After the war, a few of the old proprietors attempted to revive Block 16, but it’d gone to seed with cheap rooming houses, most of which the city condemned in 1946. In the meantime, after the prostitutes were evicted from Block 16 downtown, most of them relocated to clubs out on Boulder Highway, such as the Little Club, Kit-Kat Club, Kassabian Ranch, C-Bar-C, and Roxie’s. The Kassabian was shut down by the county vice squad in 1946 and the C-Bar-C burned to the ground in a mysterious fire shortly thereafter, but Roxie’s survived into the ‘50s.
Roxie’s is an interesting side story. The owners, Eddie and Roxie Clippinger, surrounded themselves with strong juice by paying off, year after year, the county sheriff, two county commissioners, and a law firm one of whose partners also happened to be the lieutenant governor of Nevada. The FBI raided Roxie’s in 1954, charging the Clippingers with violating the Mann Act (transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes). Disclosures during their trail in Los Angeles, combined with a sting operation contrived by a Las Vegas crime reporter (covered in detail in Green Felt Jungle), produced indictments against the sheriff and one county commissioner, disgraced the lieutenant governor, contributed to the governor’s subsequent defeat, and revealed hidden ownership in the Thunderbird Hotel-Casino by Jake Lansky, Meyer Lansky’s brother, resulting in the revocation of its license a year later. Among the other revelations: payoffs to the county vice squad to discourage prostitution on the Strip and thus eliminate competition, and a dollar-a-head kickback to cabbies who delivered tricks to Roxie’s.
The demise of Roxie’s dealt the sex industry a serious blow, but by no means killed it off. A new system of cash and carry was evolving, as Las Vegas developed into a city with more and more hotel rooms. And it all started, naturally enough, in the feverish dreams of that prominent pioneer and private pimp: Benjamin Siegel.
The sex business had been part of Bugsy’s overall vision all along. An inveterate ladies’ man, he instinctively wanted to provide easy sex to seduce, service, and presumably satisfy the suckers. The Flamingo established two traditions of sex Las Vegas-style. First, the hotel was designed with separate modular wings, so the rooms were accessible without ever having to pass through a lobby or main entrance. This was at a time (the mid-1940s) when the men who ran hotels actively barred prostitutes: Grim Soviet-style matrons guarded hallways and elevators and Mack Sennett-type house detectives roamed the floors listening into rooms registered to single men for telltale evidence. At the Flamingo, though, a guy could spend every night with a different girl and never be seen by anyone.
The second tradition was the "dressing up" of casinos with young, pretty, and suggestively attired women: coat-check girls, hat-check girls, cigarette girls, shills, showgirls, and pit cocktail waitresses. Some working girls were hired as hotel help to be at the beck and call of the house; they quickly and discreetly introduced other receptive workers to the lucrative sideline and its procurement procedures. Of course, Bugsy left the hotel business before he had time to fine-tune his sex agenda, but other boss gamblers picked up right where he left off.
These racketeers recognized the sexual excitement implicit in gambling and that women were integral to the casino scenery. The fact was, gamblers needed sex: the suggestion of it, with women parading around on stage and decorating the floor; the mysterious myth of its ready availability with gorgeous and expensive pros; and the eventual consummation -- prescribed, hidden, safe -- that would get the gambler to sleep or wake him up, make him fell lucky when he won or console him when he lost, keep him around the tables a little longer, and send him home having experienced what has been called the "Las Vegas total."
They also knew, however, that countless women were attracted to Las Vegas and that uncontrolled prostitution, especially in urban areas, became very dangerous, because of its association with pimps, drugs, theft, and violence. So the sex trade had to be directly and carefully choreographed from start to finish to avoid any chance of offending the multitudes of straights who filled the hotels. Prostitution simply could not become so obvious or vulgar or hazardous that it menaced in any way the smooth and consistent workings of the great god Percentage.
So they laid down the law, which, as always back in the day, revolved around juice. The girls had to be connected. She had to work for the hotel: be hired by the hotel as a hooker and given a straight job as a front, or recruited after she was hired for a straight job. She had to be recommended and vouched for by a trusted employee. She had to be cooperative; her main objective was to see that the player spent more time at the tables and less time in the hotel room. She had to be reliable. And she’d better be honest. After all, the money that wallet thieves and chip hustlers and trick rollers stole belonged to the house.
The personal connection extended to the john as well. A male customer who wanted sex, from a high roller to a tinhorn, had to go through the proper channels. The gamblers well known to the big bosses were supplied with a showgirl or high-class call girl as a matter of course. The lesser players, if known by the small bosses, were hooked up with cocktail waitresses or registered cruisers. Regular casino customers could become familiar enough with a bellmen, bartender, or someone with connections to make a circumspect inquiry.
If you didn’t know the procedure, however, you might walk away thinking that Las Vegas’s fabled copious commercial copulation was one of the great myths of the day. Because above all, the pandering, procuring, and coupling had to be illegal. Herein lay the true beauty of the system and the unmistakable signature of Siegel, Moe Dalitz, and all the other racketeers-turned-executives. For propriety, for privacy, and ultimately to protect the reputation of legal gambling, the whole delicate system had to operate outside the law. One false step, one loose lip, and the whole precarious structure would collapse like a house of cards.
This system lasted for twenty years and then all hell broke loose. Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion of the history of prostitution in Las Vegas.
