{"id":4324,"date":"2010-08-11T10:51:02","date_gmt":"2010-08-11T18:51:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/?p=4324"},"modified":"2021-02-18T07:33:09","modified_gmt":"2021-02-18T15:33:09","slug":"an-inspector-calls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/an-inspector-calls\/","title":{"rendered":"An inspector calls"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1590\" title=\"sahara-logo\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/sahara-logo.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"115\" \/>&#8220;You&#8217;re the hub right now, kid.&#8221; Thus spake a <strong>Los Angeles<\/strong>-based private investigator who&#8217;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 <em>Las Vegas Business Press<\/em>&#8212; not to be confused with its castrated, present-day counterpart\u00a0 &#8212; and had completely forgotten until today. It involved an attempt to raise money over the Internet to buy the <strong>Sahara<\/strong> (no, seriously) and turned out to be masterminded by two-time loser <strong>Ronald J. Goldberg<\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lvbusinesspress.com\/articles\/2006\/03\/27\/news\/news04.txt\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">from a prison cell in New York<\/a>. I even heard from a woman who claimed to have set up conference calls between Goldberg and potential <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">dupes<\/span> investors.<\/p>\n<p>Goldberg appears to have fallen off the map, but some of the other players in the Great Sahara Boondoggle of &#8217;06 have come back under investigative scrutiny. One is alleged <strong>Sahara Towers<\/strong> figurehead <strong>Clifford Perlman<\/strong>, who once got run out of<!--more--> <strong>New Jersey<\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lvbusinesspress.com\/articles\/2006\/03\/06\/news\/news05.txt\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">for being mobbed up<\/a> (not that this kept him from the <strong>American Gaming Association<\/strong>&#8216;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.multigroups.com\/press18.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">hall of fame<\/a>). The other is Sahara Towers point man &#8212; and former <strong>Donald Trump<\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/findarticles.com\/p\/articles\/mi_km4470\/is_200604\/ai_n16312970\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">confederate<\/a> &#8212; <strong>Eli Verschleiser<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n<p>Incidentally, although Perlman was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1989\/12\/08\/business\/mgm-grand-fills-position.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" class=\"broken_link\">tapped to oversee the creation<\/a> of the current <strong>MGM Grand<\/strong>, he left the company for obscure reasons <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1990\/03\/09\/business\/executive-resigns-at-mgm-grand.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" class=\"broken_link\">four months later<\/a> and, when I checked, the <strong>Nevada Gaming Control Board<\/strong> had no record of Perlman ever applying for a gaming license in connection with MGM. Other than appointing <strong>Larry J. Woolf<\/strong> as the Green Monster&#8217;s first CEO, he seems to have had little impact on the project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re the hub right now, kid.&#8221; Thus spake a Los Angeles-based private investigator who&#8217;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 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/an-inspector-calls\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[42,11,25,54,87,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4324"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4324"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29286,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4324\/revisions\/29286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}