RELATED STORY: We went inside Seminole Hard Rock’s $720 million Tampa expansion When general manager Jim Fontana came home from work, his wife made him take off his business suit in the garage because it reeked of cigarette smoke.

The tribe, which now has 4,263 members, started in the early 1980s by building a 20,000-square-foot metal-sided warehouse for bingo games on its Tampa reservation, then a small village with a softball diamond near Interstate 4. Along the way, the Tampa casino and hotel added 2,000 permanent jobs, bringing its total payroll up to about 4,800 positions.

The Tampa expansion took 2½ years to complete and created 2,000 construction jobs. Alone among casino companies, Allen said, Hard Rock’s debt is rated investment-grade by the three leading credit rating agencies. From a profitability standpoint, the Tampa casino is the most successful casino in North America, Allen said, and ranks fourth or fifth in the world. Hard Rock has more than 45,000 employees and 254 properties, many of them cafes and stores, along with what will soon be a dozen casinos, in 75 countries. Today the Seminole Hard Rock Tampa is the flagship of Hard Rock International, generating $1 billion a year in revenue for a corporation with total revenues of nearly $6 billion annually, said Jim Allen, chairman of Hard Rock International and president of Seminole Gaming. “We started off with a chickee and one alligator in a pen,” Seminole Tribe vice chairman Mitchell Cypress said, “and look where we’re at.”

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