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The virtues of vice and vice versa

By John M. Broder
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, Las Vegas, Nevada
Sunday, Jun 06, 2004, Page 12

A view of the strip from high atop the Rio Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, in April. PHOTO: NY TIMES

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.

"They are ready to take on the big dogs for the first time and really stand up to the gambling industry."

Guy Rocha, the Nevada state archivist

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.

Government has long been the willing handmaiden of that which drives the Nevada economy, looking the other way when necessary, providing a helping hand when possible.

It is no accident that Oscar Goodman, who made his name and his fortune representing mobsters and hit men, is the mayor of Las Vegas.

Among his current proposals are the legalization of prostitution in the city of Las Vegas and building a "mob museum" to enshrine the city's criminal heritage.

"We have turned vice into a virtue," Rothman said with a wry sense of wonder.

Las Vegas may be in the midst of another of its constant reinventions. The decades from the late 1940s through the late 1970s were the mob era. From 1981 to 2001, Las Vegas saw phenomenal growth and the advent of the mega-resorts, along with a shift in image from naughty to family-friendly and back again. The next decade will probably bring another business model, although legalized vice will still be at its core.

"The city has recharacterized itself time and again, like a chameleon," said Miller, the former governor.

He said that the price of entry on the Strip had become so high that further consolidation is likely, with a shrinking number of larger and more powerful concerns dominating the landscape in the year to come.

"Just like the old days," he said.

But with the rapid growth of the Las Vegas region, new power centers are beginning to emerge after a half-century of dominance by the gambling industry and its offshoots. Real estate developers, banks, retailing giants, highway contractors, auto dealers, small businesses -- interests that wield political and economic power in "normal" cities -- are beginning to make their weight felt.

"They are ready to take on the big dogs for the first time and really stand up to the gambling industry," said Guy Rocha, the Nevada state archivist.

"Nevada may be moving in a new direction, where the gambling industry can no longer do things by fiat," Rocha said.

If that happens, he said, it will truly mark a revolutionary moment in Nevada history.
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