An inspector calls

“You’re the hub right now, kid.” Thus spake a Los Angeles-based private investigator who’s hot on the trail of some possible malfeasance in the real estate world. It involves a couple of characters who were persons of interest in a caper I covered four years ago for the Las Vegas Business Press— not to be confused with its castrated, present-day counterpart  — and had completely forgotten until today. It involved an attempt to raise money over the Internet to buy the Sahara (no, seriously) and turned out to be masterminded by two-time loser Ronald J. Goldberg from a prison cell in New York. I even heard from a woman who claimed to have set up conference calls between Goldberg and potential dupes investors.

Goldberg appears to have fallen off the map, but some of the other players in the Great Sahara Boondoggle of ’06 have come back under investigative scrutiny. One is alleged Sahara Towers figurehead Clifford Perlman, who once got run out of New Jersey for being mobbed up (not that this kept him from the American Gaming Association‘s hall of fame). The other is Sahara Towers point man — and former Donald Trump confederate — Eli Verschleiser. While neither could be tied directly to the bizarre machinations of Sahara Towers, the tandem reemergence of Perlman and Verschleiser in connection with another controversial real estate deal suggests, for one thing, that Perlman may have been more involved in the Sahara Towers scheme than was believed at the time.

Incidentally, although Perlman was tapped to oversee the creation of the current MGM Grand, he left the company for obscure reasons four months later and, when I checked, the Nevada Gaming Control Board had no record of Perlman ever applying for a gaming license in connection with MGM. Other than appointing Larry J. Woolf as the Green Monster’s first CEO, he seems to have had little impact on the project.