According to the authors, Las Vegas is 'America's criminal city-state.'
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By JAMES McMANUS
 THE MONEY AND THE POWER The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000. By Sally Denton and Roger Morris. Illustrated. 479 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95. |
xcept for the sun and the
occasional thermonuclear blast, Las Vegas is the brightest source of light
in our solar system. Little more than a desert rest stop 60 years ago, it is
now the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country and is second only
to Mecca in its number of annual pilgrims. Its most famous drink is the
atomic cocktail -- vodka, brandy, Champagne, splash of sherry. Gamblers
enjoying them in the 1950's were treated to views of hydrogen bombs going
off 65 miles northwest of town.
The mushrooming impact of this gaudy metropolis is the subject of ''The Money and the Power,'' Sally Denton and Roger Morris's magisterial, if one-sided, history of what they call ''America's criminal city-state.'' Denton is a reporter and the author of ''The Bluegrass Conspiracy''; Morris, her husband, was a senior staff member at the National Security Council during the Johnson and Nixon administrations and has written biographies of Richard Nixon and the Clintons. Together they arraign Las Vegas on charges of drug trafficking, money laundering and the corruption of politicians, including nearly every president since Dwight Eisenhower.
Their story begins with Meyer Lansky, whose working assumption was that Wall Street firms, banks, industrial giants, labor unions and political parties were ''de facto gangs'' from which he should learn; the term ''Lansky operation'' soon came to define a blending of criminal with legitimate business practices. He bankrolled Bugsy Siegel's vision of Las Vegas, seeing the Mojave Desert as a critical asset. Once tourists ate and drank all they could, only two choices remained: sex and gambling.
Americans' love-hate relationship with those pleasures is best embodied
by the two middle sons of Joseph P. Kennedy. Like his father, John Kennedy
loved Nevada's wide-open fiscal and sexual ethos, and the close parallel
between the meteoric rise of the Strip and his own political career was
hardly a coincidence. Denton and Morris assert that friendly hotel owners
and entertainers (Frank Sinatra foremost among them) used a brown leather
satchel to contribute $1 million in cash to his 1960 campaign. They also
introduced him to Judy Campbell, who happened to be the Chicago mob boss Sam
Giancana's concubine, and John's compromising liaison with her lasted well
into his presidency. His younger brother Robert inherited more of their
mother's Catholic piety. As attorney general, he reversed the priorities of
J. Edgar Hoover, who had assigned 400 New York F.B.I. agents to investigate
Communism, 10 to look into organized crime. While Hoover had focused
exclusively on a Sicilian Cosa Nostra, Robert acknowledged the rise of a
multiethnic syndicate.
Kim Jew/Alfred A. Knopf
Sally Denton and Roger Morris
The real world, it seemed, was now being run by the likes of the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. He had bought most of the major hotels on the Strip but was always too ill and addled by painkillers to oversee them. Federal investigations were canceled and Teamster loans repaid, but syndicate bosses still skimmed the profits. In the meantime, the authors maintain, both of Nixon's presidential campaigns were lavishly financed by the Hughes puppeteers Moe Dalitz and Robert Maheu, and they argue that Nixon's obsessive fear that Maheu might leak incriminating information inspired his ''plumbers'' unit, thus planting the seeds of his own resignation.
In one of their most illuminating passages, the authors double back to 1954 in order to trace, often in hilarious detail, Ronald Reagan's demise as a left-leaning actor and phoenix-like rebirth as a pitchman for reactionary causes. With his election in 1980, they say, he assumed the role of ''emcee'' of a ''slow-motion coup d'état'' largely underwritten by the syndicate. While the president unctuously swore to ''get rid of the mob,'' his administration slashed the budgets of the F.B.I., D.E.A. and S.E.C. while fostering huge tax cuts for corporations and the already wealthy. ''The hogs were really feeding,'' Reagan's own budget director would say, looking back.
In the 90's, Michael Milken and Steve Wynn took over as Sin City became Family Vegas. The authors report that a 1999 study showed that for decades ''half and often more of the campaign funds of winning candidates'' in Nevada ''had come from the casinos and their masters.'' At the national level, Bill Clinton's shrewdly deniable quid pro quos became political state of the art. As he quipped to supporters at a $10,000-a-plate luncheon in Vegas, ''You're intelligent enough to support Democrats so that you can continue to live like Republicans.''
Denton and Morris have orchestrated a vast array of sources into a nuanced indictment. Their profiles of Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Benny Binion, the founder of the Horseshoe casino, and dozens of others bring to life what might have been a legalistic chronicle. Their stern moral tone seems adopted from Tacitus, the Roman historian who in A.D. 98 wrote of the barbarians, ''Under the influence of uncontrollable ecstasy, the players gambled their wives, their children and ultimately themselves into captivity.''
What the authors have failed to provide is a sense of their subject's appeal. Quoting with approval Noël Coward's opinion of Las Vegas tourists -- earnest morons flinging their money down the drain'' -- is representative of their contempt for a place where ordinary people come to feel, for a weekend, like big shots. Another fact they seem to resent is that governments make unrealistic laws, people break them, and the opportunists who help inevitably become rich and powerful. As the popular and critical success of ''The Sopranos,'' ''The Godfather'' and ''Traffic'' makes plain, the drama of bending the law touches deep human chords. For Denton and Morris, even to wear tailored clothes indicates crooked venality.
ike many two-person writing
teams, this one produces its share of three-legged prose and redundancy.
A more serious hitch is the authors' wont to conflate facts
misleadingly. They write that Benny Binion's son Ted ''was murdered amid
a family quarrel over control of the now national Binion empire.'' A
legal feud was under way among Benny's children when Ted was murdered in
1998 (not 1999, as they state), but it was his live-in girlfriend, Sandy
Murphy, and her latest lover who drugged, then suffocated, the wayward
casino mogul. No member of his family was even remotely involved.
Most of the book's soundings seem true nonetheless. Degrees of separation between gangsters and friends of gangsters, between homicidal goons and corporate hustlers, are somehow less meaningful now that gambling stocks owned by Harvard University and the California State Employees Pension Fund are part of what the authors call a ''grand alliance of upperworld and underworld.''
Witness the attorney Oscar B. Goodman. His clients have included
Lansky; the hit man Tony (the Ant) Spilotro; the narcotics importer
Jimmy Chagra, for whom Goodman won acquittal in the killing of a federal
judge; and the stripper turned murderer Sandy Murphy, whose case he
relinquished only when he decided to run for public office. In June 1999
the citizens of Las Vegas elected Goodman their mayor in a landslide,
and he now has designs on national office. Tacitus himself couldn't make
a much tighter case that one empire had seen better days while another
was feeling its oats. MORE REVIEWS:
By: Peter Dale Scott
"'The Money and the Power' is essential
reading for all those who want to understand the hidden history of how we've
been governed. Through this riveting narrative of Las Vegas, not only do
we see how it became a center for national campaign financing and
international money-laundering, mocking law enforcement, we also gain a whole
new perspective on our nation in the last half-century, and the melding of
upper- and underworld finance that increasingly dominates the world. A
breathtaking book."
By: Nicholas Peleggi
"Riveting and provacative. It's all
here. An unforgettable portrait of the world's most fascinating city and
its characters. Your view of Las Vegas and America will never be the
same."
By: Anthony Summers
"An outstanding book, at once majestic and
terrible in its symmertry. Denton and Morris have cracked a key part of
the genetic code of the modern United States, with the resolve that led
scientists to unravel DNA. There is a skein that links mobsters and
multiple presidents, Mormons and money men, the darker machinations of the CIA
and the old FBI, hard drugs and apple pie -- and it winds out from the back to
Las Vegas. 'The Money and the Power' sounds a warning call for the
millennium."
By: Jim Hougan
"What a good book this is. From the
pioneering Mormons to the racketeering Mob, this book is a terrific read, an
investigative biography and secret history of America's most surreal and wired
city. With characters like Bugsy Siegel and Benny Binion, 'The Money and
the Power' is proof-positive that Las Vegas is not only stranger than fiction
-- it's scarier."
Credits:
Peter Dale Scott: "Cocaine Politics"
and "Iran-Contra Connection"
Nicholas Pileggi: "Casino" and "Wiseguy"
Anthony Summers: "The Arrogance of Power:
The Secret world of Richard Nixon"
Jim Hougan: "Secret Agenda:
Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA"
Reviewed by Chris Rasmussen THE MONEY AND THE POWER The Las Vegas Strip is not only the most famous street on
Earth but the most visible sign of human habitation from outer space, a beacon
of civilization nearly five miles long. Yet, as Sally Denton and Roger Morris
observe, Vegas's gleaming facades conceal a history relentlessly dark. Worse,
this island of hedonism and corruption in the middle of the Mojave desert is no
longer a remote outpost but has extended its values and influence across the
United States. Denton and Morris's Las Vegas is no mere tourist
destination. Instead, it is America's "shadow capital," the nexus
where the lines of the American power grid -- politicians, organized crime,
labor and corporate capital -- combine to rule the nation. Only in Las Vegas,
they contend, is the intimate connection between upperworld and underworld, the
seen and unseen, revealed. The Money and the Power offers not merely a history
of Las Vegas's astonishing boom over the past half-century but also a view of
recent American history from the jaded vantage of the Strip. Denton and Morris have a keen eye for scandal: She is
author of a revealing exposé of drug trafficking, while he has chronicled the
boundless ambition and duplicity that propelled Richard Nixon and the Clintons
to political power. Their new book is a history not of the city of Las Vegas or
its phenomenally successful tourist industry but of the corrupt political and
business dealings of the city's elite. Although the history of Vegas's dark
underside is not altogether new, it has seldom been so abundantly researched and
compellingly told. The mob launched the city's boom in the 1940s, building
casinos to launder its multi-million dollar take from narcotics and corruption
throughout the nation. Nevadans, residents of a desperately poor state of
already dubious moral repute for its legal gambling and lax divorce laws,
tacitly condoned political corruption and rule by the mob in exchange for an
infusion of cash and jobs. Over the past 50 years, an oligarchy of thugs and
megalomaniacs has hoarded the wealth and political clout that rule Las Vegas --
they have, and are, that preeminent currency in the Vegas economy: "the
Juice." Vegas's peculiar line of succession is filled with mobsters and
casino moguls: Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Howard Hughes, Steve Wynn, Kirk
Kerkorian. Today the keepers of the Juice preside over corporations instead of
the syndicate, and have draped a veil of legitimacy over the "gaming
industry." They not only control the city, and the state of Nevada, but
wield considerable power across the nation. Gambling's power can scarcely be
overstated: Americans gamble more money than they spend on all other forms of
entertainment combined. As Las Vegas grew from a tiny desert town into a hugely
popular tourist destination, the city's extraordinary wealth made it
irresistible to politicians and other would-be power brokers. Organized labor,
especially when Jimmy Hoffa ruled the Teamsters, invested heavily in Vegas as
the city boomed. Aspiring politicians eagerly tapped casino heads for campaign
funds. John Kennedy loved Vegas (he was attracted by more than political
contributions). Ronald Reagan bombed in Vegas when he emceed a variety revue at
the end of his sagging film career, but, in the 1980s, President Reagan's
endorsement of the free market legitimized Vegas's rapacious ethos, enabling
casinos to join the ranks of reputable businesses. The syndicate, long
underground, at last ventured into the upperworld, and Las Vegas, formerly
scorned as a tawdry exception among American cities, emerged as the embodiment
of no-holds-barred capitalism and self-indulgence. Not content to trace the convergence of money and power in
Vegas, Denton and Morris pinpoint Vegas as the epicenter of recent American
history as well. After establishing the Kennedys' considerable ties to Vegas,
for instance, they credit the city with JFK's rise and fall. Did Las Vegas
mobsters, angered by Robert Kennedy's determination to investigate organized
crime, play a role in JFK's assassination? "It hardly mattered in the end
who killed JFK," because "in the end, Las Vegas had won." This
Vegas-centric perspective of America, no less than the provincialism of the
Manhattanite or Beltway insider, considerably overstates the city's influence. The Strip's headiness can be disorienting. Its gleaming
but ersatz facades may be less consequential than the unseen history of Las
Vegas, a history that the city's media and power brokers have consistently tried
to suppress. The authors' sleuthing in the shady world behind Vegas's golden
veneer uncovers disturbing ties between underworld and upperworld, organized
crime and corporations, mobsters and presidents. As they observe, Las Vegas, a
crossroads for gangsters, politicians, financiers, swindlers and spies, proves a
unique place for "connecting the unconnectable." Characterizing the
city as the nation's "shadow capital," however, and making it the
point of origin for disasters ranging from the Kennedy assassination to
Watergate, only mirrors the hyperbole that is Vegas's vernacular. Sin City's
notoriety is well-earned, as this disturbing tale of corruption reminds us, but
Las Vegas is not the gateway that links this world to Hades. • Chris Rasmussen teaches American history at the University
of Nevada Las Vegas.
James McManus's most recent novel is ''Going to the Sun.'' He is at
work on ''Positively Fifth Street,'' an account of the murder of the
casino operator Ted Binion and the 2000 World Series of Poker.
Just released and available at online sites
including amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.
Strip Mining
'The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America,
1947-2000' by Sally Denton and Roger Morris
Sunday, April 8, 2001; Page BW03
The Making of Las Vegas And Its Hold on America, 1947-2000
By Sally Denton and Roger Morris
Knopf. 479 pp. $26.95