LAS VEGAS -- Sixteen years ago, developer Ian Bruce Eichner was forced to give his lenders the keys to his newly finished office tower in Times Square. The empty building, a symbol of one of the worst downturns in U.S. commercial real-estate history, ultimately cost his lenders and partners about $200 million.

Mr. Eichner, a slender, fast-talking New Yorker, managed to stage a second act -- but it appears to be ending much like the first. Cosmopolitan Resort Casino, the casino-hotel complex he's building on the Las Vegas Strip, got caught last year in the capital-markets crisis and is headed toward foreclosure. Deutsche Bank AG has sunk nearly $1 billion into the project, and two other lenders have provided $175 million. It's unclear how much of it they'll be able to recoup.

LOSING HAND

Do you think George Soros will somehow end up with control?

I wonder if that underground river flowed into Lake Mead - or could be diverted there?

DH says it's really an aquifer, not an underground river. They had the same thing beneath some of the Venetian construction. Evidently it is quite common here, as well as many other places. He says the press likes to call them underground rivers.