Savage Journey by Peter Richardson

Author:Peter Richardson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520304925
Publisher: University of California Press

9

Las Vegas

Although the Salazar piece was a high point in Thompson’s journalistic output, it was quickly overshadowed by another work hatched in the middle of that project.

After an especially tense week in East Los Angeles, Thompson accepted an assignment from Sports Illustrated to cover the Mint 400 Off-Road Rally. Sponsored by Del Webb’s Mint Hotel & Casino, the event featured a motorcycle and dune buggy race in the desert outside Las Vegas. Claiming he needed a break from the Salazar story, Thompson invited Oscar Acosta to join him. Part of his plan was to separate Acosta from his militant colleagues, who openly wondered about his friendship with a White journalist. As Thompson would note later, “We were always in the midst of a crowd of heavy street-fighters who didn’t mind letting me know that they wouldn’t need much of an excuse to chop me into hamburger.” A road trip would allow the two men to speak openly and at length. Thompson rented a convertible, which he later dubbed the Great Red Shark, and the two men drove to Las Vegas on March 20, 1971.

Their destination resembled no other city in the United States, but it was the most American of places. Founded in 1905 as a railroad town, Las Vegas bloomed in the 1930s, when the federal government commissioned the Hoover Dam. Nevada had legalized gambling, and the city’s cowboy casinos and bordellos made it a destination for thousands of laborers. That traffic waned after the dam’s completion, but when Los Angeles cracked down on the rackets in the late 1930s, local mobsters saw an opportunity in the desert 270 miles away. They established a race wire in Las Vegas, took offtrack bets, and poisoned their main competitor. Two new defense installations boosted their business during the Second World War, and the Flamingo Hotel’s 1946 premiere kicked off a postwar casino boom. Eastern and midwestern mob figures began to invest heavily in Las Vegas, and its swanky new gambling palaces looked like they might have been airdropped from Miami Beach or Havana.

Thompson’s favorite literary figure used his underworld connections to reinvent himself as a Long Island socialite, but Las Vegas operators plied their trade openly and become pillars of the community. “When these guys came here, it was like a morality or ethical car wash,” said mob expert Nicholas Pileggi. “You came here, you were cleansed of your sins, you were now legitimate and legal. I didn’t care what you did, you got a wash.” A prime example was Morris “Moe” Dalitz, a bootlegger from the Mayfield Road Gang in Cleveland. With the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, Dalitz operated illegal casinos in Ohio and Kentucky, but in 1949, he came to Las Vegas to finance the Desert Inn hotel and casino. Over time, Dalitz became an important local builder who regarded the Las Vegas Convention Center as his greatest achievement. “He was a success of Southern Nevada’s gaming economy as any one person could be,” said a former Nevada governor after Dalitz’s death.

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