Fevered by Linda Marsa

Author:Linda Marsa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rodale
Published: 2013-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

DEAD POOLS

It’s not just farmers who are feeling the pinch. Climate change could dry up once-thriving Sunbelt cities that flourished because engineering feats shunted water to these parched territories. But out of sheer necessity, the driest city in our driest state has learned to cope with scarcity: Las Vegas, a desert oasis brought to life by a visionary gangster in the heady years after World War II.

His underworld pals called him “Bugsy” because they thought he was crazy as a bedbug. Even among these vicious psychopaths, Benjamin Siegel stood out for his ruthlessness and violent temper. The larger-than-life mobster was one of the founding members of the notorious Murder, Incorporated, a squad of hit men dispatched to carry out gangland executions. A stylish dresser and charming womanizer, Siegel, with a full head of black hair and steely blue eyes, was as good-looking and wealthy as the movie stars he hobnobbed with when he moved his family to Hollywood from New York in the late 1930s and began muscling in on the prostitution, narcotics, and gambling rackets on the West Coast.

But he quickly realized the real money was in a place where gambling was legal—a tiny watering hole called Las Vegas, which had sprouted in the arid wilderness because of the presence of several underground springs. It wasn’t much in the 1940s—a hellishly hot and dusty outpost situated at the intersection of three deserts, the Mojave, the Sonora, and the Great Basin. It was an empty no-man’s-land between Utah and California with a train depot, a couple of dude ranches, and a handful of garish hotel-casinos that catered to tourists visiting Hoover Dam, 30 miles to the southeast. As World War II drew to a close, Siegel saw all the money being raked in by the cheesy casinos on the city’s Strip. He had the uncanny foresight to see that gambling—legal and otherwise—could be an easily exploited gold mine in Las Vegas, even though Nevada itself had largely been settled by Mormons from neighboring Utah, who didn’t indulge in games of chance or even alcohol. He convinced his gangland cronies to invest $1.5 million to construct a lavish 40-acre Havana-style resort with two swimming pools, a golf course, tennis and handball courts, and a luxurious casino and hotel filled with posh amenities and staff in tuxedos. He called it the Flamingo, named after his leggy mistress, the infamous Virginia Hill, and invited his Hollywood pals, like Clark Gable, Lana Turner, and Joan Crawford, to the hotel’s glittery grand opening over Christmas in 1946. Initially, the Flamingo was an utter disaster that hemorrhaged money—plagued by bad weather that kept the celebrities away, construction delays, and horrific cost overruns that some attributed in part to Siegel and his girlfriend skimming off the top and squirreling the loot away in Swiss bank accounts. Six months after the hotel’s discouraging start, it did finally become profitable—but the notorious 41-year-old hoodlum had stepped on too many toes and was killed execution-style in a hail of bullets one steamy June evening in the living room of his Beverly Hills home.

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