Las Vegas, 1950.
Four years after Bugsy’s Flamingo arrived and two years after the opening of the Meyer Lansky’s Thunderbird, the Desert Inn was opened by Moe Dalitz, who was a Cleveland bootlegger, boss gambler, and Lansky compatriot extraordinaire. Later that year, Estes Kefauver, Tennessee senator and chairman of the Committee to Investigate Organized Crime, came to Las Vegas.
In two days of hearings, many incipient Las Vegas trends were revealed and clarified: There was, indeed, a connection between the casino industry and the national crime syndicate; gangsters from California, New York, Cleveland, and Chicago were running the new hotel-casinos, having been licensed by county and state officials who shrugged off their convictions for gambling offenses in other states; millions in mob money was already invested and millions more was redistributed without the nuisance of accounting paperwork; and the out-of-state operators were quickly gaining a measure of respectability as bona fide Nevada businessmen.
The Kefauver hearings, conducted around the country, triggered two unintended consequences that helped build Las Vegas. First, they created a mass hysteria that flooded the rackets divisions of numerous police departments with the authority and funding to wipe out the illegal gambling operations within their jurisdictions. Second, they engendered a mass migration to Las Vegas of experienced casino personnel, all sticking a thumb into the perfectly legal, largely profitable, and barely policed pie.
Since conventional sources were stingy with the capital necessary to build hotel-casinos, black money from the top dons of the Syndicate poured in from the underworld power centers of New York, Chicago, Miami, and Havana. Illegal casino operators, with their bankrolls, enforcers, and dealers, made a beeline for the Las Vegas promised land from the big-time games of Boston, New Orleans, St. Louis, Cleveland, Newport, Hot Springs, Dallas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. Hustlers, scam artists small-time hoods, prostitutes, thieves, and degenerate gamblers swamped the city. And just as men considered criminals throughout the country turned into businessmen in Nevada, respectable tourists seemed to turn into naughty boys and girls the minute they crossed the state line.
In 1951, Dallas boss gambler Benny Binion opened the Horseshoe Club downtown. In 1952, the Sahara (funded by Portland gamblers) and the Sands (New Jersey money) opened. Within three years, the Riviera, Dunes, Royal Nevada, Moulin Rouge, New Frontier, Hacienda, Fremont, and Mint held grand openings. By 1958, the $7 million Stardust and $10 million Tropicana had joined the Strip line-up.
Meanwhile, something even more spectacular was happening in the southern Nevada desert. Two months after Kefauver blew through town, the Atomic Energy Commission conducted its first aboveground nuclear test explosion in the vast uninhabited reaches of the old gunnery range, which had been transformed into the Nellis Air Force Base and Nuclear Test Site. For the next 10 years, nearly a bomb a month was detonated above ground a mere 70 miles northwest of Las Vegas. For most tests, the AEC erected realistic "Doom Town" sets to measure destruction and thousands of soldiers were posted within a tight radius to be deliberately exposed to radiation. Locals worried about which way the wind blew and seemed to contract a strange "atom fever" -- marketing everything from atomburgers to cheesecake images of a mushroom-cloud-bathing-suit-clad Miss Atomic Blast. But mostly, Las Vegans reveled in the AEC and military payrolls, the massive attention from the media, a notoriety approaching cosmic dimensions, and the neon-thermonuclear aspect of the whole extravaganza.
In addition, the Las Vegas mushrooming around the casinos was becoming the ultimate American suburb. The bright lights of the hotel-casinos, restaurants, bars, motels, and service stations along the Strip created a prototype for main drags across the nation. Row-house subdivisions occupied by casino workers’ families surrounded the town with an aura of normalcy. Las Vegas turned into almost a microcosm of the innocence and optimism of American in the 1950s -- though without, perhaps, the thin veneer of Victorian propriety.
However, the foundation of the place was somewhat shaky. By 1955, the town was badly overbuilt and an epidemic of hotel-casino failures, mergers, buyouts, buybacks, ownership shuffles, revolving-door bosses, and musical-chair managers kept the two investigators for the state’s casino regulatory agency, the Tax Commission, on their toes. It wasn’t until 1955 that Nevada created the Gaming Control Board, separate from the Tax Commission, specifically for licensing and policing the casinos.
Even so, by 1959, when the legislature further tightened its grip on the gambling industry with the formation of the policy-making Nevada Gaming Commission, the 10 major Strip hotels were veritable fiscal monoliths. Hundreds of constantly changing names and faces held points in the operations. A mosaic of corporations owned the casinos or ran the casinos, owned the hotels, held the real estate, or held the holding companies. To add to the complexity, the state found itself walking a tightrope between regulating and lubricating the casinos, since gambling taxes provided a major source of its own revenues.
Another untenable situation that came more and more to light was segregation. Black-white relations in the casino town made backwoods Alabama look enlightened. In fact, southern Nevada had a well-deserved reputation as the "Mississippi of the West." Black people could work at the casinos -- as anything from porters to headliners -- but they couldn’t play, stay, or even eat there. Sammy Davis Jr., Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, and many other black performers starred in Strip showrooms, but spent their nights in rooming houses in the Las Vegas ghetto of Westside. The Moulin Rouge, first and only hotel to cater to African-Americans in Las Vegas history, opened and closed in 1955 -- too successful for the city juice to allow it to last.
So, as the 1960s rolled around, Las Vegas was ripe for racial conflict. In addition, notorious "undesirables" ran the gambling company town. The local heat (sheriff and county commissioners) conscientiously protected the action and got its cut. The state heat consisted of a young and ineffectual regulatory apparatus. And the federal heat was just beginning to refuel in Washington, D.C., where new Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was planning to pick up where Estes Kefauver had left off.
And that’s where we’ll pick up tomorrow, as Las Vegas outgrows its image as a corrupt, immoral, mob-controlled, crime-infested den of iniquity.
