Bill Wortman remembers stopping by the Desert Inn a week or two before it closed. That was five, maybe six years ago.

Wortman was a native Las Vegan who on the afternoon in question had climbed to the upper levels of the casino industry with several places of his own. He said he wanted a last look at this casino that had been on everyone’s must-see list for so many years. Wandering through the DI, he fell into a conversation with a woman who had been a cocktail waitress there for years.

What he remembers now of that conversation is that the woman was about to lose a job – she was a cocktail waitress – that she had held  through most of her adult life.

What a sad situation, he thought .   .  .  not just for that woman but for the thousands of other DI workers who  suddenly had to go somewhere else.

The memory of his conversation with the DI waitress was with him recently as he discussed plans for  redeveloping his own  Nevada Palace, which will eventually become another Cannery  as he and partner Bill Paulos focus on growing their  Cannery Resorts company.

The Nevada Palace sits  on 30 acres along Boulder Highway near the much newer Boulder Station and Sam’s Town and the re-energized Arizona Charlie’s.

Wortman says the time will come when the Palace will not take a backseat to any of the neighborhood competition.

Which is where he gets back to that conversation some five years ago with the DI waitress.

Rather than raze Nevada Palace and leave employees looking for something else to do for the next couple of years, Cannery is going to build the basis of the new hotel and casino around it, get it up and running and then tear down the old structure as he completes the renovation.

Wortman was talking of a future full of big things in the wake of recent Gaming Control Board action that puts he and Paulos well on their way to having Oaktree Capital Management with its more than $31 billion in managed assets as a one-third partner.

They have the Meadows racetrack in Pennsylvania, they operate the Rampart Casino and they’re very interested in Atlantic City and other jurisdictions that might pop up on the radar.

The Board action was expected to get the endorsement of the Nevada Gaming Commission this week.

Who knows  .   .   .  Cannery’s list of assets may one day include a Macau casino. Oaktree has land on Cotai, that strip of landfill between the islands of Taipa and Coalon a couple miles south of downtown Macau.

It’s all a matter of the licenses becoming available, Wortman says, but the recent statements by Mccau’s China-backed chief executive Edmond Ho who says he likes the idea of more  competition among Macau casinos and  will push for the issuance of more licenses, suggests  Cannery may find an opportunity there sooner rather than later.

The Gaming Control Board approval of Oaktree  was notable because Siller, a  former FBI agent, who had previously voted against Whitehall,  characterizing the plan as an ominous move in the wrong direction, made the motion to approve Oaktree.

The difference, he later explained, is that the Whitehall applicants were  merely employees of the Goldman Sach’s sponsored fund.  He said he could not feel comfortable wondering whose interests those employees would be looking out for.