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"There is no place like it. It is literally a beacon of Civilization.... Only Mecca inspires as many pilgrims." So write Sally Denton and Roger Morris about Las Vegas, Nevada, which emerged in the last years of the 20th century as America's fastest-growing city, and in the process, a family-entertainment and cultural center. But underlying that Las Vegas--and underlying the authors' fine narrative--is an older, decidedly less friendly city, one shaped by an "alliance of gamblers, gangsters, and government" to cater to every kind of human weakness. This Las Vegas, populated by notorious criminals, dangerous eccentrics, and ambitious empire-builders, exercised an extraordinary influence on the nation's politics and economy. Few presidents elected in the last century did not come calling on the desert city to secure funds and favors, even as Las Vegas's thriving economy came under the control of a handful of powerful men.
Full of strange episodes and characters, the history of Las Vegas is too little known. Denton and Morris's revisionist, past-as-prologue look at how Las Vegas came to be is a startling, original work that adds much to our understanding of recent American history. --Gregory McNamee -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .
From Booklist
The idea of Las Vegas as the epitome of crass American pop culture has become at least a surface truism in most circles. But Denton and Morris--the former an award-winning investigative reporter and the latter an award-winning author and a senior staffer on the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon--go much deeper than the surface in this sobering account of the famous Nevada resort town. In their exhaustive history of Las Vegas, they offer in-depth profiles of the major players who turned "a gritty, wind-whipped crossroads of faded whorehouses and honky-tonks" into what has become a vacation spot that "nearly half of America has [visited], more than any other locale in the nation." Vegas, they argue, was founded with and is still kept afloat by drug money (now it's international drug money). What is even more disturbing is that the criminal forces at work in Vegas have permeated into high levels of both business and government. The authors present compelling evidence to suggest that corruption in Las Vegas has a profound effect on American life. The city is, in their view, a huge neon symbol of "the open collusion of government, business, and criminal commerce that has become a governing force in the American system." This is strong stuff and sure to be controversial; expect demand to follow in the authors' wake as they tour the talk shows. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .
From Library Journal
According to Denton (The Blue Grass Conspiracy) and her husband, noted author Morris (Partners in Power), modern Las Vegas enjoys a thriving economy dependent on gambling, greed, political corruption, and drugs that mirrors what is practiced throughout America. The authors present many fascinating profiles of the men with the "juice," including founding father Meyer Lansky, leader of the Jewish mob that originally controlled postwar Las Vegas; Benny Binion, gambler, murderer, and one of the city's most feared casino owners; Hank Greenspun, editor of the Las Vegas Sun, who attacked corruption when it suited his purposes; and former governor and senator Paul Laxalt, who was elected with casino money and became gambling's national champion. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton also fed at the trough of Las Vegas contributions, while, the authors speculate, President Kennedy and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy may have been murdered because they launched criminal investigations of the Mob. Sadly, much of the income from gambling continues to be skimmed off and ends up in the pockets of crooks and politicians while ordinary Las Vegans endure poorly funded public schools, mediocre universities, and ill-equipped hospitals. This lucid historical account calls out for campaign finance reform. Recommended for all public libraries.
- Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Township Lib., King of Prussia, PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .
- Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Township Lib., King of Prussia, PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .
Pressestimmen
“The history of Vegas’s dark underside . . . has seldom been so abundantly and compellingly told.” –The Washington Post Book World
“Riveting. . . Absorbing. . . A saga of underworld subculture that intersects with that of government agents, senators, and presidents and ranges from Cuba to Dallas to Watergate.”–The Wall Street Journal
“A must-read. . . . One of the most important non-fiction books published in the U.S. in [a] half century.” –Los Angeles Times
“Something on every page hits like a meat ax. In their unsparing, meticulous reporting, Denton and Morris produce a compelling, important dossier.”–New York Daily News
“Riveting. . . Absorbing. . . A saga of underworld subculture that intersects with that of government agents, senators, and presidents and ranges from Cuba to Dallas to Watergate.”–The Wall Street Journal
“A must-read. . . . One of the most important non-fiction books published in the U.S. in [a] half century.” –Los Angeles Times
“Something on every page hits like a meat ax. In their unsparing, meticulous reporting, Denton and Morris produce a compelling, important dossier.”–New York Daily News
Kurzbeschreibung
Las Vegas–the name evokes images of divorce and dice, prostitutes and payoffs, gangsters and glitz. But beneath it all is a sordid history that is much more insidious and far-reaching than ever imagined. Now, at the dawn of the new century, this neon maelstrom of ruthlessness and greed stands to not as an aberrant “sin city,” but as a natural outgrowth of the corruption and worship of money that have come to permeate American life.
The Money and the Power is the most comprehensive look yet at Las Vegas and its breadth of influence. Based on five years of intensive research and interviewing, Sally Denton and Roger Morris reveal the city’s historic network of links to Wall Street, international drug traffickers, and the CIA. In doing so, they expose the disturbing connections amongst politicians, businessmen, and the criminals that harness these illegal activities. Through this lucid and gripping indictment of Las Vegas, Morris and Denton uncover a national ethic of exploitation, violence, and greed, and provide a provocative reinterpretation of twentieth-century American history.
The Money and the Power is the most comprehensive look yet at Las Vegas and its breadth of influence. Based on five years of intensive research and interviewing, Sally Denton and Roger Morris reveal the city’s historic network of links to Wall Street, international drug traffickers, and the CIA. In doing so, they expose the disturbing connections amongst politicians, businessmen, and the criminals that harness these illegal activities. Through this lucid and gripping indictment of Las Vegas, Morris and Denton uncover a national ethic of exploitation, violence, and greed, and provide a provocative reinterpretation of twentieth-century American history.
Über den Autor
Sally Denton and Roger Morris live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Leseprobe. Abdruck erfolgt mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.
Chapter 1
1.Meyer Lansky
The Racketeer as Chairman of the Board
He was born Maier Suchowljansky in 1902 at Grodno, in a Poland possessed by Tsarist Russia. As a child he envisioned the United States as a place of angels, "somewhat like heaven," he would say much later. When he was ten, his family fled the pogroms directed at Jews for the land of his dreams. In the Grand Street tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan he found not angels but what he called his "overpowering memory"-poverty, and still more savage prejudice.
In school, where he excelled, his name was Americanized. Meyer Lansky was a slight child, smaller than his peers. But he soon acquired a reputation as a fierce, courageous fighter. One day, as he walked home with a dish of food for his family, he was stopped by a gang of older Irish toughs whose leader wielded a knife and ordered him to take down his pants to show if he was circumcised. Suddenly, the little boy lunged at his tormentor, shattering the plate into a weapon, then nearly killing the bigger boy with the jagged china, though he was almost beaten to death himself by the rest of the gang before the fight was broken up. Eventually, he would become renowned for his intelligence rather than his physical strength. Yet no one who knew him ever doubted that beneath the calm cunning was a reserve of brutality.
He left school after the eighth grade, to find in the streets and back alleys of New York his philosophy, his view of America, ultimately his vocation. He lived in a world dominated by pimps and prostitutes, protection and extortion, alcohol and narcotics, legitimate businesses as fronts, corrupt police, and ultimately, always, the rich and powerful who owned it all but kept their distance. There was gambling everywhere, fed by the lure of easy money in a country where the prospects of so many, despite the promise, remained bleak and uncertain.
A gifted mathematician with an intuitive sense of numbers, he was naturally drawn to craps games. He was able to calculate the odds in his head. Lore would have it that he lost only once before he drew an indelible lesson about gambling and life. "There's no such thing as a lucky gambler, there are just the winners and losers. The winners are those who control the game . . . all the rest are suckers," he would say. "The only man who wins is the boss." He decided that he would be the boss. He adopted another, grander axiom as well: that crime and corruption were no mere by-products of the economics and politics of his adopted country, but rather a cornerstone. That understanding, too, tilted the odds in his favor.
By 1918, at the close of World War I, Lansky, sixteen, already commanded his own gang. His main cohort was the most charming and wildly violent of his childhood friends, another son of immigrants, Benjamin Siegel, called "Bugsy"-though not to his face-for being "crazy as a bedbug." Specializing in murder and kidnapping, the Bugs and Meyer Mob, as they came to be known, provided their services to the masters of New York vice and crime, and were soon notorious throughout the city as "the most efficient arm in the business." Like other criminals then and later, and with epic consequences in the corruption of both labor and corporate management, they also hired out their thuggery first to companies, and then to unions-most decisively the Longshoremen and Teamsters-in the bloody war between capitalists and workers. Some employers "gave their hoodlums carte blanche," as one account put it, which they took with "such enthusiasm that many union organizers were murdered or crippled for life." Lansky and Siegel would be partners and close, even affectionate friends for more than a quarter century, and in the end Lansky would have "no choice," as one journalist quoted him, but to join in ordering Bugsy's murder.
At a bar mitzvah, Lansky met Arnold Rothstein, the flamboyant gambler involved in fixing the 1919 World Series, and he soon became Rothstein's protégé. During Prohibition they made a fortune in bootlegging while dealing in heroin as well. Their collaborators, competitors, and customers in the criminal traffic, as Lansky later reminisced, were "the most important people in the country." On a rainy night in 1927 in southern New England, a gang working for Lansky hijacked with wanton violence a convoy of Irish whiskey being smuggled by one of their rival bootleggers, an ambitious Boston businessman named Joseph P. Kennedy. The theft cost Kennedy "a fortune," one of the hijackers recalled, as well as the lives of eleven of his own men, whose widows and relatives then pestered or blackmailed a seething Kennedy for compensation.
Ruthless with enemies, Lansky was careful, even punctilious, with his partners and allies. One of his closest and most pivotal associates was yet another boyhood acquaintance and fellow bootlegger, an astute, pockmarked Sicilian named Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Their rapport baffled those who witnessed it, bridging as it did bitter old divisions between Italians and Jews. "They were more than brothers, they were like lovers," thought Bugsy Siegel. "They would just look at each other and you would know that a few minutes later one of them would say what the other was thinking."
Lansky's share of the enormous criminal wealth and influence to come out of Prohibition in the early thirties would be deployed shrewdly. He branched out into prostitution, narcotics, and other vice and corruption nationwide. But his hallmark was always gambling. "Carpet joints," as the ubiquitous illegal casinos of the era were called, run by his profit-sharing partners-proconsuls like the English killer Owney Madden, who controlled organized crime's provincial capital of Hot Springs, Arkansas-were discreetly tucked away and protected by bribed officials in dozens of towns and cities all over the United States. Still, Lansky's American roadhouses were almost trivial compared to the lavish casinos he would build in Cuba in league with a dictatorial regime.
For Luciano and other gangsters, Lansky was the preeminent investment banker and broker, a classic manager and financier of a growing multiethnic confederation of legal and illegal enterprises throughout the nation. He organized crime along corporate hierarchical lines, delineated authority and responsibility, holdings and subsidiaries, and, most important, meticulously distributed shares of profits and proceeds, bonuses and perquisites. There would always be separate and distinct provinces of what came to be called most accurately the Syndicate-feudal baronies defined by ethnic group, specialty, assets, or geography, that ruled their own territorial bases and colonies, coexisting warily with the others, distrusting, jockeying, waiting, always conscious of power. It was part of Lansky's clarity of vision to see how they might be arrayed to mutual advantage despite their unsurrendered sovereignty and mutual suspicion. He recognized how much the country-in the grip of Wall Street financial houses and powerful local banks, industrial giants in steel, automobiles, mining, and manufacturing, the growing power of labor unions, the entrenched political machines from rural courthouses to city halls of the largest urban centers-was already ruled by the interaction of de facto gangs in business and politics, as in crime. A faction unto himself, after all, he would never subdue or eliminate the boundaries and barons. Over the rest of the century their domains would only grow. In business, he preferred to own men more than property, especially public officials whose complicity was essential. He did not, like most of his associates, merely bribe politicians or policemen, but worked a...
1.Meyer Lansky
The Racketeer as Chairman of the Board
He was born Maier Suchowljansky in 1902 at Grodno, in a Poland possessed by Tsarist Russia. As a child he envisioned the United States as a place of angels, "somewhat like heaven," he would say much later. When he was ten, his family fled the pogroms directed at Jews for the land of his dreams. In the Grand Street tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan he found not angels but what he called his "overpowering memory"-poverty, and still more savage prejudice.
In school, where he excelled, his name was Americanized. Meyer Lansky was a slight child, smaller than his peers. But he soon acquired a reputation as a fierce, courageous fighter. One day, as he walked home with a dish of food for his family, he was stopped by a gang of older Irish toughs whose leader wielded a knife and ordered him to take down his pants to show if he was circumcised. Suddenly, the little boy lunged at his tormentor, shattering the plate into a weapon, then nearly killing the bigger boy with the jagged china, though he was almost beaten to death himself by the rest of the gang before the fight was broken up. Eventually, he would become renowned for his intelligence rather than his physical strength. Yet no one who knew him ever doubted that beneath the calm cunning was a reserve of brutality.
He left school after the eighth grade, to find in the streets and back alleys of New York his philosophy, his view of America, ultimately his vocation. He lived in a world dominated by pimps and prostitutes, protection and extortion, alcohol and narcotics, legitimate businesses as fronts, corrupt police, and ultimately, always, the rich and powerful who owned it all but kept their distance. There was gambling everywhere, fed by the lure of easy money in a country where the prospects of so many, despite the promise, remained bleak and uncertain.
A gifted mathematician with an intuitive sense of numbers, he was naturally drawn to craps games. He was able to calculate the odds in his head. Lore would have it that he lost only once before he drew an indelible lesson about gambling and life. "There's no such thing as a lucky gambler, there are just the winners and losers. The winners are those who control the game . . . all the rest are suckers," he would say. "The only man who wins is the boss." He decided that he would be the boss. He adopted another, grander axiom as well: that crime and corruption were no mere by-products of the economics and politics of his adopted country, but rather a cornerstone. That understanding, too, tilted the odds in his favor.
By 1918, at the close of World War I, Lansky, sixteen, already commanded his own gang. His main cohort was the most charming and wildly violent of his childhood friends, another son of immigrants, Benjamin Siegel, called "Bugsy"-though not to his face-for being "crazy as a bedbug." Specializing in murder and kidnapping, the Bugs and Meyer Mob, as they came to be known, provided their services to the masters of New York vice and crime, and were soon notorious throughout the city as "the most efficient arm in the business." Like other criminals then and later, and with epic consequences in the corruption of both labor and corporate management, they also hired out their thuggery first to companies, and then to unions-most decisively the Longshoremen and Teamsters-in the bloody war between capitalists and workers. Some employers "gave their hoodlums carte blanche," as one account put it, which they took with "such enthusiasm that many union organizers were murdered or crippled for life." Lansky and Siegel would be partners and close, even affectionate friends for more than a quarter century, and in the end Lansky would have "no choice," as one journalist quoted him, but to join in ordering Bugsy's murder.
At a bar mitzvah, Lansky met Arnold Rothstein, the flamboyant gambler involved in fixing the 1919 World Series, and he soon became Rothstein's protégé. During Prohibition they made a fortune in bootlegging while dealing in heroin as well. Their collaborators, competitors, and customers in the criminal traffic, as Lansky later reminisced, were "the most important people in the country." On a rainy night in 1927 in southern New England, a gang working for Lansky hijacked with wanton violence a convoy of Irish whiskey being smuggled by one of their rival bootleggers, an ambitious Boston businessman named Joseph P. Kennedy. The theft cost Kennedy "a fortune," one of the hijackers recalled, as well as the lives of eleven of his own men, whose widows and relatives then pestered or blackmailed a seething Kennedy for compensation.
Ruthless with enemies, Lansky was careful, even punctilious, with his partners and allies. One of his closest and most pivotal associates was yet another boyhood acquaintance and fellow bootlegger, an astute, pockmarked Sicilian named Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Their rapport baffled those who witnessed it, bridging as it did bitter old divisions between Italians and Jews. "They were more than brothers, they were like lovers," thought Bugsy Siegel. "They would just look at each other and you would know that a few minutes later one of them would say what the other was thinking."
Lansky's share of the enormous criminal wealth and influence to come out of Prohibition in the early thirties would be deployed shrewdly. He branched out into prostitution, narcotics, and other vice and corruption nationwide. But his hallmark was always gambling. "Carpet joints," as the ubiquitous illegal casinos of the era were called, run by his profit-sharing partners-proconsuls like the English killer Owney Madden, who controlled organized crime's provincial capital of Hot Springs, Arkansas-were discreetly tucked away and protected by bribed officials in dozens of towns and cities all over the United States. Still, Lansky's American roadhouses were almost trivial compared to the lavish casinos he would build in Cuba in league with a dictatorial regime.
For Luciano and other gangsters, Lansky was the preeminent investment banker and broker, a classic manager and financier of a growing multiethnic confederation of legal and illegal enterprises throughout the nation. He organized crime along corporate hierarchical lines, delineated authority and responsibility, holdings and subsidiaries, and, most important, meticulously distributed shares of profits and proceeds, bonuses and perquisites. There would always be separate and distinct provinces of what came to be called most accurately the Syndicate-feudal baronies defined by ethnic group, specialty, assets, or geography, that ruled their own territorial bases and colonies, coexisting warily with the others, distrusting, jockeying, waiting, always conscious of power. It was part of Lansky's clarity of vision to see how they might be arrayed to mutual advantage despite their unsurrendered sovereignty and mutual suspicion. He recognized how much the country-in the grip of Wall Street financial houses and powerful local banks, industrial giants in steel, automobiles, mining, and manufacturing, the growing power of labor unions, the entrenched political machines from rural courthouses to city halls of the largest urban centers-was already ruled by the interaction of de facto gangs in business and politics, as in crime. A faction unto himself, after all, he would never subdue or eliminate the boundaries and barons. Over the rest of the century their domains would only grow. In business, he preferred to own men more than property, especially public officials whose complicity was essential. He did not, like most of his associates, merely bribe politicians or policemen, but worked a...
