Phil Falcone Bets on a Casino (Where the Locals Can’t Gamble)

It’s 7:55 on a sweltering Tuesday morning in southern Vietnam, and more than 1,000 cleaners, cooks, and card dealers from the Grand Ho Tram Strip casino wait outside the resort’s largest ballroom for a staff meeting to start. A bass-heavy electronic beat booms from within. When the doors finally open, drawing a cheer, the ballroom is dark, apart from beams from blue and white spotlights dancing across the ceiling. In the middle of the floor are five figures. Four are tall Vietnamese women, dressed in bright red, ankle-length feathered skirts; bright red, ­rhinestone-studded bikini tops; and bright red, feathered headdresses twice the width of their shoulders. The women form a square and stride forward, hoplite warriors in the world’s weirdest phalanx, with the fifth person at their center: Michael Kelly, a middle-aged guy from Philadelphia who’d never even visited Asia before signing on as the casino’s executive chairman.

Kelly is dressed a little like a magician, in a boxy three-piece suit with a matching red tie and pocket square. As the employees find seats, he begins with a pep talk. Kelly speaks little Vietnamese, so translations are projected onto a screen behind him. He’s eager to praise a faraway benefactor. “When I arrived here almost 18 months ago,” Kelly says, “I was told to think big by Mr. Phil Falcone.”