Jack Binion, son of the legendary Benny Binion, who ran the Horseshoe Club casino here for years, once said that Las Vegas was the best town in the world to live in if you had no weaknesses.
"But if you have one," he said, "we'll find it."
Las Vegas is the most efficient machine ever devised to relieve the willing or the weak of their earthly fortunes, whether that weakness is gambling, sex, drink, spectacle or consumption.
Stripped of euphemism, that is precisely what the Las Vegas gambling and entertainment industry is designed to exploit. And much of the political and commercial life in southern Nevada is devoted to helping the large and wealthy corporations that now dominate the Strip and the barren landscape beyond achieve that end.
Some have described Las Vegas as the epicenter of global organized crime, where the syndicate plants its ill-gotten fortunes in the desert sands and sprouts hotel-casino pleasure palaces that generate ever more billions. Sally Denton and Roger Morris, authors of The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, call it "America's criminal city-state" where all institutions are corrupted by the influence of dirty money.
That may have been obviously true a generation or two ago. But the truth today is perhaps more mundane and complex -- and, in a way, more fascinating.
The business once ruthlessly ruled by Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Moe Dalitz and Howard Hughes is now dominated by a relative handful of publicly traded "entertainment" companies, among them Harrah's, Caesars, MGM/Mirage and Mandalay Bay Resorts.
The table stakes to play on the Strip are now US$1 billion and rising. Steve Wynn, who transformed the Strip a decade ago with the lush Bellagio, is returning to the scene with a new 2,700-room hotel that will cost US$2 billion to complete.
Nobody invests that kind of money without some certainty that the political and economic climate will support the enterprise, and Nevada's political institutions have always proved more than compliant, said Hal Rothman, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
"Government here has always been weak," Rothman said. For years the Nevada power structure -- state and local government, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the chambers of commerce -- has willingly served the interests of the big gambling concerns, he said. It was to everyone's benefit to keep the visitors coming, to smooth the way for development, to keep the taxes low.
It is difficult at times to distinguish between government in Nevada and the so-called resort industry. One of its US senators, John Ensign, is the son of Mike Ensign, chairman of the Mandalay Bay Resort Group and himself the former manager of a casino hotel. Its longest-serving governor, Bob Miller, is the son of Ross Miller, a well-connected Chicagoan who moved to Las Vegas in the 1950s to help the syndicate run its Nevada gambling operations. The younger Miller now serves as a legal adviser to gambling companies and sits on the board of Wynn's company.
Three members of the Clark County Commission were indicted last year on charges of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from strip-club owners.
Candidates for the state legislature raise as much as US$300,000, much of it from casino interests, to win a part-time job that pays US$7,800 a year, perhaps hoping for a spot in the revolving door between government and the state's chief industry.
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