Question of the Day - 05 November 2025

We're not sure what "recent revelations" you might be referring to in your question. If it's the $7 million that New York crime families and NBA players and a coach cheated victims out of in crooked poker games, the answer is an unqualified no.

If the recent revelations have anything to do with such high-end casinos as the Wynn, Resorts World, and MGM Grand violating strict anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer regulations, facilitating illegal international money transfers, allowing proxy betting, associating with illegal bookmakers, and willfully ignoring suspicious activity, then again, the answer is no, though we might comment that these financial shenanigans actually remind us of similar capers when the Mob did run the Vegas casinos.

Perhaps recent revelations refer to our new book Casino Redux. The title alludes to the lessons from the Mob era in Las Vegas that were definitely not learned by casino bosses, regulators, and legislators in the U.S., Canada, Australia, China, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, and elsewhere; that and the subtitle, Unveiling the Global Casino Network of Chinese Organized Crime, aptly sum up the thesis of the book that one Mob has been efficiently replaced by another. 

Or maybe you're talking about the gouge? Those revelations are hardly recent. 

Anyway, whatever the revelations are/were, the question of whether players would be better off under organized-crime control of the casino is one of those “what ifs” that gets at the heart of Las Vegas mythology and has sparked endless debate over whether the city lost its edgy soul in the process of converting from Mob to corporate control. It reminds us of Philip K. Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history in which Germany and Japan win World War II and the United States is divided and occupied by both (a novel within the novel imagines a world where the Allies won the war).

Under the Mob, casinos catered to gamblers, not conventioneers, families, foodies, clubbies, concert-goers, sports fans, and locals. The players were treated like friends, which many were, since pit bosses knew them personally, rather than "player segements" that needed "developing" by hosts, marketing databases, and Central Credit. Drinks were free without algorithms, comps flowed generously without a thought to the "theo"; paid parking was unthinkable and there were no hidden fees; the Rat Pack defined “Vegas cool”; casinos made money off the games, while everything else was a loss leader. Profits were skimmed, certainly, but the casinos were set up so that most of the money made in Vegas stayed in Vegas, rather than being returned to stockholders in the form of share buybacks and judged by industry analysts obsessed with quarterly earnings. 

All that said, corruption was rampant and violence was threatened and used to settle disputes, silence witnesses, punish wrongdoers. Street crime was flagrant in the '70s and early '80s, with ripoffs and murders monopolizing headlines. Racism was as bad as in the Jim Crow South. FBI wiretaps and Teamsters-loan scandals were constant; the Mob kept Las Vegas perpetually suspect in the eyes of banks and Wall Street. It wasn't until state regulators and federal law enforcement cleaned house that legitimate financing and massive development could -- and did -- follow. Corporate money built the megaresorts that turned Las Vegas into a global destination. 

Today, Las Vegas supports 2.5 million residents, a diversified economy, and an international brand. The mobsters had neither the capital nor the inclination to fund billion-dollar projects and could never have sustained the scale, predicated on legitimacy, that followed in their wake. 

Bottom line, if you’re talking gambler-friendly policies and old-school glamor with an edge of menace, then the Mob's Vegas might seem “better off” than what replaced it. But in terms of long-term prosperity, safety, transparency, and infrastructure, the corporate era has transformed Las Vegas from a dusty outlaw outpost into a legitimate global city. You could say: The Mob built the legend. The corporations built the empire.