Question of the Day - 19 January 2024

Yesterday, we left off our coverage of which casinos were controlled by the Mob in its heyday in Las Vegas with the Riviera, which opened in April 1955. Today, we continue with the Dunes, which opened a little more than a month later.

The history of the Dunes (1955) is so convoluted and rife with ownership changes, including the Sands group and Kirk Kerkorian (his first small investment in a Las Vegas casino), landlord-tenant relationships, and bankruptcies that even if the Mob did control the place for a bit, not even they wanted it. Eventually, in 1971, three owners were indicted for skimming, but none was known to be even marginally connected to mobsters. 

When the Fremont (1956) opened downtown with a 15-story hotel tower, it was the tallest building in the state. The Fremont was under the control of Ed Levinson, Lansky's associate who also held an interest in the Sands; the Fremont's Mob history extends all the way to the 1970s, when Allen Glick became the frontman for it (along with the Marina, Hacienda, and Stardust).

The Hacienda way down at the south end of the Strip (where Mandalay Bay now stands) also opened in 1956. It was built by non-gangsters, who, in the usual scheme of things, went broke before completing the property. Warren Bayley, owner of a number of Hacienda-branded motels in California, stepped in and completed construction. State regulators delayed the casino's debut, objecting to Jake Kozloff, casino manager of the Thunderbird, whose hidden Mob ownership had been exposed; soon after his removal from the Hacienda's license application, the casino opened. When Warren Bayley died, his wife Judy ran the joint for seven years, the only woman casino owner in Las Vegas at the time. When she died of cancer, the property was sold to Allen Glick, a front for the Chicago Outfit.

Then comes the Tropicana (1957), more mobbed up than any casino that opened in Las Vegas in the '50s, even the Sands. The Trop was the brainchild of "Dandy" Phil Kastel, who'd spent 25 years managing the entire Louisiana gambling scene for Frank Costello, New York boss of bosses, along with Lansky and another New York boss, Lucky Luciano. Kastel enlisted Ben Jaffe, who held points in the Riviera and was part owner of the Miami Fontainebleau (both of which bring it full circle of sorts) to invest and front for him. Still, Kastel's name was actually on the license as casino manager and the grand opening was held up for a year until it was removed. 

Finally in the '50s was the Stardust (1958). This was the most tangled web of them all. It started in the feverish imagination of gangster of one, Tony Cornero (meaning he was independent, but crooked as Lombard Street in San Francisco), who invested $10,000 of his own money and sold two million shares of stock, which he somehow neglected to mention to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Trust us when we say that this is a major saga of its own, but to make a long story short, when Cornero dropped dead at a Desert Inn dice table in the middle of it, Jake "the Barber" Factor, cosmetic mogul's Max Factor's brother and Al Capone crony, swooped in, paid off the investors, and opened the place. For the next 25 or so years, the Stardust was Chicago-mob central in Las Vegas.

The Nevada Gaming Control Board was spun off the Tax Commission in 1954 and started hounding the organized criminals, along with the feds under Bobby Kennedy's Department of Justice in the early '60s. No major casinos opened between the Stardust and the Aladdin (1966), which started out mostly clean, but was vacuumed up in 1968 by the Fremont-Stardust consortium. 

By the time Caesars Palace opened (1968), the Teamsters Union's Pension Fund was financing the burgeoning expense of building a Las Vegas resort-casino ($25 million in Caesars' case) and the Mob certainly had a hand in that. Caesars' creator Jay Sarno went on to create Circus Circus (1968), but when he got into the inevitable financial trouble, Bill Bennett, an Arizona furniture mogul and Del Webb casino executive (Sahara Tahoe) took over the reins. 

The '70s marked the beginning of the end of Mob involvement in Las Vegas. It took 15 or so more years to rid Nevada of the most blatant organized-crime legacy, also another whole story (well told in our books Policing Las Vegas, The Battle for Las Vegas, and Cullotta; we're offering all three bundled at the special price of $25, a $12 saving.)

But to sum up, El Rancho Vegas, Last Frontier, Sahara, Dunes (mostly), Hacienda (till much later), and Circus Circus weren't controlled by the Mob in its heyday, at least as far as was known.