Download or read book When the Mob Ran Vegas written by Steve Fischer and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Strip written by Stefan Al and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-03-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformations of the Strip—from the fake Wild West to neon signs twenty stories high to “starchitecture”—and how they mirror America itself. The Las Vegas Strip has impersonated the Wild West, with saloon doors and wagon wheels; it has decked itself out in midcentury modern sleekness. It has illuminated itself with twenty-story-high neon signs, then junked them. After that came Disney-like theme parks featuring castles and pirates, followed by replicas of Venetian canals, New York skyscrapers, and the Eiffel Tower. (It might be noted that forty-two million people visited Las Vegas in 2015—ten million more than visited the real Paris.) More recently, the Strip decided to get classy, with casinos designed by famous architects and zillion-dollar collections of art. Las Vegas became the “implosion capital of the world” as developers, driven by competition, got rid of the old to make way for the new—offering a non-metaphorical definition of “creative destruction.” In The Strip, Stefan Al examines the many transformations of the Las Vegas Strip, arguing that they mirror transformations in America itself. The Strip is not, as popularly supposed, a display of architectural freaks but representative of architectural trends and a record of social, cultural, and economic change. Al tells two parallel stories. He describes the feverish competition of Las Vegas developers to build the snazziest, most tourist-grabbing casinos and resorts—with a cast of characters including the mobster Bugsy Siegel, the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, and the would-be political kingmaker Sheldon Adelson. And he views the Strip in a larger social context, showing that it has not only reflected trends but also magnified them and sometimes even initiated them. Generously illustrated with stunning color images throughout, The Strip traces the many metamorphoses of a city that offers a vivid projection of the American dream.
Download or read book The Battle for Las Vegas written by Dennis N. Griffin and published by Huntington Press Inc. This book was released on 2006-04-25 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1970s through the mid-1980s, the Chicago Outfit dominated organized crime in Las Vegas. To ensure the smooth flow of cash, the gangsters installed a front man with no criminal background, Allen R. Glick, as the casino owner of record, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal as the real boss of casino operations, and Tony Spilotro as the ultimate enforcer, who’d do whatever it took to protect their interests. It wasn’t long before Spilotro, also in charge of Vegas street crime, was known as the “King of the Strip.” Federal and local law enforcement, recognizing the need to rid the casinos of the mob and shut down Spilotro’s rackets, declared war on organized crime. The Battle for Las Vegas relates the story of the fight between the tough guys on both sides, told in large part by the agents and detectives who knew they had to win.
Download or read book Las Vegas Then and Now written by Su Kim Chung and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2022-11-24 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Las Vegas Then and Now pairs vintage shots from 100 years of the city's history with the same view today.
Download or read book Casino written by Nicholas Pileggi and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story behind the Martin Scorsese film: A “riveting . . . account of how organized crime looted the casinos they controlled” (Kirkus Reviews). Focusing on Chicago bookie Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and his partner, Anthony Spilotro, and drawing on extensive, in-depth interviews, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of the Mafia classic Wiseguy—basis for the film Goodfellas—Nicholas Pileggi reveals how the pair worked together to oversee Las Vegas casino operations for the mob. He unearths how Teamster pension funds were used to take control of the Stardust and Tropicana and how Spilotro simultaneously ran a crew of jewel thieves nicknamed the “Hole in the Wall Gang.” For years, these gangsters kept a stranglehold on Sin City’s brightly lit nightspots, skimming millions in cash for their bosses. But the elaborate scheme began to crumble when Rosenthal’s disproportionate ambitions drove him to make mistakes. Spilotro made an error of his own, falling for his partner’s wife, a troubled showgirl named Geri. It would all lead to betrayal, a wide-ranging FBI investigation, multiple convictions, and the end of the Mafia’s longstanding grip on the multibillion-dollar gaming oasis in the midst of the Nevada desert. Casino is a journey into 1970s Las Vegas and a riveting nonfiction account of the world portrayed in the Martin Scorsese film of the same name, starring Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Sharon Stone. A story of adultery, murder, infighting, and revenge, this “fascinating true-crime Mob history” is a high-stakes page-turner (Booklist).
Download or read book Elvis in Vegas written by Richard Zoglin and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Outstanding pop-culture history.” —Newsday The “smart and zippy account” (The Wall Street Journal) of how Las Vegas saved Elvis and Elvis saved Las Vegas in the greatest musical comeback of all time. Elvis’s 1969 opening night in Vegas was his first time back on a live stage in more than eight years. His career had gone sour—bad movies, mediocre pop songs that no longer made the charts—and he’d been dismissed by most critics as over-the-hill. But in Vegas he played the biggest showroom in the biggest hotel in the city, drawing more people for his four-week engagement than any other show in Vegas history. His performance got rave reviews; “Suspicious Minds,” the song he introduced there, gave him his first number-one hit in seven years; and Elvis became Vegas’s biggest star. Over the next seven years, he performed more than 600 shows there, and sold out every one. Las Vegas was changed, too. By the end of the ‘60s, Vegas’ golden age—when the Rat Pack led a glittering array of stars who made it the nation’s premier live-entertainment center—was losing its luster. Elvis created a new kind of Vegas show: an over-the-top, rock-concert extravaganza. He set a new bar for Vegas performers, with the biggest salary, the biggest musical production, and the biggest promotion campaign the city had ever seen. He opened the door to a new generation of pop/rock artists and brought a new audience to Vegas—not the traditional well-heeled older gamblers, but a mass audience from Middle America that Vegas depends on for its success to this day. At once “a fascinating history of Vegas as gambling capital, celebrity playground, mob hangout, [and] entertainment Valhalla” (Rolling Stone) and the incredible “tale of how the King got his groove back” (Associated Press), Elvis in Vegas is a classic feel-good story for the ages.
Download or read book Bright Light City written by Larry Gragg and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Elvis crooned "Bright light city . . . gonna set my soul on fire," he voiced and embraced the siren call of a glittering urban utopia that continues to mesmerize millions. Call it Sin City or Lost Wages, Las Vegas definitely deserves its rapturous "Viva!" Larry Gragg, however, invites readers to view Las Vegas in an entirely new way. While countless other authors have focused on its history or gaming industry or entertainment ties, Gragg considers how popular culture has depicted the city and its powerful allure over its first century. Drawing on hundreds of films, television programs, novels, and articles, Gragg identifies changing trends in the city's portraits. Until the 1940s, boosters promoted it as the "last frontier town," a place where prospectors and cowboys enjoyed liquor, women, and wide-open gambling. Then in the early 1950s commentators increasingly characterized Las Vegas as a sophisticated resort city in the desert, and ever since then journalists, filmmakers, and novelists have depicted a city largely built by organized crime and featuring non-stop entertainment, gambling, luxury, and, of course, beautiful-and available-women. In Gragg's narrative, these images form a kaleidoscope of lights, sounds, characters, and ultimately amazement about this neon oasis. In these pages, readers will meet gangsters like Bugsy Siegel, Tony Spilotro, and Lefty Rosenthal, as well as Las Vegas's most popular entertainers: Elvis Presley, Sinatra's Rat Pack, Liberace, and Wayne Newton, not to mention the Folies Bergere showgirls. And Gragg's skillful interweaving of fictional and journalistic accounts of organized crime shows just how mutually reinforcing they have become over the years. Vegas will always make people's eyes light up as bright as the Strip, witness the new TV show Vegas or the recent film The Hangover. For everyone entranced by its glitter and glamour, Bright Light City is a must read boasting color photos and bursting with insider details: an eclectic blend of stories, people, sights, and sounds that together make up this desert city's extraordinary appeal.
Download or read book Neon Metropolis written by Hal Rothman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for the Previous Edition (0 415 92612 2): ...lively and provocative...this book will teach you something startling on nearly every page... --The New York Times Book Review Like the Emerald City, Las Vegas glitters brightly in the vast Nevada desert, a haven for refugees from ordinary America. A hip, iconic, playground that exports nothing, it nonetheless earns billions from consumer services alone -- gambling, hotels, gaming, and entertainment. It is, historian Hal Rothman argues, the quintessential city of the future. As other cities try to mirror its success and huge, respectable corporations like Coca-Cola invest in a piece of the pie, the very traits that have ostracized Las Vegas in the past -- hedonism, money worship, and permissiveness -- have today made it America's fastest growing urban center. From the gambling-driven, mob-run Sin City of the 1940s to the corporatization of the Strip as a respectable family entertainment center after the 1970s, Las Vegas has shown incredible economic resilience and adaptability. The first full account of America's new dream capital, Neon Metropolis brilliantly shows how Las Vegas gambled on the post-industrial service economy well before the rest of the country knew it was coming, and won.
Download or read book Turning the Tables on Las Vegas written by Ian Andersen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1978 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a winning system and, even more importantly, explains how to avoid being detected once you begin to use it.
Download or read book The Money and the Power written by Sally Denton and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2001 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The shadowy past and present of Las Vegas--and its role in the shaping of today's America--are here revealed as never before by two of the country's leading investigative reporters. After five years of intensive research and interviewing, Sally Denton and Roger Morris make clear how and why Las Vegas became the greatest "business success story" of the twentieth century, and how the rest of America ensured this success by contributing capital as well as customers. Headquarters of a trillion-dollar worldwide empire, the site of unprecedented political and economic power, Las Vegas, in the view of Denton and Morris, is by no means an aberrant sin city. They demonstrate how, on the contrary, it has grown out of, and reflects, a corruption and a worship of money that have crept into American life since Prohibition. They trace the original funds for the founding of the Las Vegas we know today to nationwide narcotics trafficking. They show how deeply a multiethnic criminal syndicate, in part feeding off gambling profits and the skim in Las Vegas, came to influence American politics and the larger society, and how pervasively its "style of business" has penetrated the entire nation. Denton and Morris detail the amazing rise and reach of Meyer Lansky--the mind that ran the city; exactly how criminals, politicians, and businessmen worked together to control Las Vegas; the curious interplay of the city with the fates of Joseph, John F., and Robert Kennedy; how Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover vastly intensified the city's corruption; how Mormon bankers and Wall Street financiers have bankrolled and profited from casinos ruled by organized crime; how a handful of dedicated journalistsand law enforcement officers were destroyed before they could expose the city's secrets. The Money and the Power is a detailed and illuminating chronicle of an extraordinary place and time-- and a provocative reinterpretation of twentieth-century American history.
Download or read book Vegas and the Mob written by Al W Moe and published by Al W Moe. This book was released on 2017-02-16 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Las Vegas was the Mob's greatest venture and most spectacular success, and through 40 years of frenzy, murder, deceit, scams, and skimming, the FBI listened on phone taps and did virtually nothing to stop the fun. This is the truth about the Mob's control of the casinos in Vegas like you've never heard it before, from start to finish. Two of the nation's most powerful crime family bosses went to prison in the 1930's: Al Capone and Lucky Luciano. Frank Nitti took over the Chicago Outfit, while Frank Costello ran things for the Luciano Family. Both men were influenced by their bosses from prison, and both sent enough gangsters into the streets to influence loan sharking, extortion, union control, and drug sales. Bugsy Siegel worked for both groups, handling a string of murders and opening up gaming on the west coast, and that included Las Vegas, an oasis of sin in the middle of the desert - and it was legal. Most of it. The FBI watched as the Mob took control of casino after casino, killed off the competition, and stole enough money to bribe their way to respectability back home. By the 1950's, nearly every major crime family had a stake in a Las Vegas casino. Some did better than others. Casino owners watched-over their profits while competing crime families eyed each other's success like jealous lovers. Murder often followed.
Download or read book Super Casino written by Pete Earley and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2000 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Las Vegas was a mob town built on restlessness and hunger, on glitter, greed, and the firm belief that anyone can get lucky once. But in the last decade Las Vegas has had its own change of fortune, transforming itself from a gambler's fun house to one of the country's top family vacation spots. Now Pete Earley--the investigative journalist and award-winning author who stormed Leavenworth in The Hot House--takes us inside today's colossal theme casinos, in a fascinating look at the life, death, and fantastic rebirth of the Las Vegas Strip. With 320 days of sunshine, 500 churches, 27 golf courses, and no state income tax, Las Vegas is the ultimate boomtown. And at the heart of the boom are the new "entertainment superstores" known as super casinos. How do they run? Who are the business titans responsible for these extravagant showplaces? And why was the gaudy Vegas of the Rat Pack era remade in the first place? Pete Earley traces this evolution by taking a probing look at the checkered history of Las Vegas--when moguls, mobsters, and the world's top entertainers came together to create this ultimate monument to American excess. This fascinating book reveals the real stories of well-known power brokers like Steve Wynn, Vegas legends like Howard Hughes and Bugsy Siegel, and the gripping rise and fall and rise again of the entrepreneurs behind one of the largest gaming corporations in the nation, the colossus Circus Circus, to which the author was given unique access. Earley's trademark you-are-there style brings us front and center as "whales" win and lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in a few seconds. We see grifters try every trick in the book to beat the odds--whileeye-in-the-sky cameras record all the action. We go behind the scenes to meet the blackjack dealers and hookers, the heavy hitters and bit players, the maids and chefs, security officers, cabbies, and showgirls who are caught up in the mercurial pace that pulses at the heart of this astounding city. This lively, probing book lays forth the real Las Vegas and shows how and why it has become the biggest draw in the country, offering adult and family entertainment like no other in the world. The result is an intriguing, often troubling look at a uniquely American city founded on greed--and a nation that built its own mad Mecca in the desert. This is the new Las Vegas--no longer the stomping ground of the Rat Pack, but just as fascinating, just as energized, just as cutthroat. What, and who, is behind it all? Earley was offered unique access to one of the largest gaming corporations in the nation (Circus Circus), and through his investigation of other major gambling enterprises, he shows how the Strip of yesterday has transformed itself, with multi-faceted, themed mega-complexes offering adult and family entertainment like no other in the world. Wall Street analysts call Las Vegas "the biggest cash cow in America"--its 1999 revenues were a staggering $27.2 billion. SUPER CASINO tells how it came to be the biggest draw in the country, while catching the voices of those large and small--bosses, shift managers, dealers, cashiers, showgirls, hookers, cabbies, tourists, and of course, the players--who make it run today. -->
Download or read book Storming Las Vegas written by John Huddy and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2009-04-28 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On September 20, 1998, Jose Vigoa, a child of Fidel Castro’s revolution, launched what would be the most audacious and ruthless series of high-profile casino and armored car robberies that Las Vegas had ever seen. In a brazen sixteen-month reign of terror, he and his crew would hit the crème de la crème of Vegas hotels: the MGM, the Desert Inn, the New York—New York, the Mandalay Bay, and the Bellagio. The robberies were well planned and executed, and the police–“the stupids,” as Vigoa contemptuously referred to them–were all but helpless to stop them. But Lt. John Alamshaw, the twenty-three-year veteran in charge of robbery detectives, was not giving up so easily. For him, Vigoa’s rampage was a personal affront. And he would do whatever it took, even risk his badge, to bring Vigoa down.
Download or read book At the Sands The Casino That Shaped Classic Las Vegas Brought the Rat Pack Together and Went Out With a Bang written by David G. Schwartz and published by . This book was released on 2020-08-26 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lights are coming down. Frank, Dean, and Sammy are about to take the stage. This is the moment we remember, when Las Vegas became classic. And it was at the Sands. Built in 1952 over the ashes of Hollywood Reporter publisher Billy Wilkerson's last chance in Las Vegas, the Sands was a collective effort. Underworld figures like Meyer Lansky, Doc Stacher, and Frank Costello provided the cash. Beloved Texas gambler Jake Freedman was the public face. Manhattan nightclub king Jack Entratter kept the Copa Room filled and made the party happen, every night. Carl Cohen, esteemed as the greatest casino manager in the history of the business, made the team complete.No matter how well your casino is run, you need a good hook to get the gamblers through the door. Casino owners were learning that entertainment was a pretty fair hook. Entratter, who broke into the entertainment business as a bouncer at the Stork Club, had risen to become manager of the Copacabana, one of Manhattan's hottest hot spots, before heading to Las Vegas. At the Sands, "Mr. Entertainment" brought many of the brightest stars of the day to the casino's showroom, named the Copa Room. The Copa was the hottest ticket in America and, for performers, one of the most coveted stages in the nation. Headlining at the Sands-or even opening there-meant that you had made it.For gamblers, the Sands was paradise. For tourists, it was a chance to see some sophistication-and maybe run into a famous singer or actor. The resort itself became a celebrity. Early on, the Sands hosted numerous radio and television broadcasts, bringing the casino into American households coast to coast when gambling was still not entirely reputable. Las Vegas is a city built on public relations, and the Sands' Al Freeman was one of its early masters.The Sands did more than showcase stars: it made them shine brighter. In 1960, while filming Ocean's 11, the Rat Pack (though they were never called that in those days) came together onstage at the Sands, creating a cultural icon that would define the era. Behind the scenes, Davis and Sinatra resisted the prevailing segregationist mindset of Las Vegas and helped to overturn Jim Crow on the Strip. With Sinatra as its star, the Sands reached its highest point, hosting everyone from John F. Kennedy to Texas oilmen to Miami bookmakers.Yet the Sands wasn't all comps and curtain calls. Behind the scenes, the casino's connection with reputed mobsters made it a target. For years, the FBI tried to penetrate the casino, including a disastrous wiretapping operation that turned into a public embarrassment for the Bureau. And Frank Sinatra-at one point a 10 percent owner of the Sands-would divest his interests after a highly-publicized feud with Nevada gaming regulators over his friendship with alleged Chicago mob kingpin Sam Giancana.thanksAfter Howard Hughes bought the Sands in 1967 (with Frank Sinatra explosively departing soon after) the Sands lost some of its allure, but the casino soldiered on under Hughes and other owners before being sold to Sheldon Adelson, who closed the property in 1996 to make way for the Venetian mega-resort, along the way doing for conventions what Jack Entratter had done for entertainment in Las Vegas four decades earlier.In the end, the Sands went out with a bang-an implosion that brought down its hotel tower. It had a wild 44 year run. Along the way, a host of characters, including the Rat Pack (and their many friends) in all their glory, author Mario Puzo, Apollo astronauts, wealthy arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and President Ronald Reagan passed through the Sands' doors.At the Sands tells the story of how one of the most fondly remembered classic Las Vegas casinos beat the odds to become a success, staged some of the Strip's most memorable spectaculars, and paved the way for the next generation of Las Vegas resorts. The Sands may be gone, but it did not fade away.
Download or read book High Stakes written by Gary Provost and published by Crossroad Press. This book was released on 2017-10-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, the name "Las Vegas" summoned up the image of a neon world of nonstop gambling, gangsters, sex, and adult entertainment. But today, Las Vegas has transformed itself into a family vacation spot second only to Disneyworld on America's leisure-time itinerary. What—and who—is responsible for this multibillion-dollar transformation? With High Stakes, Gary Provost takes the reader on a wide-ranging tour of Nevada's newly revitalized 21st-century vacation world. This inside look at both the gaming business and its new total entertainment centers, which now host twenty million visitors a year, reveals how Las Vegas became a clean, attractive, family-oriented resort. Today, casino gambling is just one attraction of many, most of them new: amazing theme parks, spectacular virtual-reality rides, futuristic glass domes, the world's tallest tower, a sky laser that can be seen all the way to Los Angeles. Circus Circus Enterprises Inc. is used as a model of excellence to show how the Las Vegas gaming industry develops, markets, and delivers its entertainment "product" at a lower price, and with greater profits, than any of its competitors. Highlighted by a preview of Circus Circus' astonishing pyramid—Luxor—the new centerpiece of the greatest gaming empire in history, High Stakes includes extensive interviews with Luxor's legendary creator, William G. Bennett, the man who taught the entire gaming industry how to attract the vast market of family-oriented vacationers. Also covered are all the games of chance that a casino like Circus Circus offers and the odds each gives; everything the casino hands out for free and why; the different ways in which high rollers and ordinary folk are treated; how legendary casinos of the past have crashed to oblivion and the hot newcomers that have taken their place; and the increasing competition from Atlantic City and the growing list of other venues of legal gambling in the United States. Timely, wide-ranging, and well informed, this eye-opening book traces the evolution of Las Vegas from "Sin City" to the "Orlando of the West." Whether you are interested in gambling, business, or the changing face of America, High Stakes is fascinating.
Download or read book Las Vegas written by Eugene P. Moehring and published by University of Nevada Press. This book was released on 2005-03-16 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The meteoric rise of Las Vegas from a remote Mormon outpost to an international entertainment center was never a sure thing. In its first decades, the town languished, but when Nevada legalized casino gambling in 1931, Las Vegas met its destiny. This act—combined with the growing popularity of the automobile, cheap land and electricity, and changing national attitudes toward gambling—led to the fantastic casinos and opulent resorts that became the trademark industry of the city and created the ambiance that has made Las Vegas an icon of pleasure. This volume celebrates the city’s unparalleled growth, examining both the development of its gaming industry and the creation of an urban complex that over two million people proudly call home. Here are the colorful characters who shaped the city as well as the political, business, and civic decisions that influenced its growth. The story extends chronologically from the first Paiute people to the construction of the latest megaresorts, and geographically far beyond the original township to include the several municipalities that make up today’s vast metropolitan Las Vegas area.
Download or read book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas written by Hunter S. Thompson and published by . This book was released on 2003-04-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a reissue of the novel inspired by Hunter S. Thompson's ether-fuelled, savage journey to the heart of the American Dream: We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold... And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.
