Jim Allen wasn’t bragging.
He’d just been asked to recount some of the memories and accomplishments that, stacked upon each other, led to his election into the Gaming Hall of Fame.
Allen just has very notable memories and accomplishments.
There was working his way from a humble middle-class background to the leadership of a global hospitality giant.
There was revolutionizing the status of tribal gambling in the United States.
Oh, and how he personally devised the so-called “hub-and-spoke” mobile sports betting model that might help the Seminole Tribe of Florida again chart the future of Native gambling.
Not bad for someone who considers himself a “low-key humble kind of guy.”
“I certainly acknowledge and appreciate the recognition,” Allen, 64, said in an extensive interview with Gaming Today. “Some people get very, very high energy on this stuff. To me, it’s been a long career, and I’m very thankful that I’m being acknowledged.”
Among the many adjectives attached to the chairman of Hard Rock International and CEO of Seminole Gaming by those who have worked for or with him, or just observed him, include driven, detail-oriented, focused, and decisive. Then there’s visionary, unflappable.
Robert Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern in Fort Lauderdale, has long been impressed with the career and its arc.
“Let me start off by saying I have no dog in this fight. I’m just a law professor who studies and teaches and writes about gambling,” he told Gaming Today.
“But he’s amazing. He has transformed the [Seminole] Tribe. He has transformed Florida. He has transformed Indian gaming across the nation.
“You could not use enough superlatives in describing what Jim Allen has done and meant to all those entities.”
“Jim should be on the Mount Rushmore of gaming in the US,” Marc Dunbar, a Florida-based attorney who has represented the Seminole Tribe, told Gaming Today. “His hand has been on some of the most progressive evolutions in US gaming history.”
Wash a Car, Start a Career
The drive and the focus on detail has long been an Allen trait. At 13, in 1974, he presented himself at a Northfield, N.J., Italian restaurant looking for a job even though its owner, Richard Walters, wasn’t offering one. After being rebuffed three times, Allen concocted a plan.
“He was renovating a restaurant right at the end of the corner of the street that I grew up on. So I just went there every day, brought my own broom and rake, and just started to rake the leaves or sweep the construction dust,” Allen said. “And when I got noticed, I was just kind of this pain-in-the-neck kid, just hanging around the site.”
Then Allen spotted Walters’ Mercedes SL, complete with wire wheels. It wasn’t as perfect as it should have been.
“I could see that it was a little bit dirty, and I decided to wash it on my own,” Allen said. “I don’t know if he wanted to kill me or hug me for having initiative.”
Hug, apparently. Allen was brought on as a dishwasher, then bus boy, and a prep cook who got pretty good at sauces. He worked his way up from free to $20 a week on weekends and after-school shifts. On one of those weekend nights, with Allen expected home in a half hour, Walters’ general manager, “Pete,” Allen recalled, stormed out after an argument. Allen made it through the shift filling in for Pete and from then forward, was on the schedule.
Walters continued to build restaurants in the area, with Allen becoming more ingrained in the daily minutiae of the process and ever-cognizant of how details dictate success or failure.
“Even in that first restaurant when Richard kind of embraced me, we were doing renovations,” Allen said. “There were plans, there was ‘Move this, cut this piece of wood, get up the ladder, do that.’ So he was just incredibly instrumental at exposing me to other sides of the business.”
Allen doesn’t have to get up ladders anymore. He could hunker down in his office in South Florida and take occasional strolls across the casino floor of the Guitar Hotel. But he’s still known to sign off on the placement of a chair or some other detail well removed from his job title, but not his gaze. It was a personality trait sharpened by his formative working experience, he said.
“I was always someone that, my room was always clean, my bike was always perfect and I was always out in the woods or in the garage tinkering or building something,” he said. “[Walters] must have seen some of that in me because there’s no doubt he exposed me to things that would’ve just never happened if he didn’t take that initiative.”
From the Dishwasher to the Board Room
As a motivated kid from New Jersey enamored with the hospitality business, a career in the gambling industry seemed almost inevitable in hindsight. It came quickly. But, again, at the bottom rung. After graduating from Mainland Regional High School in 1978, Allen studied hotel management courses in night school at Atlantic Cape Community College. He then earned gambling certifications through a course at the University of Nevada-Reno.
By 1979 he was working at Bally’s Park Place in Atlantic City, as a cook. But Allen again exhibited his usefulness and eagerness beyond his job description. He soon began working in food and beverage control and helped Bally’s master a new automated inventory system that integrated all aspects of the restaurant operation.
“We were the first to get that done, completely automated,” Allen said. “And that was probably my really big break into getting into more the … in the old days, we used the term, ‘shirt-and-tie type management’ versus working solely in the restaurant.”
His momentum quickened. Allen was hired as purchasing manager at the Atlantic City Hilton, then with the Trump Organization after it took over management of the property. Allen eventually became part of senior management and then vice president of operations with the Trump Organization before leaving to work in casino real estate development.
“It goes to show that you do not have to have a college degree, you do not have to come from privileged circumstances,” Jarvis said. “If you have drive, if you have determination, you can achieve the American dream. I mean, it is the classic rags-to-riches American dream.”
South African entrepreneur Sol Kerzner hired Allen as senior vice president of property operations with Mohegan Sun in 1995, where he was instrumental in the development of Atlantis Paradise Island. Allen stayed with Mohegan Sun and Kerzner — who he considers a “second father” — for six years.
Allen’s springboard to his most influential period in the gambling industry began mundanely. Friend and former Mohegan executive Kevin DeSanctis in 2001 mentioned to Allen that he was considering executive positions at Penn National or “do this deal with the Seminoles” in Florida. He asked if Allen was interested in either of the opportunities.
“I looked at both and said, ‘I don’t think I want to work for Penn National Gaming’,” Allen remembered. “But I was very intrigued by the Seminole opportunity.”
Seminole Tribe + Jim Allen + Opportunity
The Seminole tribe had long been a vanguard of tribal gaming. It started when they emerged from the Everglades and opened high-stakes bingo halls that were the first stones in what is now a multi-billion-dollar global hospitality business through the Hard Rock International brand they purchased in 2006. The spree of litigation that has followed their capitalization of native sovereignty has created landmark opportunities for other tribes, too.
“There were 72 other bidders, including hotel companies, restaurant companies, private equity firms, obviously casino companies, and a very, very difficult process. We’re still a little surprised that we won,” Allen said, laughing, “but we did.”
Jim Allen, the driven and visionary Jersey guy, and the tiny tribe with big aspirations found the right time and place together.
“It was the perfect storm in that you had a tribe that was ready to go, that was very ambitious at a time when the laws were changing to make what they wanted to do possible,” Jarvis said. “But that was because of much bigger societal factors and changes in attitude that the Seminoles had no control over. And they were just the beneficiaries But that’s not to take anything away from either the tribe or Jim Allen.”
Under Allen’s leadership, the Seminole Tribe wielded its virtual monopoly on casino-style gambling in Florida to expand to six properties, including the so-called Guitar Hotel in Hollywood, which is the iconic symbol of the Hard Rock brand and ambition. That blue glass-and-metal building, Jarvis said, is a monument to Allen’s accomplishments.
“He came up with the idea for the Guitar Hotel and the architects had told him that it could not be done,” Jarvis said. “And he said, ‘Yes, it can.’ And he pushed them until they finally came back and said, ‘All right, all right. You’re right. It can be done.’ That piece of the story should not be overlooked because that is such a perfect example of how Jim Allen sees things that no one else sees.”
Allen Influenced All Tribal Gambling
Clearly, my number one priority is to help the tribes. — Jim Allen
Having built tribal relationships at Mohegan and commercial bonds elsewhere, Allen was the perfect bridge to help stimulate Native gambling not only in Florida, but elsewhere.
"What we've been able to create, has certainly been beneficial for the members of the Seminole tribe. But so much that we've done has now been mirrored and utilized by so many other tribes," he said. "I am the person who created the opportunity for Class II gaming devices, number one, to be all be linked and networked, and number two, no one in the major manufacturers — Bally, IGT Aristocrat — none of 'em had ever done business with Class II gaming with tribes.
"I had put that relationship together. That really laid the foundation for all the Oklahoma tribes to get their compacts done. It laid the foundation for California tribes. Some of them did have compacts, but there was a maximum 2000-game limit. So now they could use this Class II device that had all the IGT titles."
A 2016 Forbes story posited that "Allen may well be the single best champion of Indigenous people since Franklin Delano Roosevelt enacted the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934."
"I wouldn't have this type of success if it wasn't for the Seminoles' sovereignty and being here in Florida," Allen said. "That is the most important thing to be acknowledged, but very humbly, I am the person that negotiated all the compacts, and I am the person who came up with the hub and spoke model. I am the person who created Hard Rock Digital and convinced all the team from Stars [Group] to come with us.
"One doesn't happen without the other. You think about it, we have a compact that allows us to have sports betting. But we own the company that is the provider of the sports betting. And that was incredibly unique."
Marc Dunbar, a Florida-based attorney who has represented the Seminole Tribe, told Gaming Today that Seminole tribal counsel Jim Shore and Allen "have navigated successfully some of the most complicated business evolutions facing a tribal sovereign and chartered the course for its evolution into one of the global power brands in gaming, hospitality and entertainment."
The first rule of tribal gaming: watch the Seminoles. https://t.co/g5JSHZH08r
— Victor Rocha (@VictorRocha1) May 20, 2024
Hub-and-Spoke and the Next Tribal Advance
Hub-and-spoke, the evolutionary mobile sports betting model that weathered a two-year shutdown during court challenges at state, federal and Supreme Court levels, that relaunched in Florida in 2023 via the Hard Rock Bet app, that was Allen, too. Not some lawyer, or coder or tech firm big-thinker.
Not that Allen isn't all of that by proxy.
What Is Hub-and-Spoke?
The US Supreme Court's decision not to take up West Flagler Associates' final bid to shut down the system ended three years of litigation and uncertainty.
Simplified, courts ruled that hub-and-spoke allows the Seminoles gambling operation to accept mobile sports bets state-wide in Florida — even though it wasn't legalized off tribal lands — because it offers parimutuel outlets the right to enter into marketing deals and rebrand Hard Rock Bet as their own product. Several Florida parimutuels have done so in exchange for a "60 percent of the difference between the net win that an operator generates and a "reasonable and proportionate share of all expenses incurred by the Tribe."
This format was included — with blackjack and roulette — in a 30-year compact signed with the state in 2021.
"I realized and respected and recognized the influence — politically — of the parimutuel industry," Allen said. "And I knew I would never get the compact done if I didn't include them."
Allen organized a small group to begin working on the project, believing that federal law and the compact structure would require that the betting platform and servers be "controlled by the tribe or the sovereign nation," but that these marketing deals would pass legal muster.
"I started to get some real traction with, I'm going to say, five-to-six or so parimutuels," he said. "We then sent a letter to every parimutuel in the state. We offered it to everyone, including those that were trying to block us. That's how we got it done. Because the reality is, we needed some platform connectability to the individual platforms, the individual parimutuel's websites. That was the technology side, but the idea and getting everyone to agree was, very humbly, 100% myself. I met with every track myself."
The legal triumph's reverberations could be felt as far away as California, the elusive unrealized prize for tribal and commercial sports betting operators in the United States. They've already been felt in Colorado, where two tribes are suing the state for a deal similar to the that of the Seminoles.
Victor Rocha, owner and editor of Pechanga.net and conference chairman for the Indian Gaming Association, told PlayUSA:
"Let’s give it to the Seminoles, undefeated since Columbus. When the deal first came out, I think a lot of people in the industry said, ‘Oh no, that’s too much.’ But the governor signed off on it, the secretary of interior signed off on it, and now the court has signed off on it. Now the big question going forward as it relates to us in California is does it give the template for California tribes to do that hub-and-spoke model?”
Now What?
The next big work project for Allen figures to be the same as every other gambling executive: getting online casino in as many states where Hard Rock does business as possible.
Florida remains a "primary foundation block of the business," he said, before mentioning that the Hard Rock brand is doing business in 70 countries around the world, that the company has seven integrated resorts under construction, 118 hotel deals signed on top of the 40-plus the company is operating currently. There will be more Hard Rock Cafe openings internationally. Details.
"But the real opportunity in the future is Hard Rock sports betting and iGaming, that clearly is the future, I believe, of the industry in the next 10 to 20 years," he said.
And the prospects in Florida?
"I think it's like anything: you have to navigate through the process with the state, and we want to be very respectful to that," he said. "We'll take one step at a time."
Jim Allen Doesn't Think He Needs a Hobby
Driven has consequences.
Allen has not so much struggled with work/life balance as much as wished there were more hours in a day. He's a believer, he said, that "half a day's work is at least 12 hours."
He has no hobbies. And he doesn't want any.
"Yeah, that's probably … well, that's definitely true," he said.
"It's just the way my schedule works, there's just not time for hobbies, you know? I'm not opposed to people doing any of those activities."
Allen said he's feeling fit and has been in good health in recent years. But he underwent open heart surgery in 2012 and has been encouraged by his cardiologists to work in some time for himself.
"They've been telling me that forever," he said. "I feel great. I always joke with the heart doctor, I said, 'Is there something wrong with our insurance? Are you not getting paid?' He says, 'I assume. Why do you ask?' I said, 'Because as long as you're getting paid, your job is to keep me alive. My job is to make sure you're getting your insurance paid.
"I'm not focused on any negative health issues right now."
Perhaps T-Ball could be a future pastime. He and his wife, Shelly, welcomed a new son last year.
"Best best thing ever happened to me," he said. "I have to live for another 30 years."
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