It's impossible to compare current conditions in Atlantic City to the boom time depicted in the TV series "Boardwalk Empire" without coming to the following conclusion: Atlantic City did far better when it was going against the law than with it.

Back in the days when the city was defying Prohibition, the various mobsters, hustlers and operators all knew how to cater to the customer base. They never would have built something like the Revel.

Last week, I took a drive to visit that hulking mausoleum by the sea. I pulled into a gravel parking lot and got out to take a look.

Last time I'd visited the Revel, it was open for business and I got to see what a beautiful building it is. Beautiful, but too big for the market.

This time it was fenced off. As I was taking some photos, a security guard limped into view. He would walk up to each door and test the lock, making sure no one could get in.

But who would want to get in? The boardwalk in November is a cold and lonely place.

What ever possessed our elected officials to think they could lure enough tourists to fill thousands of hotel rooms in the off-season?

Back in my car, I fired up the heater and dialed a guy who was asking that question back when another failing casino was being built.

In 1990, Marvin B. Roffman was fired him from his job as a financial analyst after Donald Trump called his boss to complain about his prediction that the Taj Mahal would go belly-up at the end of its first summer.

"I predicted that when the cold winds of October blew, the Taj Mahal wasn't going to make it," Roffman recalled. "And that's exactly what happened."

Roffman later won a suit against his former employer and went on to a successful career on his own. He told me he bears no ill will against Trump and he even admires the way the Donald outsmarted the investment houses.

But how did the investors get hoodwinked again? Even back then, neighboring states were gearing up for gambling. Atlantic City was once again on the verge of losing its monopoly market, this time in gambling rather than booze.

"Going back to 1990, a third of the market for Atlantic City was Pennsylvania and 40 percent was New York," he said. "I was saying that as casino gaming spread, it would just exacerbate the problem."

None of this registered with the political class. The Trenton crowd considered the casinos to be a cash cow. Locals still express resentment that Casino Redevelopment Authority money was spent on such projects as the Yogi Berra Museum at Montclair State University rather than in sprucing up the city. That led to the current situation, Roffman said.

"Gaming is so prolific and is in everyone's back yard, but Atlantic City is such an ugly and dreary place except for those casinos," he said.

Ugly and dreary it is. Yet that doesn't stop the politicians from pushing the next pipe dream. That's the idea that the casinos can reopen as hotels without gambling.
That got a laugh out of Seth Grossman, a local lawyer and talk-show host who led the free-market Liberty and Prosperity group during the unsuccessful effort to prevent public subsidies for Revel in 2010.

"If you can't make money with a gold mine on the first floor, then how are you going to make money without the gold mine?" Grossman asked.

Grossman expressed a view popular among local business owners: The regulators were wrong to insist on big casino-hotels.

"The original sin was to require the casinos to have 500 hotel rooms," he said. "That really chilled the scene for the local hotels and restaurants."

That wasn't the case in the "Boardwalk Empire" days, he said. Back then all the locals competed equally for their slices of the booze business.

Now the city is stuck with all of those empty casinos.

No problem, say the pols. Now they believe they can repackage Atlantic City as a year-round luxury resort that doesn't rely on gambling. If only the right projects can be built, they say, then tourists can be induced to come to freezing Atlantic City in the months when they could go to the warm Caribbean instead.

Or in other words, they believe that there is a vast market of stupid-yet-wealthy people waiting to be tapped.

Actually there is. Unfortunately they're too busy working on Wall Street and in Trenton to visit Atlantic City in the off-season.