New To Las Vegas

The recently filed lawsuit by the family of a deceased Florida lawyer claiming the Wynn Las Vegas casino kept dealing cards after he collapsed from a heart attack at a blackjack table has gotten a lot of national attention. In the five days since the Las Vegas Review-Journal broke the news–in a story by David Wilson buried on an inside page of the Sunday paper–the account has been picked up widely. At the New To Las Vegas world headquarters, a Google search found more than 11,000 mentions on the Internet, in places as far-flung as the websites of The New York Post, The Washington Post and the Houston Chronicle.

The R-J story about the civil lawsuit said David Jagolinzer was “slumped over the blackjack table” in the Wynn Las Vegas casino for 15 minutes on April 6, 2022, as the dealer kept dealing before help arrived. The story said Jagolinzer died six month later as a result of the delayed treatment, at the age of 48. A quoted Wynn Las Vegas statement called the allegations in the lawsuit false. In an interesting twist, Jagolinzer, who practiced in Miami, was in town for Mass Torts Made Perfect, a periodic conference of plaintiff personal injury lawyers looking for new ideas and causes that I wrote about 15 years ago for Forbes.com.

I’m guessing the lawsuit is getting wide notice partly because it fits into a media narrative of Las Vegas as a damn-the-customer place where almost anything goes in the name of profits for the house. You know, the underbelly of that “What happens here, stays here” aura long promoted by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

But indeed, this wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened along the Las Vegas Strip, according a long-ago but well-known book about Sin City. Continue reading →