This is Tony Rodio, Hollywood Boss

By Greg Hoard

He’s Tony Rodio, the man in charge of Hollywood Casino, Lawrenceburg. He’s the man Penn Gaming hired to oversee the $336-million conversion from the Argosy riverboat to this gigantic, impressive structure perched on the Ohio just 23 miles downriver from Cincinnati, and captain its voyage into a new era of entertainment in the Tri-state area.
Gigantic?
Try two decks each wider than an aircraft carrier, as long as a football field and capable of accommodating 9,000 guests, 5,000 more than the Argosy could handle.
There are 4,400 gaming positions, more than any other riverboat casino in the country; 41 tables in the World Poker Tour room, the largest of it’s kind in the Midwest.
You can bet high, you can bet low, but odds are you can not keep up with Tony Rodio as he points out one new attraction after another: there’s a 60-foot serpentine video wall, nine large billboards and over 300 flat screen displays featuring first-run movie trailers, video shorts and sporting events. There are bars and restaurants and people, people everywhere. It’s as hard to absorb in one visit as it is difficult to keep pace with Tony Rodio. He can walk a mile faster than some can run it.
“Uh, hang on. I got a knee and a bad back.”
“Oh, sorry. I’m strictly ‘Type-A’,” he says, and he’s on the move again.”
“Uh,” clearly stalling. “Pretty crowded for a Wednesday afternoon.”
“Not bad for a weekday,” he says. “On an average weekday we’ll get 10,000 people. But you should see it on the weekends. Last Friday we had 24,500 people and Saturday we topped 20,000. I’m confident we’ll continue to grow. We’re capable of 30,000 on a Friday or Saturday and I’m sure we’ll meet that. In the course of a year, I think we will see over four million people. Oh, you got to see this.
It’s Hollywood on the Roof.”
It’s a staging and performance area that resembles the Hollywood Bowl where national acts perform and video is projected on the roof over a large bar area that overlooks the atrium. Tony Rodio is beaming. “Pretty cool, don’t you think?”
In fact, Hollywood Casino is nothing like anything else in the Cincinnati area, and Tony Rodio shatters every shallow stereotype associated with the world of casinos and gaming: no pinky rings or shark skin suits, no entourage, no one whispering in his ear, not a woman in sight in leopard skin tights.
This is Tony Rodio, who looks far more like your local golf pro than De Niro or Pacino in full and shadowy character. He hustles about the building in a polo shirt and slacks picking up scraps of paper, candy wrappers, talking with patrons and employees, solving problems, offering a greeting – everyone calling him “Tony.” “I insist on it,” he says. “Mr. Rodio was my father.”
And, by the way, Tony Rodio – while it sounds too perfect for a casino boss – is his given name. “Yep,” he says, with a broad, bright smile, “that’s it, my real name. But people always want to misspell it. They want to spell it ‘R-o-d-e-o.’ My standard line is, ‘I’m Italian, not a cowboy.’”
Like the boat he commands, Tony Rodio offers a surprise at every turn.

He grew up in New Jersey, Hammonton, in the southern part of the state on a farm where his parents grew tomatoes, peppers, corn and strawberries. “Most people think of New Jersey they think of Newark and Trenton,” he says. “Southern New Jersey is very different. It’s rural, agricultural. That’s why it’s called ‘The Garden State.’”
Hammonton was a close-knit, hard-working Italian community. In the evening and on weekends, when the work was done on the farm, his parents and grandparents – first generation immigrants – would gather at the kitchen table and play cards. “There was always some kind of card game going on: euchre, pinochle, something, friendly wagers on football games,” he says. “We all loved football.”
Laughter swirled about the table and dreams that some day the money would be right and they could travel to Las Vegas, try the tables, see a show and just maybe see the stars: Sinatra, Dean Martin. But the money was never right and the time was never available. The dream didn’t come to pass.

In 1976, New Jersey passed a referendum becoming the first jurisdiction in the country outside of Nevada to legalize gambling. The casinos opened two years later and Rodio still remembers the pictures in The Atlantic City Journal, still has them. “People lined up for what seemed like miles just to get in the door,” he says. “There were shows and stars and it was just 25 miles up the road. There was just something exciting and sexy and cool about casinos,” he says. “You know, all these stars, all this allure and mystique…And all of a sudden it’s in my backyard. I knew I wanted to be a part of that.”
There were 76 people in Tony Rodio’s graduating class at St. Joe’s High School, where he played baseball and basketball. He attended Rider College where he refined his acumen for numbers and seeing tangibles behind the math. He majored in accounting and earned a graduate degree from Monmouth.
He landed his first casino job at Harrah’s Atlantic City. He was an accounting clerk making $4.00 an hour, but he was in the door, where he wanted to be and he had the good sense to see beyond the superficial glamour of the business. “It isn’t – it’s never been – just open the doors, watch the folks flock to the tables and then go count the cash,” he says. “It’s lot more sophisticated than that and on many fronts. There’s the accounting piece, the marketing piece, the way we keep track of our customers and rate them and make offers to them based on their geography – their distance from the casino – and how often they play…
“There’s the analytical end of it…It’s critical that you are watching your margins and ratios…You have to make sure all your internal controls are in place and no one is stealing from the casino, that there are no improprieties…No, it’s not just open the doors and count the money.”
Certainly, there is a lot to count. On a Friday or Saturday, Rodio estimates that $1.2 million is wagered at the table games. But the slots see the most activity. “On a weekend, we can see $25 million wagered on the slots,” he says. “Yeah, even in these times.”

While Hollywood Casino opened June 29th to rave reviews and financial success, Rodio maintains the vigilant, analytical eye that’s guided him through the industry: from accounting clerk to senior management and finance positions with Harrah’s Entertainment, Trump Entertainment, Resorts Casino and the Atlantic City Hilton.
For every success in Lawrenceburg, he guards against the errors he witnessed in Atlantic City. “For years, Atlantic City had a monopoly on gaming in the east,” he says. “Then, the competition started coming.”
Indian casinos opened in Connecticut. Slots came to Rhode Island and the racetracks in New York. Delaware legalized gambling and Maryland. Pennsylvania passed a referendum for slots and casinos. “There are two casinos coming to downtown Philadelphia,” he says. “Atlantic City is in trouble and the crime – the shame – is that we had a 20-, 25-year head-start on all these other jurisdictions but didn’t create that destination resort identity and didn’t create all those other amenities – other than gaming – that would keep it viable when competition arrived.
“The $336 million investment we made here was partly because we were capacity constrained, but it was also done with an eye toward the future to protect us, if or when, Kentucky and Ohio get gaming. We want to create an experience that is, quite frankly, better than anything else anyone can conceive in this area.”
There are plans to expand and enhance the casino’s 300-room hotel, adding a high-end theater and possibly convention space. “That’s if we are still the only gaming jurisdiction in the area,” Rodio says. “If there is a casino in downtown Cincinnati or at Turfway Park in Northern Kentucky, that will impact our revenue so the deployment of capital will be altered.”
In the meantime, he is here for “the duration,” spending most days and nights spreading the word about Hollywood Casino. “I tell everyone I meet, whether it’s in a restaurant in downtown Cincinnati or at a Reds game: ‘You have got to see this place. It’s like nothing else in the area.’ Hey, you can come out here on a weekend, see a show, have a nice meal, have a great time and never place a bet. It’s the experience. That’s what I try to get across to people.”
He has to hurry off to another meeting, but wait! Someone left a drink behind over there and an empty pack of cigarettes. Better grab that real quick, and someone is trying to reach him on his cell phone. “Pardon me, I have to take this,” he says.
This is Tony Rodio, keenly attentive to detail. He’s in the casino business, has been for nearly 30 years, but he is not a gambling man – not to speak of.