Howard Hughes by Geoff Schumacher

Author:Geoff Schumacher [Schumacher, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948908610
Publisher: University of Nevada Press

17

Legacies: Hughes in Hindsight

And so we come to this question: How should Howard Hughes be remembered in Las Vegas? What is his rightful place in the city’s history? Is he a pioneer or simply a spicy anecdote for historians to tell before getting to the main course?

In his bicentennial history of Nevada, Robert Laxalt (brother of Paul Laxalt, the former Nevada governor and U.S. senator) offered a concise assessment of the Hughes effect: “He could not have arrived in Las Vegas at a more opportune time. The town had been caught up by overbuilding, both in resort hotels and private construction. It was an open secret that several of the hotels were in dire financial straits. Huge construction, service, and supply bills were owing, and the possibility loomed large that some of the troubled hotels might have to close their doors, with devastating impact on the Las Vegas economy.” Hughes “solved all the problems,” Laxalt wrote, by investing hundreds of millions in the city and clearing a path for respected corporations to come to town.

Burton Cohen was president and chief executive officer of the Desert Inn for a brief period while Hughes was living upstairs. That put him in an ideal position to see what impact his boss was having on Las Vegas. “He accelerated the departure of the old guard to bring in the new guard,” Cohen said in 2007, using “old guard” to refer to the organized crime bosses who once ran Las Vegas. “When you buy the Sands, the Frontier, the Desert Inn, and the Castaways, which were four hotels owned by the old guard, you gotta say that he accelerated that departure.”

And when Hughes bought a casino, money-handling procedures changed and skimming diminished greatly, if not entirely. Cohen didn’t buy the oft-repeated claim that the mob continued to skim after Hughes bought casinos. “I think it’s bullshit,” Cohen said. “The executives he had running his casinos at the time were top drawer, the cream of the crop. At the Desert Inn, there was no skimming, because everything was checks and balances, the cage, the whole ball of wax.”

Before Hughes came to town, Cohen said, the “blue-noses”—lawyers, doctors, insurance companies, etc.—refused to hold their conferences and conventions in Las Vegas. That changed after Hughes spurred corporate ownership of Strip resorts.

Bill Friedman, a casino management consultant and author, ran the Castaways and Silver Slipper casinos for Summa Corporation from 1976 to 1989. He acknowledged that Hughes pushed organized crime out of the casinos he purchased, but not those properties he did not control. “Hughes had an impact,” Friedman said. “But I wouldn’t go so far as to say he cleaned it up. The feds were still busting serious mobsters here into the 1980s.”

James Phelan was skeptical that Hughes even managed to push the mob out of his own casinos. “When Hughes moved to Las Vegas, hid himself away on the top floor of the Desert Inn, and began buying up great chunks of the town, he set off

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