Question of the Day - 05 November 2018

We’ve waited a long time—years—to answer this question.

We too had heard about auto racing in Vegas, recollected in passing in oral histories and memoirs, but we never ran across anything substantive about it.

Until now.

We’ve just run across a major work on the subject, a big new 400-page book called Stardust International Raceway—Motorsports Meets the Mob in Vegas, 1965-1971 by Randall Cannon and Michael Gerry (McFarland and Company, $49.95).

Randall Cannon is a former motocross racer and a lifelong motorsports enthusiast.  Michael Gerry is a race-vehicle constructor and has worked on multiple world-championship drag-racing teams. They grew up as friends in Las Vegas in the rustic ’60s and attended numerous professional and local race events. 

And we have to say, for such a short-lived and obscure piece of Vegas history, author Randall Cannon has uncovered voluminous sources and written about it in astonishing detail, with a four-page small-type bibliography of books; magazine and newspaper articles and websites; personal interviews and correspondence; track programs; casino newsletters, fact sheets, and press kits; FBI files, SEC digests, and lawsuit transcripts, and much more; plus a 20-page index and hundreds of historical photos, including a 16-page color spread.

The story starts in the 1950s with an American-Graffiti-like chapter on street racing along Highland Drive in Las Vegas and out in remote Henderson by Basic Magnesium. “Was it organized,” Randy Cannon writes. “‘No, but word got around.’ Was it legal? ‘No, but we warned the cops ahead of time,” a racing pioneer recalled.

From those humble roots, Las Vegas actually became known as a drag-racing destination, attracting race cars and drivers from around the Southwest.

The story continues through a number of makeshift tracks, including Las Vegas Park Speedway (as the bankrupt Las Vegas Park horse track was dubbed for auto racing events), Henderson’s Industrial City Drag Strip (1958-1962) that turned into the Thunderbird Speedway (1962-1964), and finally the big lead-up to the Stardust International Raceway (1965-1971), which featured actual grandstands, bathrooms, and air-conditioned timing towers and hosted the biggest racing names of the time: Mario Andretti, Parnelli Jones, Bobby Unser, Mark Donohue, and many more.

The bulk of the book covers that six-year period of the track’s existence, connecting it to the “predominant regional culture of the time period” and following the “intricate and sometimes byzantine workings of gamblers, gravel-barons, and government,” with the involvement of such prominent personalities as Moe Dalitz, Irwin Molasky, Howard Hughes, Robert Maheu, E. Parry Thomas, and the scandal-ridden Parvin-Dorhmann Corporation.

The interviewees put a pretty spin on the story. One said, “We had the best cars and the best drivers. We gave it our best shot, spent millions of dollars, and lost it all. We were just forty years ahead of our time."

In fact, the over-arching thesis of the book is that, typical of Vegas at the time, there weren’t many good intentions along the way, particularly with respect to Stardust International. Much more likely is that the racketeers and their fellow conspirators used the racing properties effectively as bearer-shares to conduct their private affairs, transact their hidden business, and wash a lot of cash. 

For anyone who has an interest in Las Vegas history, especially the deeply buried past, or the history of motorsports in general, Stardust International Raceway — Motorsports Meets the Mob in Vegas, 1965-1971 is a real find and worth every penny.