The original developer was Continental Connector Corp., later renamed Dunes Hotel Casinos Inc. The corporation was controlled by Morris Shenker, a St. Louis attorney who had spent decades representing Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters Union. Shenker was the kind of figure who showed up in nearly every federal investigation of organized crime's involvement in commercial gambling. He owned the original Dunes Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. He had been investigated by the federal government for ties to organized crime - the investigations never produced convictions, but they shadowed his business career. The plan was to extend the Dunes brand from Las Vegas to Atlantic City. The corporation bought the President Motor Inn and the Mayfair Apartments at Albany Avenue and the boardwalk. Demolition of the President Motor Inn began in 1979. Then the project got caught up in something more famous than any of the principals could have wanted.

The Dunes Atlantic City project became one of the side stories of Abscam - the FBI sting operation that ran from 1978 through 1980 and targeted public officials with bribery schemes involving fictitious Arab investors supposedly interested in Atlantic City casino licenses. Several congressmen and one senator were convicted. The Dunes was not the focus of the prosecutions but its developers were among the entities being approached by undercover agents posing as agents for the fictional Sheik Yassir Habib. The Abscam coverage and the federal investigations made financing the Dunes virtually impossible. Construction halted in 1980 with only a two-story skeleton built. The project was now a public liability. Shenker himself was running into separate financial problems - by 1984 he had filed for personal bankruptcy.

In April 1983 the San Diego real estate developer Jack Bona took over majority ownership in a joint venture with Shenker's company. Bona was one of the largest borrowers at San Marino Savings and Loan. His $194 million in personal and corporate loans contributed substantially to that thrift's failure in 1984 - one of the early collapses of what would become the savings and loan crisis. In 1983 Bona obtained a $14.9 million mortgage loan for the Dunes site from San Antonio Savings Association - another savings and loan whose collapse later in the decade would mirror San Marino's. He expanded the plans to 664 rooms and a 60,000-square-foot casino. He purchased an option to buy the adjacent lot - the site of the aborted Sahara Boardwalk Hotel and Casino project - from Golden Nugget for $18 million. In August 1985 he filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy, just after attempting to sell the proposed casino rooms as condominium units.

In 1988 Bona's bankrupt company was sold to the Royale Group Ltd., owned by Leonard Pelullo. Pelullo was a reputed associate of the Philadelphia crime family. The Royale Group had previously been called Cavanagh Communities Corp. and had failed to develop a separate Atlantic City casino project called Royale Vista in the marina district. The Dunes Atlantic City was now controlled by an organized-crime-linked entity that had just failed at its previous casino attempt. Bona was incarcerated in 1989 on a writ of capias ad satisfaciendum - a centuries-old common-law procedure used when a debtor refuses to disclose assets - and spent nearly two years in the Atlantic County jail. The Royale Group filed involuntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1989. The San Antonio Savings Association collapsed in July 1989 and the federal Resolution Trust Corporation took title to the Dunes property. The bankruptcy was dismissed.

The unfinished two-story skeleton on the Atlantic City boardwalk - now a decade old, exposed to a decade of salt air, vandalism, and corruption investigations - was finally demolished in 1991. The site sat empty through most of the 1990s. Ownership passed through MGM Mirage, Park Place Entertainment, and Colony Capital before being sold to AC Gateway LLC in 2006. A plan for a mega-casino on the site was dropped during the 2008 economic downturn. In July 2011, the Hard Rock chain announced plans for a smaller boutique hotel-casino on the property. That deal collapsed in September 2012 as Atlantic City's casino market continued to deteriorate. In 2018, Stockton University - a four-year state college based in the New Jersey Pine Barrens - opened student housing on the site as part of its expansion into Atlantic City. The site that was supposed to be the seventh Atlantic City casino is now a dormitory complex for undergraduates. The story is not the one the Dunes principals envisioned in 1979. It is closer to a quiet, accidental success.