I may not be the authority to answer some of your points but there are a few things that I have known from my following of the whole situation with Jack and Becky etc.

I wasn't aware that Jack didn't have a license in NV. It was my understanding that he did still own some minority stake in The Horseshoe in order to keep his NV license active. I could be misinformed on that. As for licenses in other jurisdictions I believe he runs and is licensed in Biloxi(?) I know when he bought Empress in Indiana and Joliet,IL, Illinois refused him a license due to alleged mob connections. He was forced to sell the Joliet boats to Argosy but was able to keep the Hammond,IN boat because Indiana did issue him a license. Empress, Hammond has a great reputation and is very popular since it had been renamed Horseshoe. Since then, about 2 maybe 3 years now(?) Jack has sold Horseshoe Gaming to, I think, Harrah's who, as was reported, plans to keep the Horseshoe name and even rename some of their other properties to Horseshoe to capitalize on Jack's reputation and brand.

I am not all that familiar with the internal issues with Binion's but from my reading in the papers, and all, it seems clear that there were some financial problems. I seem to recall after Ted's murder they found, in a vault on the ranch, boxes of chips that didn't appear on the books of The Horseshoe. Perhaps that led to a problem where more chips had been issued by Ted than he had on record or maybe there was some coutnterfitting going on where good chips were diluted with bad. That may be what led to the battle with Stupak. The outcome of that was a court battle where, as I recall, Binion's was ORDERED by the court to redeem Stupak's chips. I recall, here in Chicago, news coverage of the day that Stupak arrived at the cage to redeem the chips. The reason it was news in Chicago was the appearance of The Rev. Gray(?)(sp?) who was/is a very outspoken opponent to gambling and especially Illinois gaming. When redeeming the chips Stupak gave the reverend a $5 chip.

From this point is where I noticed more and more financial difficulty and defaults on payments, in the news, involving Horseshoe (LV). Whether Becky ran the place to the ground, which is a common account of the situation which I can't argue with, if she was forced to shut down or pay debts, which reportedly has happened a few times, she may have HAD to sell the million dollars to keep the place open. I recall a couple instance in the last year, one with IRS over employee insurance and tax payments where she had to pay or close and another where Gaming determined that Binion's didn't have enough cash on hand to support NV requirements for cash reserves to pay jackpots. For the latter infraction, I recall, maybe it was last year around this time, that they (gaming) actually closed a whole mess of slots and some tables in order to balance the amount of reserves at the cage with the number of games operating and jackpots at stake. I may not have worded that quite right but something like that. Supposedly, a short time later The Horseshoe rectified the cash situation and reopened the previously closed games.

I don't know that the display really attracted that many people. I know, as a visitor and tourist myself, that was never a draw to me. My interest in visiting was more notoriety of the place, History, WSOP etc. I never thought of a case full of a million dollars as much of an attraction.