With a Roll of the Dice, Truth and the Law Are Tossed Aside in Vegas

THE MONEY AND THE POWER

The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000

By Sally Denton

and Roger Morris

Knopf

$26.95, 461 pages

*

Two questions haunted me after my brief stint as a reporter at the Las Vegas Review-Journal nearly 30 years ago:

Had the laws of physics been suspended? Was it possible for something to go up and never come down? Las Vegas--then only half the size it is now--grew and grew, seemingly impervious to the cyclic slumps of the rest of the economy. Was the simple human itch to gamble such an unstoppable force, or was some other factor at work?

And why, in what should have been a great newspaper town--littered with scandals as shallowly buried as the bodies that kept turning up in the desert--did my own newspaper care so little? It hired naive, inexperienced people like me, paid them like janitors, gave them no leadership or guidance apart from an unwritten rule: Don’t write anything that will get the company lawyers involved.

When I arrived in Las Vegas, with a copy of “The Green Felt Jungle” in my suitcase, I expected to receive bribe offers or death threats when my stories started digging too deep. Gravelly voices would call in the night and tell me to lay off or else. What a sap! I never came close enough to the truth to disturb anybody--and that, as Sally Denton and Roger Morris make clear in “The Money and the Power,” suited my bosses just fine.

In fact, if even half of what Denton and Morris tell us is true--and their 392 pages of text are backed up by 60-plus pages of documentation--the journalism of Southern California and Nevada over the last 50 years has been a colossal failure. Journalists have been outspent and outgunned, seduced and intimidated, betrayed by their own managements and bamboozled into chasing little stories rather than the big one taking shape right in front of them. Indeed, if, as is likely, most all of “The Money and the Power” is true, it’s one of the most important nonfiction books published in the United States in that half-century.

Denton, a native Nevadan who has reported for the New York Times and the Washington Post, and Morris, a National Security Council staffer in the Johnson and Nixon administrations, argue that Las Vegas has never gone straight. Instead, it has become the nation’s “shadow capital,” laundering untold billions of dollars in drug money. Organized crime--far transcending the stereotype of an Italian-accented Mafia--has controlled Nevada politics for decades and heavily corrupted both national political parties and every recent presidency.

Las Vegas is recession-proof because gambling offers almost untaxed annual profits of 30% to 50%, making it “the greatest business success story of the 20th century,” dwarfing any traditional industry. With postwar acceptance of a “near-complete rule of money in American life,” the city was massively financed by ostensibly legitimate institutions, including the Mormon church. People hungry for a good time and a chance at riches have been willing to ignore what Denton and Morris call the city’s--and the nation’s--”hidden history.”

Law enforcement has been as feeble an adversary as journalism, Denton and Morris say, because it has been fatally compromised ever since mob financier Meyer Lansky got the goods on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s homosexuality in the 1930s.

“The Money and the Power” asks, in fact, whether the “national surrender of democracy to oligarchy--the submission to house rules, as they might put it on the Strip”--has gone on too long to be reversed.

Certainly, if you think Lansky had less to do with the founding of modern Las Vegas than the Hollywood-airbrushed Bugsy Siegel; if you fly into McCarran International Airport and wonder who Sen. Pat McCarran was; if you think Howard Hughes cleaned up the city by buying it from the mob in the 1960s; if you forget who exactly Moe Dalitz and Benny Binion and Robert Maheu and Tony “the Ant” Spilotro were; if you remember Hank Greenspun only as the crusading publisher of the Las Vegas Sun; if you view Michael Milken as a philanthropist and casino mogul Steve Wynn as a family-friendly art collector, this book is for you.

Likewise, if you wonder what thread could possibly stitch together McCarthyism, CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, 1960 election fraud, the corruption and decline of organized labor, Watergate, Jack Ruby, Jimmy Hoffa, the nationwide spread of legalized gambling, the dogged failure of the “war on drugs” and the current struggle to rein in campaign financing, it’s a must-read.

“The Money and the Power,” as lucid and exciting as a novel, tells a grim and depressing story. Its heroes are few--the young McCarran; one side of Greenspun; well-meaning but timid Nevada Gov. Grant Sawyer; anti-mob crusaders Sen. Estes Kefauver and Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, whose probes (in Kennedy’s case, despite his own family’s ties to organized crime) stopped short of decisive results; FBI station chief Joe Yablonsky, who shook up Las Vegas enough in the 1980s to be forced into retirement; Valley Times publisher Bob Brown, whose upstart paper was quashed; former Review-Journal columnists Ned Day and John L. Smith.

Add Denton’s and Morris’ names to that short list.