No one knows for sure, but according to conventional historical wisdom, the Italian-Jewish Mafia's involvement in Las Vegas casino business lasted a full four decades, from the mid 1940s, when Benjamin Siegel muscled his way onto the scene, through the mid-1980s, when Tony "the Ant" Spilotro and his brother Michael were found bludgeoned to death in an Indiana cornfield (the whole story of the hounding of the mob out of Las Vegas is told in our book The Battle for Las Vegas by Denny Griffin; the story of Spilotro is further examined in our books Culotta and Of Rats and Men.)
The mob's heyday, of course, was in the late 1940s and 1950s, when the Thunderbird (financed by Florida-based Meyer Lansky and fronted by his brother Jake), Desert Inn (financed by Cleveland-based Moe Dalitz and fronted by Wilbur Clark), the Sands (Joseph Stacher, New Jersey), Riviera (Chicago), Dunes (New England), Fremont (St. Louis), Tropicana (New York), and the Stardust (Chicago) were all owned by Syndicate families from around the country.
For example, a month after the Tropicana opened in April 1957, Frank Costello, the New York-based boss of bosses, was wounded in an attempted assassination and detectives found a slip of paper in his pocket with a tidy sum of figures, which turned out to be the gross profits from the Trop's first three weeks of operation.
The Tropicana cost $15 million to build, which was about as much cash as even the well-heeled New York mob could lay its hands on. After the Stardust opened a year later, no new major resort-casinos opened on the Strip for another eight years, by which time the mob-controlled Teamsters Union was fronting the money. Caesars Palace, for example, cost $25 million to open in 1966, financed mostly by the union's pension fund.
By then, however, the mob was being hounded out of Nevada. The state heat had been turned up in 1955 with the creation of the state Gaming Control Board. The national media put Las Vegas in the pressure cooker with the Diatribe, a series of books and exposes that peeled off the layers of glitz to expose the slimy underbelly; it culminated with the publication of The Green Felt Jungle in 1963. Las Vegas also found itself the main battleground in the intensifying federal war on organized crime; in 1961, Attorney General Robert Kennedy embarked on a personal crusade to rid Vegas of the underworld.
Howard Hughes showed up in 1966 and launched his campaign to "buy out the mob." He scooped up the Desert Inn, Sands, Castaways, Frontier, Silver Slipper, and Landmark. In addition, the special dispensations Hughes received from state casino regulators paved the way for the Nevada Corporate Gaming Acts of 1967 and 1969, which allowed publicly traded corporations to acquire gambling licenses without the requirement of every stockholder being individually licensed. Hilton, MGM, and Holiday Inn quickly secured financing from legitimate sources; for the first time, actual lending institutions were now loaning money to build Vegas hotel-casinos. This formally began Vegas' transition from a mob-controlled to a corporate-controlled gambling city.
Meanwhile, of course, some original connections continued to play themselves out. In 1973, past owners of the Flamingo pleaded guilty to a hidden interest by Meyer Lansky. In 1976, agents from Gaming Control uncovered a major operation that was skimming upwards of 20% of slot revenues at the Stardust, Fremont, Marina, and Fremont hotels, all purchased by frontman Allen Glick of Argent Corporation with $70 million in loans from the Teamsters Union; Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, the mob's main man at Argent, was shoved out for his part in it and the Stardust lost its gambling license, the last Las Vegas casino to have that happen, in 1983.
By then, Allen Dorfman, the Teamster's Pension Fund fixer, had been assassinated. Lefty Rosenthal had barely escaped with his life after his Cadillac was blown up, and Allen Glick, along with Carl Thomas and Joe Agosto of the Tropicana, had turned state's evidence; their testimonies helped convict the capos of the Chicago, Kansas City, and Milwaukee organizations.
Subsequently, Tony "the Ant" Spilotro, the Chicago mob's enforcer in Las Vegas, made a bid to fill the void left by the dons' imprisonment; he and his brother Michael were found in an Indiana cornfield, beaten to death. It's widely agreed that the mob's overt involvement in the Las Vegas casino business ended with the hits on the Spilotros.
According to one source who knows, some mob-connected guys can still be seen on occasion in Vegas, but they're either on vacation or they've retired here. A few renegades, bookies, and drug dealers try to ply their trades here. But it's not organized like it used to be. Those days are gone.
Also, while the Italian mob has moved on, other criminal elements have filled the void on the streets and are now active in southern Nevada -- namely Mexicans, Russians and other Eastern Europeans, Asians, even Israelis.
The "Mexican Mafia" consists mainly of Hispanic gang members from California who come to Las Vegas to commit street crimes, mostly burglarly and armed robbery, but also murder.
The Israelis are involved in loan sharking, extortion, money laundering, and prostitution; they've also cornered the Ecstasy drug market.
The Russian Mafia is active in Las Vegas, mostly in terms of computer cracking, credit card fraud, and identity theft, as well as extorting money from online gambling sites.
