March 27, 2008
Mob mentality: For better or worse, Las Vegas continues to revel
in its gangster past
By STEVE FRIESS
The man to my left was an old-timer. You could tell from his
smoky voice, from the wrinkles and the gray, from the way he
talked fondly of hotels like the Trop and the Riviera that today
are rarely spoken of fondly.
I don’t usually make conversation on planes anymore, especially
not en route home to Las Vegas. I used to, until I found that
most tourists hear I live in the city they fantasize about and
usually have a barrage of the same old questions. You live there
and don’t gamble it all away? Isn’t the summer heat murder?
Why are so many people moving into Vegas all the time anyway?
But this weekend we were on the four-hour flight from Atlanta
that followed our grueling 10-hour flight from our Switzerland
vacation, and I was getting a second wind just as my partner
was crashing with exhaustion. So I noticed the guy to my left
was browsing a dog-eared copy of Doyle Brunson’s poker bible
Super System and decided to make chit-chat.
Frank Durango was actually from Orlando, en route to Vegas
for a poker trip masquerading as travel for a work convention.
He was 67. He’d been coming to Las Vegas since the 1960s, had
seen the Rat Pack at the Sahara and met his first wife at the
Stardust and treasured the time he rode an elevator with Don
Rickles at Caesars.
And so, naturally, he loved the so-called Old Vegas. He went
on a standard-issue rant about how great it all was back then,
how it was smaller and more intimate and everybody knew your
name and everything was cheap or free. It’s as if somebody sent
out a talking-points memo to Vegas nostalgists everywhere, the
way they repeat the lines so flawlessly no matter where they’re
from.
“It was so much better when the mob ran Vegas,” Frank confided
predictably. “Nowadays, it’s all corporate. It’s just not the
same.”
It was a more simplistic reiteration of the remarks Old Vegas
legend Jerry Lewis made to me last year. Lewis, too, bemoaned
the modernization of the city. “When the mob ran this town,
we had Las Vegas. When the corporates came in, we have Huckleberry
Finn Farms.”
Even in such a colorful rendition, this line has always bored
me. I’ve never been one of those people—and evidently there
are many—who have been fascinated by mafia lore in general or
believed that life back in the day was so great. I’ve always
thought we were being led to root for the wrong folks in most
of those redundant Scorsese flicks, and certainly The Sopranos.
Turns out, I’m not the only one. While interviewing Vegas
attorney Don Campbell for a profile for a lawyer’s magazine
a few weeks ago, I tripped a switch when I mentioned the oft-told
tales of the glorious Vegas mob era. Campbell spent years in
the Clark County prosecutor’s office trying mob cases against
the likes of Oscar Goodman. Our conversation was humming along
calmly until this:
“That is an absolute fallacy! To suggest that a criminal syndicate
could somehow fashion and run a city in a more even-handed and
efficient manner than the elected public officials is just maddening.
Saying that the mob ran the town better than now when we have
much better government structures and community structures,
especially the corporations that own the hotels, is just absolute
nonsense. These guys were brutal murderers. They were killers.
To suggest that they should somehow be romanticized as something
that they were not is very offensive to me.”
Campbell also teed off on Goodman’s plan to transform the
old federal post office into a mob museum complete with an interactive
wiretapping exhibit, wondering if 50 years from now there’ll
be a museum to pay tribute to the Crips and the Bloods and other
street gangs of our day. “Is that the logical extension of it?
I don’t think we should ever romanticize a criminal activity.
You see on MTV the glorification of criminal activity, particularly
among the underprivileged that can least afford additional criminal
activity in their lives.”
But of course there’ll be no pop-culture veneration of that
sort for modern-day gangbangers. Why not? Well, duh. They’re
usually not white. Spilotro, Rosenthal, Dalitz and Siegel were.
White culture finds white criminals exotic. Criminals of all
other races? They’re just terrifying.
I tested that theory on old Frank on the plane. I asked why
he thought the street gangs of today aren’t as admired. His
response: “Well, those guys are just nuts. High on drugs. No
morality at all. Scary.”
My impression is, the victims of the mob era in Vegas would
say exactly the same thing about their oppressors. Today, at
least, everybody in a casino has roughly the same shot at winning
and at earning a comp. Nobody knows your name, ’tis true, but
they also don’t come by your house and beat you to a pulp or
threaten to rape your wife if you don’t pay your debts.
What’s interesting, too, is where my plane neighbor Frank
was staying. I mean, if he really loved the Old Vegas, you’d
expect to find him at Binion’s or the Sahara or, perhaps, the
Flamingo, right? But no. Frank was resting his poker-addled
head at—are you ready for this?—the Excalibur. The Excalibur!
He was sheepish about it, to be sure.
“They happen to have a lot of low-cost poker tournaments,”
he said. “And the buffet isn’t half bad.”
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