Instead of picking world-class MGM Mirage or Hard Rock Entertainment to run the city’s first video-slot parlor, Gov. Paterson is betting on the company that runs the largest casino in all of . . . tiny Elko, Nev.
And if the Red Lion Hotel & Casino in the sleepy backwater town 500 miles from Vegas is any indication, Aqueduct is well on its way to being redeveloped as a Sin City resort — circa 1972.
The Post spent the weekend in Elko to get an idea of how the Navegante Group — the gaming arm of the politically connected winning Aqueduct bidder, AEG — operates, since the desert town is where most of its holdings are.
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Navegante acquired the Red Lion in 2006 but has so far been unable to turn the tide.
“This is a casino that might have been in Vegas — in the 1970s,” said Courtni Greenwell, who works at the casino’s Starbucks.
A third of the hotel’s rooms have been renovated, but “still smell like an ashtray,” one regular said. And the only entertainment currently offered at the casino, aside from the slots and table games, is karaoke.
The other three properties Navegante owns in town are in even worse shape.
The carpeting “is stained and dirty, and they just laugh at me when I ask for it to be replaced,” said Thunderbird Motel front-desk clerk Velma Cheety. “There’s a bullet hole in the window from five years ago, and they won’t replace that, either.
“And now they’re going out to New York?”
David Zornes, CEO for Navegante’s properties in Elko, defended his hotels.
“There’s nothing we don’t repair. If we know about it, we do it,” he said.
Lifelong residents in this town of 40,000 said Elko can hardly be considered a proving ground to make it in the Big Apple.
They should know — the company is focused nearly exclusively on locals after it stopped subsidizing charter flights of tourists to bring them to town. Instead, Navegante now regularly doles out $5 vouchers to Elko residents to help bring in business.
Unlike on the Vegas Strip, where you’re apt to see Gucci-slinging celebrities dining at four-star eateries, in downtown Elko, it’s cowboy hats and mullets chowing down in restaurants with deer antlers on the walls.
“Look at this town. It’s ugly. It’s dirty,” Cheety said. “We’re an old cow town off the Interstate, nothing like New York.”
When the company needed photos of the motel for advertisements, it “painted the left and the right side of the building but not the middle,” she said. “And you can’t see the middle, so they didn’t bother. But why not just finish the job? It looks funny.”
Founded in 1996 by former MGM Grand CEO Larry Woolf, Navegante owns or manages seven casinos in Nevada, Canada and Wisconsin, although none of them on the scale of the planned video slot parlor at Aqueduct.
Navegante contends that it is actually a better fit for the Aqueduct job than the bigger players in the industry.
“A lot of the guys running these big operations have never run a casino in their lives — they’re Wall Street guys,” said Larry B. Woolf, the CEO’s son.
“We have been in a similar situation before, when we beat out Caesars and Circus Circus to get the contract for Casino Niagara, which when we opened it at that time, generated more per square foot than any other casino.
“We don’t have a board to report to. We make our own decisions, and we are competent, experienced, impeccable.”
Michelle Fitzsimmons, 50, a cocktail waitress at the Red Lion, backed up her bosses.
“In this town, this casino is managed the best because, well, the other two went bankrupt,” she said.