A bronze statue of Bob Stupak that once welcomed visitors into the Stratosphere, and was last publicly seen more than 20 years ago at a casino museum at the Tropicana, has resurfaced on eBay. Its current owner is asking $90,000 (or best offer), and acknowledges that its claim — written on its plaque — to be plated in 24 karat gold is suspect.
Bob Stupak poses with his statue in 1999, during his induction into the Casino Legends Hall of Fame at the Tropicana. (Image: Casino Collectibles Association)
Since the statue was removed from the Stratosphere months after its 1996 opening — when Stupak resigned as chairman — the artifact has spent the last three decades doing what its subject did best: disappearing, reappearing, and hatching tall tales.
Stupak Unpacked
An unabashed self-promoter, gambler and carnival barker who called himself “the Polish Maverick,” Stupak emerged from Pittsburgh, where his father ran a dice game called the Lotus Club. After National Guard and Army service, where he ran craps games in the barracks, Stupak drifted into coupon books, then the Chateau Vegas restaurant, then — inevitably — casinos.
On March 31, 1974, Stupak opened Bob Stupak’s World Famous Million-Dollar Historic Gambling Museum and Casino. Two months later, it burned down in a fire that investigators labeled suspicious in origin. (Insurers sued, alleging that Stupak set the blaze to collect on overstated losses, but the case was settled.)
Stupak rebuilt on the same spot, opening Vegas World on Friday the 13th in July 1979. It was a place of giant signs, giant promotions, and giant bets — including the million‑dollar Super Bowl wager he famously won in 1989 by taking the Cincinnati Bengals plus 7 against the San Francisco 49ers.
Stratospheric Aspirations
The Stratosphere is shown under construction in the early ’90s at Vegas World. Note the Vegas World sign at left. (Image: Vintage Las Vegas)
But the Stratosphere was Stupak’s moonshot. He envisioned a giant neon sign after a windstorm toppled Vegas World’s, then an observation tower that he later hoped to push toward 1,800 feet — tall enough, he said, to be the world’s tallest structure — before being blocked by the Federal Aviation Administration and limited to 1,149 feet.
Construction was plagued by setbacks, including a mid-build fire and a severe cash crunch that forced him to partner with fellow poker player Lyle Berman’s Grand Casinos. That company ultimately became the largest shareholder with about 42% — leaving Stupak with only about 14%.
When the casino resort opened April 29, 1996, it immediately hit financial trouble. By July of that year, Stupak resigned as chairman, and the property plunged into bankruptcy in January 1997.
Somewhere in the chaos, Bob Stupak’s statue vanished. Stratosphere spokesman Tom Bruny told the Las Vegas Sun it “just disappeared in the middle of the night” in late September or early October 1996. No explanation. No paperwork.
It popped back up three years later at the Tropicana’s Casino Legends Hall of Fame, a 5,000‑square‑foot museum packed with more than 15,000 pieces of Nevada gaming memorabilia on display from a much larger private collection. But when the Hall of Fame closed in 2005 — replaced briefly by the Las Vegas Historic Museum, which closed in 2006 — the statue slipped back into the shadows.
From there, it entered the high-end secondary market, passing through collectors and specialty liquidators. The latest is Bloc Galleries, which posted the current eBay listing.
Statutory Myths Busted
Later in his life, Stupak tried distancing himself from the statue by claiming he had never authorized it. However, a video in the UNLV Special Collections archive suggests otherwise. In footage shot April 11, 1996, Stupak and his girlfriend at the time, singer Phyllis McGuire, are shown inspecting the statue and offering suggestions for improvements to its sculptor.
Their conversation has not aged well.
Stupak inspects his bronze statue pre-polishing. (Image: UNLV Special Collections)
“Why is it so dark?” Stupak complains at the 25:15 mark. “I thought bronze looks like gold.”
McGuire adds: “It looks like he’s of the black race there. I’ve never seen a bronze so dark. He looks like it could be Martin Luther King.”
The plaque beneath the statue — which hijacks Wayne Newton’s “Mr. Las Vegas” title — claims it is plated with 24K gold. That would have required about 58.3 troy ounces to do the job, worth roughly $23,000 at the time.
While we can’t prove it, we suspect this claim is as false as the Mirage’s 18K gold-glazed windows turned out to be.
Stupak was a casino chairman already skating on dangerously thin financial ice. Also, he was prone to, umm, exaggerations. These include:
The eBay listing for the statue shows it as it appeared at the Casino Legends Hall of Fame. (Image: eBay)
Claiming to have been ranked third in the world in motorcycle racing after breaking a speed record as a youth when no records were ever produced to verify it
The “million-dollar slot jackpots” he advertised at Vegas World that, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal put it, “never seemed to pay out”
The $100,000 bill on display at his gambling museum that proved to be a fake
Indeed, if a statue were plated in gold that today would be worth $260,000, there is little chance it would be offered for sale for $90,000.
Even Bloc Galleries’ eBay listing states that this claim is “not verified” — though a portable X-ray fluorescence gun could verify it by shooting an X-ray beam at its surface and instantly reading its elemental composition down to microscopic depths.
The UNLV video seems to undermine this claim as well, as it shows Stupak clearly instructing the statue’s sculptor to polish it so it looks lighter.
No mention is made of plating it with gold, and there was no time anyway, since the Stratosphere was opening in 18 more days.
After Bob Stupak died in 2009 at age 67 from leukemia, the Stratosphere became the lasting public symbol of his legacy.
However, depending on where it ends up, his fake gold statue could claim second place.
“Lost Vegas” is an occasional Casino.org series spotlighting Las Vegas’ forgotten history. Click here to read other entries in the series. Think you know a good Vegas story lost to history? Email corey@casino.org.
