Qualla: Dunes Hotel and Casino (Atlantic City, New Jersey)

Dunes Hotel and Casino (Atlantic City, New Jersey): Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the southern end of the Atlantic City boardwalk, at Albany Avenue, the Dunes Hotel and Casino was supposed to rise as the city's seventh casino - 504 rooms, a 34,500-square-foot gambling floor, the southernmost of the new generation of post-legalization resorts. Construction began in 1979. By 1980, the project stalled at a two-story skeleton. By 1991, the unfinished structure had been demolished without ever having held a single guest. The Dunes Atlantic City is one of the most thoroughly documented casino failures in American gambling history - a project that touched the Las Vegas mob, the savings and loan crisis, Jimmy Hoffa's old lawyer, the Abscam FBI sting operation, and a sequence of bankruptcy filings that read like a textbook in 1980s financial fraud. Stockton University now operates student housing on the site.

Dunes Hotel and Casino (Atlantic City, New Jersey): Morris Shenker's Casino

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 u...

Dunes Hotel and Casino (Atlantic City, New Jersey): Abscam

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. Severa...

Dunes Hotel and Casino (Atlantic City, New Jersey): Jack Bona and the Savings and Loan

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Dunes Hotel and Casino (Atlantic City, New Jersey): Pelullo, the Philadelphia Mob, and Jail

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Dunes Hotel and Casino (Atlantic City, New Jersey): The Demolition and the Student Housing

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...