Reply #71: It wasn't a rousing success at the outset...but it paved the way for others that were. [View All]

[MADem]

"They" were Bugsy's associates, and the 'half baked' idea was his hotel.

And I justify my "never" comment by the following:

Howard Hughes didn't build shit in LV, he BOUGHT stuff that the MOB had already built. It wasn't "ONE" hotel--it was damned near EVERY hotel in town that the mob either built or had their paws in up to their elbows.

Subsequently, the politicians passed legislation which enabled corporations, rather than individuals, to be the named entities that ran these enterprises. This enabled the mob to fade into the background, creating an "aura" of respectability, but they didn't leave LV until they milked it dry and had their own organizational issues. But they had a strong run that lasted for many, many decades, and to pretend that they didn't or that their influence didn't define the city is just not valid.

Howard Hughes did not build a thing in Las Vegas; in fact he was spooked by the city. His idea of Las Vegas was the movie set for his 1952 production of The Las Vegas Story with Jane Russell, Victor Mature, and Vincent Price. He had used the Flamingo, as Alan Hess recounts, "to represent all that was glamorous and exciting about Las Vegas . . . as the example of grandeur and the luxury of plush gambling on the Las Vegas Strip." That was the Las Vegas that the delusional Howard Hughes returned to in 1966, to hide from subpoenas and the media, and to build an empire in the desert. But by 1966 the glamour world of the Flamingo was a delusion from the past. Hughes was living another reality in 1966 controlled by a cohort of Mormon advisors, communicating with his lieutenants, even the chief of his Nevada Operations, via memo. Hughes was horrified by what he would have glimpsed from his penthouse windows had they not been permanently covered to shield him from the dangerous sunlight and germs. Circus Circus was bringing Coney Island next door, and his nemesis, the federal government, was shaking his penthouse by testing nuclear devices just down the highway. To the paranoid Hughes, Las Vegas had become a place of Fear and Loathing.

Hughes had purchased the Desert Inn, as the story goes, because he couldn't get a room there, and took over the top floor. He then proceeded to purchase the Sands, the Frontier, the Silver Slipper, and that monument to failed dreams, the Landmark, with its space-needle saucer-on-a-stick. Hughes is credited with bringing corporate legitimacy to Las Vegas, and running out the Mafia. The State of Nevada did oblige Hughes by changing its gaming licensing laws for him, thereby ushering into Las Vegas publicly traded hotel corporation like Hilton and Marriott, who changed the face of Las Vegas and whose hotels looked like hotels and corporate towers, not like roadside motels with big signs.

Under Hughes, or Hughes's people, his hotels continued business as usual, and for all intents and purposes under their previous management. Moe Dalitz still ran the Desert Inn, Jack Entratter and Carl Cohen, the Sands. The story was that people like Dalitz and Entratter were tired of Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department's relentless investigations of their business associates and decided to sell out to Hughes. But the economic changes that were affecting Las Vegas hotels and driving the expansion of convention centers and room additions would have occurred without Hughes. How Hughes's people marketed their hotels as tourist, convention and entertainment centers was no different than what other hotels were doing, or from what Hughes properties had been doing before he took them over.

http://www.library.unlv.edu/hughes/pages/vegas.html

Now, those guys that are underlined, Moe Dalitz, Jack Entratter, Carl Cohen--they were mobbed up. You can google them and see, if you'd like. Here's a start: http://www.1st100.com/part2/dalitz.html

They weren't choirboys or Mormon businessmen.

Even PBS 'makes the connection.' It is what it is. To pretend that the place wasn't launched by mafiosi, shaped by mafiosi, and has a modern-day persona that has been built on the foundations of what the mafia created IS revising history.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/lasvegas/peopleevents/p_syndicate.html

In Las Vegas
After Siegel, who had once famously noted of Syndicate members, "We only kill each other," was murdered in 1947, Gus Greenbaum, Davey Berman, and Morris Rosen, three of the Syndicate's chief authorities, took over the Flamingo. The hotel's success prompted the Syndicate to pour more money into building Strip resorts, and by the 1950s, the Strip was lined with hotel-casinos, many, if not all, funded by Syndicate money. From the 1940s through the 1970s, Las Vegas and its lavish resorts were made possible in large part by the mob, who not only funded resort development, but offered indispensable knowledge in casino management. Men who had little-to-no criminal records fronted the resorts. Behind the scenes, so-called "Miami hotel men" took undeclared, thus untaxed, money from the establishment's profits. As the Syndicate's "chairman," Lansky was the Syndicate's accountant. He was responsible for collecting, and then dividing, the skim.

As for Laxalt, he was bankrolled by those guys. He ushered in a law that he knew would help the individuals affiliated with the mob to conceal their ties and put a patina of respectability over the the entire enterprise. And he quid-pro-quo'ed, too:

By the mid-1960s, organized crime figures were growing old–many had come of age during Prohibition in the 1920s–and they were tired of fighting the authorities. State officials wanted to attract more legitimate investors. Federal officials were cracking down on them. Howard Hughes's buying spree ended alleged mob ownership of several resorts, but with the same employees in the casinos and the counting rooms, the skimming continued.

Nevada governor Paul Laxalt along with other officials and businessmen such as Thomas and Bill Harrah hoped to bring the state new respectability with the Corporate Gaming Act of 1969. The measure enabled the state to license key investors and executives rather than every stockholder, and thus publicly traded corporations to own casinos. Laxalt's predecessor, Governor Grant Sawyer, expected the mob to find ways around the Corporate Gaming Act, and events proved him right.

Allen R. Glick formed Argent Corporation, for his initials (Allen R. Glick ENTerprises or the French word for money). He obtained a $62.7 million loan from the Teamsters to buy the Stardust and Fremont and later claimed not to know that he answered to the Chicago, Kansas City, and Milwaukee mobs. If he didn't know, he soon found out when mob bosses installed Frank Rosenthal as their top executive at the two hotels. Rosenthal and his friends apparently devised a successful skimming operation that continued even after state gaming regulators forced them out and new owners took over. Finally, in 1983, Nevada officials revoked the licenses of top executives Al Sachs and Herb Tobman (they also preceded Glick at the Stardust) and brought in Boyd Gaming to run the Stardust and Fremont. Boyd eventually bought the two hotels, effectively ending mob control.

But other mob operations flourished–and ended similarly. Kansas City interests ran the Tropicana behind the back of supposed owners Mitzi Stauffer Briggs, a chemical heiress, and Ramada Inns by installing Joe Agosto as producer of the Folies Bergere production show. FBI wiretaps revealed that Agosto and prominent casino executive Carl Thomas, long considered free of mob taint, were in charge of skimming from the casino. Detroit's Lebanese mob and St. Louis interests represented by attorney Sorkis Webbe controlled the Aladdin until its forced sale to entertainer Wayne Newton. Longtime Teamsters attorney Morris Shenker ran the Dunes. All suffered under the federal and state microscope–and local critics such as Ned Day, a respected print and broadcast journalist whose reporting revealed many mob connections.

Not until the 1970s and 1980s did the mob extend its power and profits beyond the Strip. Anthony Spilotro, nicknamed Tony the Ant, came to Las Vegas in 1971 to run a gift shop at Circus Circus. State regulators soon listed him in the Black Book, thanks to allegations that he had been involved in perhaps twenty murders. Thus, Spilotro concentrated on the streets, forming the "Hole in the Wall" burglary gang, which earned its name by blowing a hole in the side of Bertha's jewelry store during a robbery. Federal prosecutors obtained several convictions, and induced one of Spilotro's hit men, Frank Cullotta, to testify and enter witness protection. Spilotro faced numerous indictments by 1986, when he and his brother Michael traveled to Chicago in hopes of taking over the Chicago mob after the conviction of several of the old dons. Instead, their campaign failed, they disappeared, and they turned up dead nine days later in an Indiana cornfield, near a farm owned by one of the convicted Chicago leaders.

While friends and allies of Rosenthal and Spilotro remain in Las Vegas, mob rule on the Strip and the streets was effectively over. Obviously, wherever crime is organized, organized crime exists, including ethnically oriented gangs involving Latinos and Russians. Allegations have persisted that topless and nude dancing clubs have replaced casinos as mob hangouts and money-laundering enterprises.....

Saying that the mob had nothing or little to do with Vegas is like pretending the French had nothing to do with the American Revolution. They played a key and vital role in the establishment of that place.