Ilitch Family Forms Ilitch Gaming, Buys Out Ocean Casino and Mississippi's Scarlet Pearl

The Ilitch family, the Detroit billionaires who built Little Caesars and own the Detroit Red Wings and Tigers, is converting a passive casino stake into an operating company. Ilitch Companies announced on June 18 the formation of Ilitch Gaming, a holding company that will take full ownership of Atlantic City's Ocean Casino Resort and acquire the Scarlet Pearl Casino Resort in D'Iberville, Mississippi. Chris Ilitch, chief executive of Ilitch Companies, will chair the new unit. Both deals are subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions, and each property keeps operating as usual until then.

The Ocean transaction closes a loop that opened in 2021. The Ilitch family paid roughly $175 million that year for a 50 percent stake in a property that had cost about $2.4 billion to build. Ilitch Gaming is now buying out the remaining 50 percent held by private equity firm Luxor Capital to gain sole control. The new company folds Ocean together with the family's MotorCity Casino Hotel in Detroit and the incoming Scarlet Pearl into a three-property platform. The same Detroit playbook that built MotorCity into a regional operator is the stated template here: Marian Ilitch bought out her partners in that casino for $525 million in 2005 and has run it as sole owner since.

Ocean is the more valuable of the two assets by a wide margin. The Boardwalk property posted about $532 million in 2025 revenue, up roughly 6 to 8 percent on the year, ranking it the third-highest-grossing casino in Atlantic City behind Borgata at $824.7 million and Hard Rock at $585.5 million. Three of the nation's top-grossing casinos sat in Atlantic City in 2025, and Ocean was one of them. The site covers 20 acres on the Boardwalk with 1,860 rooms and suites, a 135,000-square-foot casino floor, 160,000 square feet of meeting space and a 4,500-seat concert venue. Fanatics Sportsbook runs its retail betting, and it operates online in New Jersey through its betOcean platform.

The two properties

Scarlet Pearl, opened in December 2015 and being sold by founder LuAnn Pappas, is the smaller bet: 300 hotel rooms, more than 800 slot and video poker terminals, 30 table games and a sportsbook on Mississippi's Gulf Coast. No purchase price was disclosed for either deal. John Policicchio, named chief executive and chief development officer of Ilitch Gaming, said the focus is to "support great teams, deliver exceptional guest experiences, invest in the communities we serve, and responsibly grow the business over time."

The financial weight behind the move is what separates it from a typical regional roll-up. Forbes pegs the Ilitch family fortune at roughly $6 billion to $6.9 billion, most of it from Little Caesars and its estimated $5 billion in annual systemwide sales. The family bought the Red Wings for about $8 million in 1982 and the Tigers for about $85 million in 1992. That balance sheet lets Ilitch Gaming finance buyouts and renovations without the leverage strain that has squeezed Atlantic City peers, where 2025 brought rising revenue but compressed operating profit across the nine-casino market.

Why it matters for operators and affiliates

A well-capitalized family taking full control of a top-three Atlantic City asset is a signal worth reading for anyone selling traffic or B2B services into the New Jersey market. Sole ownership tends to mean faster capital decisions on the floor, the hotel and, relevant to affiliates, the online product. betOcean is a smaller online brand than the BetMGM and DraftKings tier, and a committed parent with no exit clock has room to spend on player acquisition rather than dress the asset for resale. New Jersey online operators are also fighting a parallel war over prediction-market sports contracts, a fight covered in our piece on prediction markets pressuring New Jersey sportsbooks, and a deeper-pocketed Ocean changes the competitive math in that channel.

The precedent for non-gaming wealth entering casino ownership is mixed but generally favorable when the operator stays hands-on. Tilman Fertitta, who built Landry's restaurants and bought the Houston Rockets for $2.2 billion in 2017, has run the Golden Nugget casino brand across seven U.S. locations, including Atlantic City and Biloxi, Mississippi, and grown a personal fortune to an estimated $10.7 billion by 2025. The Ilitch family's own MotorCity history is the cleaner comparison: it entered gaming in 1999 with a $525 million Detroit project alongside Mandalay Resort Group, bought out the partner in 2005, and has operated it profitably for nearly three decades. The risk case is the opposite, owners who treat a casino as a trophy and underinvest, but the structure here, a dedicated operating company with named gaming executives rather than a real-estate holding, points away from that.

What is next is regulatory. Both transactions need clearance from the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement and the Mississippi Gaming Commission before closing, a process that typically runs several months for licensed-operator transfers. Until those approvals land, Ocean, Scarlet Pearl and MotorCity continue trading under their current licenses.