By Dana Kennedy,Editor

Copyright dailymail

Don’t tell Vegas Pauly C about the shocking decline in Sin City tourism – he knows firsthand the skyrocketing prices for everything from mediocre buffets and water bottles to parking and resort fees.

He was ranting about sticker shock two years ago.

‘Bacon, egg, and cheese on a croissant is $14, a slice of crappy pizza, $13? At Eataly I paid $52 for two drinks and two slices of pizza… I got 3 million views on Instagram for that one and I knew we were seeing the beginning of a big problem.

‘And you know why? Nobody tells you why. This place is mortgaged up to its eyeballs!

‘And too many of the casino owners don’t understand Vegas. They don’t understand compulsive gamblers. You can’t learn this at Harvard Business School.’

Pauly C – real name Paul Contino – is a bald, sometimes broke, 60-year-old former telecommunications executive from Long Island and self-described ‘full-time, degenerate gambler since the age of seven’ who launched himself as a gambling influencer two years ago and has quickly become a rising star on the Strip.

Back in the day, the smooth crooners of the Rat Pack may have ruled — but there’s a new brand of kid in town, complete with an old-school New York accent and controversial opinions.

‘Look at me, I’m a nerd,’ he told Daily Mail on a recent night out in Vegas where, dressed in his customary blue jeans, hoodie, and sneakers, he was fielding invitations to parties from eager casino executives while craps table-hopping from the Bellagio to the Rio and way down to the Strat.

Buxom Playboy cover model Leah Speake broke away from her table to cozy up to Contino at Tao’s 20th anniversary party – almost spilling over into his lap – while the immaculately-dressed Jason Strauss, co-CEO of the Tao empire, came by to hang out and glad-handers including DJ Pauly D of ‘Jersey Shore’ fame paid homage to him.

‘Nobody would look at me twice before 2023. It’s as much a surprise to me as it is to anyone else,’ he told Daily Mail.

Known for his signature ‘Well Hello! Hello! Hello! I’m Vegas Pauly C-eeeeeee!’ on his social media accounts, Contino stands out from other gambling influencers like Vegas Matt or Lady Luck who have more followers thanks to a rapid-fire blunt wit coupled with a lifelong obsession with numbers and financial data.

He regularly calls out and beefs with the biggest casino executives for what he sees is their tone-deaf and ruinous management of their establishments and can quote chapter and verse on every casino spreadsheet and boss in Vegas.

He was thrown out of a favorite target, Hilton World Resorts (‘the guys who run that place have no clue what they’re doing’), but then the bosses there relented, he said, and called him personally to invite him back.

He saves some of his worst vitriol for Caesars CEO Thomas Reeg who’s notorious among Vegas insiders for pulling the plug on the casino’s buffets a few years ago, explaining it wasn’t their job to feed guests and saying, Marie Antoinette style, ‘God forbid they stop at McDonald’s on the way home.’

‘The biggest idiot in Las Vegas is Tom Reeg,’ Contino said. ‘Terrible product at a terrible price, mortgaged up to his eyeballs. But there are a lot of idiots out here.’

Reeh has not responded to Daily Mail’s request for comment.

Pauly C – who loves the 1995 Robert De Niro/Sharon Stone movie ‘Casino’ so much he has seen it at least 30 times – longs for the days when gangsters who ran the now long-gone Riviera, Stardust, Marina and Hacienda were breaking bones, burying enemies in holes in the desert and calling each other ‘balloon heads.’

Instead he’s stuck, he says, with bean counters in the form of private equity behemoths taking over his city.

Just over the last few years – not so coincidentally as the Strip has headed into the toilet – Blackstone has taken over most of the Bellagio, the Cosmopolitan, the MGM Grand, and Mandalay Bay and Apollo Global Management and Vici Properties have taken over the Venetian.

‘Taken over’ is a relative phrase as the deals are complicated and often over-leveraged transactions involving REITs (real estate investment trusts) and buybacks and leases – all of which Contino insists on describing in mind-numbing detail in a back room at the Venetian as if he were a Wharton School of Finance professor.

In recent years, many Vegas properties have been sold to REITs and the casino companies then lease the properties back.

While this reduces mortgage debt on the operator’s balance sheet, it still means the property itself is financed and encumbered.

‘Between MGM and Caesars you have $56billion in long-term capital leases and debt… $24billion at Caesars… and $31billion at MGM,’ he explained.

‘Against that, the equity… is $14billion. Just think of it like you own a $700,000 house and you owe $560,000 on it… you feel the pressure.

‘Eventually, the debt eats the equity. That’s what’s gonna happen to Vegas.’

Even worse, he says, is that the new corporate owners of Vegas which have been taking increased control of the city since about 2004, do not understand what everyone from OG Vegas kingpin Bugsy Siegel to Frank ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal knew intuitively.

You don’t nickel and dime them, Contino said.

‘Most gamblers are willing victims,’ he said. ‘If you give to people, you comp them a room every now and then, you let ’em park for free, you give ’em an all-you-can-eat for ten bucks, then you guilt them into losing real money in the casino.’

‘But what are you taught in Harvard Business School? You’re taught to optimize every part of an operation.

‘You’re not taught to lose money on the showroom to make it back in the casino.’

One of his heroes is one-time Vegas titan Steve Wynn, who ushered in a new Vegas boom in 1989 when he opened the Mirage.

‘Steve understood Vegas and gamblers because his dad was a compulsive gambler,’ Contino said.

‘Steve knew how to manage gamblers. He also gambled himself. You almost need a bedside manner to run these operations, like being a good doctor.’

Contino also has high praise for the suave British wunderkind Jonathan Jossel, who came over to Vegas after graduating from the University of Birmingham and became the youngest non-restricted gaming license holder in Nevada at age 27.

He’s now lighting up downtown Vegas as CEO of the Plaza Hotel & Casino.

‘He gets it,’ Contino said. ‘A lot of the others don’t.’

Contino first came to Vegas in July 1987, stayed at the Hacienda and lost $1,300 at blackjack and craps.

He seems to have a slightly ‘Rain Man’ type brain that allows him to recall exact times, dates and places —and to hold forth on the myriad reasons Vegas is suddenly losing customers.

His biggest wins and losses?

‘I won $400,000 over one month in the state of Nevada in February 1995 and lost $1million in about 10 days from April 12, 1995 to April 22, 1995.

‘When I went home after the $1million loss, I faced eight years of suffering paying off the markers.’

A new law passed at the time that labeled bounced markers as criminal ‘passing bad checks,’ forcing him into a multi-year repayment plan, he said.

Contino says, and he’s only half-joking, that he gambles because he has a ‘medical condition’ a genetic mutation called CCAAT in which the dopamine system can become dysregulated and sufferers continually seek stimulation by gambling or substance abuse.

He tried Gamblers Anonymous three different times and it didn’t take – so he sticks with craps and blackjack (‘poker is too slow and boring’) to assuage his condition.

‘The primary precursor for dopamine is adrenaline,’ he says, ‘That’s why people do dangerous things.’

For him the riskiest game is bubble craps, a variation of the traditional craps game but played on a machine rather than a physical table.

‘They’re crack for gamblers. The first night I was here last time I lost $7,500 because I was powerless over the game.’

Contino splits his time between an apartment in Vegas and a home in Huntington, New York.

He bought some lots of land in Kingman, Arizona a few years back but he says it’s so expensive to maintain the influencer lifestyle in Vegas that he’s been slowly selling them off.

He sometimes tries to space out his gambling binges so they occur every seven weeks. ‘It’s when the itch comes back.’

After years of dating strippers (‘I didn’t really date them as much as I paid them to be with me’,) Contino found love eight years ago with a 22-year-old college student from Syracuse, New York named Mahi Nguyen.

‘It’s unbelievable that I actually connected with someone like that who I love to look at,’ Contino said.

‘We FaceTime two hours a day when I’m out here. She doesn’t care what I look like as long as I stay at 158 pounds.

‘She likes the abs. I’m 165 now so I hope she doesn’t notice.’

Despite his cynicism and the very real numbers showing Vegas saw a 12% year-over-year drop in visitors in July 2025 with continued declines last month, Pauly C is bullish on the town.

‘It will always be the Mecca,’ he said. ‘There’s tremendous dopamine and diversity of product.

‘I see a future where some of these over-leveraged properties get sold for cheap and we get the entrepreneurs back. The obituary is premature.