With fluctuating arrogance, I have stemmed more than a few debates on historical events or actors by rejecting the premise that they have breached the cannon of history. Admittedly, by definition, everything that’s happened (including Terrell Owen’s career) is history. However, in all practical sense, I like to say that “history,” as we can reasonably understand it, ends at around 1975. This is because everything after that time is too recent and so the consequences can only barely be hypothesized—not to mention the year is also a convenient, transitional milestone (Vietnam, Fran Tarkenton, etc). Events and actors in the 1980s and 1990s are too often discussed emotionally because people feel a certain, sometimes inappropriate or unnecessary, responsibility. However, I will adopt the crafted attitude of this post’s subject and bend that rule, because there is no other way to properly understand the city of Las Vegas.
Las Vegas (Spanish for “the shiny”) may have been founded in 1910, 1829 or when Mark Twain was in the fourth grade, but that’s all just prologue and usually riddled with tidbits on how early settlers and natives played primitive games of chance. Such anecdotal history serves as light-hearted justification for the modern sensibilities of Nevadans and proudly flung about by the state’s modern gaming overlords. In short—past that point, I know—Las Vegas didn’t really start to become Las Vegas until 1966, because that's when it stopped being an economic island.
Pictured: Las Vegas; metaphor.
Now, some are quick to note the Gangster coat of paint that covered in the city from a week after World War Part Duex through the encore screenings of the original “Ocean’s Eleven.” (You know, the slick, half-assed, celebrity packed, casino heist film that didn’t star George Clooney.) But any fears that the Syndicate--or organized goons of any kind--could so much as own a burger stand in modern Las Vegas are rawest nerves for current casino magnates like Steve Wynn and Arthur Goldberg. These men sue their way into social grace where their 1950s counterparts preferred having an unsavory past (if only to make negotiations easier).
In either case, when there is trouble, casinos deploy their lawyers with a blood thirst that’d startle Meyer Lanksy’s hit men. No, Papa Joe Kennedy and the mob men have no real progeny in Las Vegas. That coat of paint has been bulldozed as unimaginable, monumental, intentionally-collapsible labyrinths are built up and painted with a similar, though different, shade of paint that tested better with focus groups.
Focus groups also liked beautiful women and all that got us was "Slutty Al Capone."
In 1966, Howard Hughes sold his near $600 millions worth of stock and bonds and had a hole burning in his pockets of which the likes not even a Saudi prince has ever felt. $600 million. $6,000,000. In 1966. Adjusted for nowadays, that’s an ass ton of money. And crazy old Howard Hughes bought up everything he could. Not sports cars, mind you, but rather controlling share of several casinos and hotels. More than just providing buckets of material for a sequel (or two!) to Scorcese’s “The Aviator,” Hughes did what the government wasn’t allowed to do: he legitimized Las Vegas from a 20th century pirate port to growing cultural center. A real life city.
Now, it’s important to understand Hughes wasn’t exactly cutting the legs out from Fat Tony or anybody else. Far from. Really, Hughes might have just as well been the latest front for the organized criminals who could run their casinos and partake in any other endeavors under the pitch-perfect guise of a crazed billionaire’s late-stage ambitions. The former playboy industry titan may as well have just been another front. Hughes, to his (cronies’) credit, lay the groundwork for the city to come by having Hughes apply for his gambling licenses (required by law) without ever appearing before the state gaming commission. Before this point, the owners of any establishment were held accountable for their casinos and actually had to be of some moral standing to own a casino—or they had to bribe the commissioners. The insane and reclusive Hughes, though, became a corporation onto himself—though not entirely orchestrated by himself—and took over places he never so much as actually saw, leaving in charge person (alleged gangsters) he never actually met.
As a short aside, as Hughes continued to lose touch with humanity and looking more like a Gandalf-Holocaust victim, President Richard Nixon became more paranoid about his own connections with Hughes. Specifically how the WWII Captain of Industry donated over $100,000 to the president in the last campaign and how most of Hughes’ latest millions came from contracts with the CIA. Nixon became convinced the Democrats, in the 1972 election, would exploit his ties to America’s last robber baron and he saw to hire thugs lifted from a friend’s Las Vegas Rolodex. And so went the botched break-in at the Watergate Hotel.
With Hughes’ death in 1976, Las Vegas was free from one man’s mythological, nonsensical, possibly non-existent tyranny. The city was free to be owned by absentee landowners and faceless corporations. Before F.F. Coppola made the regrettable Godfather Part Three, Las Vegas had been completely remodeled. Not as America’s Playground, Sin City or an adult Disneyland, but as America itself. Unchecked, unashamed, America. Old Las Vegas was flawed; old Las Vegas was gone.
In fact, calling Las Vegas an “adult Disneyland” does a disservice to the city that brings in more tourists than actual Disneyland. Add on that children don’t have much money to spend on themselves and it’s pretty clear where the great money pile is. A more apt comparison to Las Vegas may actually be the holy city of Mecca. Though, again, more pilgrims flock to Las Vegas every year, offering up their own sacrifices to the dream of escape.
People pray all over the world, but they mean it in Las Vegas.
The city is simply too American. We love freedom, sure, but only because it sells. What we really love is, in fact, selling things. We sell cotton, lumber, land, guns and the idea that somehow because my drunk neighbor’s political opinion has the same mathematical weight as my own, we, as a country, landed on the Moon.
The gangsters of olde stole millions of dollars from cheating people at casino. But as made evident years later, they left untold billions of dollars on the proverbial table by banning from the premises women, minorities anybody not wearing a suit. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King, Jr., Caesar Chavez and millions of others strove for a goal only made attainable by the one infallible dollar. Money is the equalizer. Sex, race, class, history and weight be damned; if your Franklins have their watermarks, you have a friend in the casino.
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