's treated it like his child, and it shows."

That is the way Boughner has always approached his work, said Stan Patmor, who hired Boughner as a busboy at his Bombay Bicycle Club restaurant in Scottsdale, Ariz., when he was 17. Within four years, Boughner was managing one of Patmor's restaurants.

"He was a hard, honest worker," Patmor said. "I would have been surprised if he had reached less than what he has."