Rolling Sevens and Elevens

Detroit casino pioneer Tom Celani built a personal empire on beer, gaming, fast bikes, and fine wine — Plus a few things he learned on the streets — and gave new meaning to the term ‘family values’

By Ric Bohy

(page 1 of 4)

Luna LLC
Business: Gaming, wine, retail, development, lodging
Executive: Tom Celani, Principal
Headquarters: Novi
Employees: 1,000+
Revenue: $200 million (2007)

Photograph by david baditoi

Benedetto Celani sniffed the sticky morning air as he watched his son, just 11, climb into a packed boxcar and lean into his work. It smelled of diesel and grease, stale beer, and soiled tobacco — the cloying perfume of all-night debauchery in nearby blind pigs — and the ozone tang of rain. Today maybe it wouldn’t be so hot for the boy. He turned to leave for his own work and knew his son would be safe here, even on the cinder-paved paths of a working railroad yard in one of this hard city’s rawest neighborhoods. They had already spent a lot of time together, working those streets, talking to people, learning about them — becoming part of the community — and helping where and how they could.

As the boy worked among towers of beer cases in the boxcar, restacking them for unloading, one by one, several thousand times each day, he never counted to measure his progress. He thought about baseball — thought a lot about baseball. The games that were coming up, the teams his own would face. Strategy. And as the heat bloomed to almost 100 degrees, that week’s bottle of Faygo, cold in the fridge at home, was nice to think about.

He didn’t think about the larger lessons he was learning from this beloved man who dropped him off every day to work like his equal, or the friendships they made, or the value and security of a network of such friends. It was safe for him in this railroad yard, when it might not be for others, because father and son were good neighbors who earned the same in return. No matter your station in life, one of the lessons taught, it comes with a certain noblesse oblige.

The boy didn’t think about the lessons because such things are learned in increments too small to notice on their own, as they happen. He was, after all, just 11. Everything would coalesce in time.

“Different world today than it was then.”

Tom Celani dresses to the nines — beautifully tailored suits and shirts, snug white collars with plenty of starch, sleek shoes with thin leather soles, and a diamond-crusted ring big enough for a Super Bowl winner on one work-seasoned, thick-fingered hand.

He could have chosen a different place for a sit-down to talk about a life and career that he agrees is remarkable. This setting comes with background music, a throaty growl that sometimes rises from the parking lot below, muffled but instantly
recognized as the voice of America’s street machine.

The building’s filled with them, and enough bikes move out its Farmington Hills doors each year to make this the largest such dealership in the Midwest and one of the brand’s top 10 in the country. MotorCity Harley-Davidson. Celani owns it.

He could have chosen his office in Novi, home of Luna, an umbrella company for a collection of businesses. They include Indian casinos, commercial gaming houses and slot machines, movie theaters, golfing and hunting suppliers, a Crowne Plaza Hotel in Niagara Falls, and real-estate developments in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Michigan. Celani owns or has an ownership interest in all of them.

Celani added Anderson Sales and Service in Bloomfield Hills to his collection a couple of years ago, and renamed it MotorCity Power Sports. It deals in snowmobiles and watercraft, ATVs, and scooters — big boy toys.

Most recently, Celani was approved for a new Native American casino in Clear Lake, Calif., located north of Napa Valley. The 50,000-square-foot facility is expected to open in late 2009 and offer 350 slot machines, as well as 10 table games. He is also principal of Cal-Neva Casino on the north shore of Lake Tahoe in Nevada, which was owned by Frank Sinatra in the 1960s.

It would be less practical to meet in the offices or kitchen/blending room of the new Celani Family Vineyards, which just scored 90 points from Wine Spectator for its first-ever chardonnay and, soon after, 92 points for the infant winery’s signature release, a great big cabernet called Ardore — Italian for passion. It’s in Napa Valley and usually where he’d really rather be.

“Different world today than it was then,” he says. It closes out the story of his early life as a willing and eager child laborer, helping his father, Ben, build metro Detroit’s largest beer distributorship, starting with three borrowed trucks, a blue-collar work ethic, and a talent for meeting people, making friends, and building relationships.

Ben was selling appliances for Sears, Roebuck and Co. in 1964 when he heard that Hamm’s Brewery wanted to return to selling in Michigan. He’d already had a career in the beer business and was still looped into the “beer guy” network. He learned that Hamm’s had found distributors throughout the five-county southeastern region — everywhere but in its largest city.

“Detroit was on the downside,” Celani explains. “There was some tension. It wasn’t an easy place to do business; a lot of the stores had closed up. So it was the roughest market you could get into.” But it was a vacuum waiting to be filled. Ben borrowed his trucks, built a business, and bought an abandoned warehouse on 12th Street and Avery, next to the Grand Trunk Railroad yard.