The walls of the tiny conference room in Las Vegas seem to be splattered with the inside of someone’s brains.

That is to say, there are renderings and photos everywhere of a long list of colorful projects, from a mountain-peak retreat to the renovation of a storied off-Strip hotel to a smattering of low-rise apartment buildings. There are even, randomly, images of a series of planned Jamba Juice-like shops aimed at the Hispanic market.

And here’s the twist: They’re all a go. In fact, some are done.

Yes, you read that right. Someone is investing in Vegas again, and in real estate no less. And not losing his shirt.

His name is Stephen Siegel, a 39-year-old former street tough from Los Angeles who has a gimmick. He owns a growing chain of no-lease apartment buildings in which tenants receive seven coupons for free meals at the coffee shops of one of his two small casinos every time they pay their weekly rent. The more Siegel Suites he opens, then, the more tenants also become restaurant patrons who add a drink or a salad and, of course, may play in the casino.

If that sounds a bit predatory, consider that Siegel’s No. 1 fan happens to be Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman. Goodman says Siegel’s practice of buying lost-cause properties overrun by drugs and crime and renovating them into viable, safe residences solves two problems at once, blight and the need for quality, safe, lower-income housing.

“They go in there, they renovate them, and each one is more successful than the next,” Goodman says. “They change the whole ambiance of them, they have promotions, they really clean them up. And they don’t ask anything from me in terms of incentives or anything.”

Siegel, who bought his first Vegas building in 2004 after finding himself priced out of the Los Angeles market, now has 19 properties in Nevada accounting for 4,000 units that rent for $159 a week on up, utilities, cable, and wireless Internet included and full-kitchen equipped. His goal is 10,000 units; as many as 18,000 free meal coupons are redeemed monthly. The cash flow from Siegel Suites and access to credit through his many dealings with the banks also helped Siegel buy three more seemingly lost-cause resorts.

Not bad for a guy without a high-school degree who dropped out of school at age 15 to fix up old Volkswagens for resale as a self-taught car mechanic. With little parental guidance—his dad was out of the picture by age 11, and his mom couldn’t control him—he ran with gangs, but also always held jobs delivering pizza or flipping burgers.

By his late teens, Siegel saw friends going to jail and decided to channel his energies instead into building a legitimate enterprise. A series of businesses followed—a car stereo and alarm shop in the rough L.A. neighborhood of La Brea and Pico, an auto body shop in the San Fernando Valley, a children’s furniture manufacturing business. It was a period of learning how to fix and operate a company, he said.

“I met this guy, he had a small little warehouse where he made children’s furniture, and I walked in and I saw the potential,” Siegel recalls of that operation. “He didn’t know how to run a business. He was a good salesman, but he couldn’t build the product in time, couldn’t get it right, couldn’t do it. I took the place from 12 employees to 400 in four months, we were selling to Wal-Mart, Toys R Us, Sears. I knew nothing about this business, but the minute I got in there I just got going.”

Siegel says he has a tough time staying interested in one project for very long. By 1999, he was back in the body-shop business in North Hollywood, buying into a failing collision operation and turning it within months into what he says was a $500,000-a-month company.

“When something is nice and shiny and running right, I don’t want to buy it,” Siegel said. “I buy stuff that people say, ‘Are you crazy?’ or ‘There are too many problems there.’ I’ve always done that.”

That body shop led to real estate. He bought a small apartment building near the shop and filled it with employees because “I knew they could pay the rent because they worked for me.” The next thing he knew, he was buying and selling apartment buildings around L.A. until the boom there made it unaffordable.

That’s when he scoped out Vegas, seeking a distressed property to fix up. He found his first match in Vista Arms, a trashed, crime-riddled building “full of crackheads, criminals, and prostitutes” where senior tenants feared for their lives in the hallways. It had one thing going for it that made it worth its $6 million price: It backed up against the Las Vegas Convention Center.