Even financially literate bookworms, however, may at times struggle to keep pushing through pages of dense jargon. In the process, it also controversially terminated some large bond guarantees.Īn eccentric Illinois judge, whose final ruling ultimately stunned bankruptcy aficionados, and the rantings from the Masters of the Universe make the book entertaining, maybe essential, reading across Wall Street. The Caesars parent company, ostensibly to help it raise cash, sold off its more promising Las Vegas properties and intellectual property, at questionable prices, to entities controlled by its two owners. Making sense of it all for everyone else was the challenge for authors Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap, the journalists who sifted through thousands of pages of court filings and transcripts while interviewing nearly 200 people to tell a seedy tale worthy of Sin City.ĭespite the multiple complicated lawsuits and tortuous subplots, including an amusingly consequential fight over valuing Britney Spears’ residency at Planet Hollywood, most of the high drama revolves around a series of transactions orchestrated by Apollo and TPG. Jim Millstein, the exasperated restructuring guru attempting to broker a deal on behalf of the company, warned in a sworn statement that it would be “one of the great messes of our time.”Ĭleaning it up was arduous for those involved, which seemed to include nearly every pedigreed investment bank, law firm, buyout shop and hedge fund in the financial firmament, along with many lesser-known ones, too. The action – as much as contract law, courtroom arguments and rich lacrosse bros petulantly storming out of midtown Manhattan conference rooms qualifies as action – centres on a vast wake of vultures feasting on $18 billion of distressed debt at the gambling and lodging conglomerate once known as Harrah’s Entertainment. “The Caesars Palace Coup” is a casino caper and legal thriller rolled into one. bankruptcy convention and rewrote the story of one of Wall Street’s most ruthless fights. Their battle from a position as holdout junior bondholders upended U.S. The conquering “they” in this saga, edifyingly chronicled in a new book published this week, are Howard Marks’ Oaktree Capital and David Tepper’s Appaloosa Management.

Marc Rowan and David Bonderman, the respective co-founders of Apollo Management and TPG tried a real-life run for the money with brazen efforts to snatch big slugs of the sprawling Caesars empire before it collapsed under the debt of their poorly timed $31 billion leveraged buyout in 2008.

Las Vegas Strip casinos are seen from the High Roller observation wheel in Las Vegas, Nevada, April 9, 2014.

Casinos robbed in ocean's 11