Readings

The Money and the Power

Knopf, 479 pp., $26.95

Las Vegas lifts out of the Mojave Desert in southwestern Nevada with stunning visual power and magnitude so intense its lights are the first seen by astronauts re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Only Mecca receives more pilgrims each year. The terms may have changed (it’s “gaming” now, not gambling), but the city’s Mob values mirror more than ever the ethics of corporate America. A city of ambition, last chances, resilient political mobility, and organized crime, Las Vegas functions as Wall Street’s western shadow, where the forces of capitalism meet to extend covert agendas. It’s our holy city, a dazzling mirage many Americans are eager to embrace.

Investigative reporter Sally Denton and Nixon biographer Roger Morris — husband and wife — collaborate in The Money and the Power to retrieve a classic American tale of corruption and power. The book stars an ethnically diverse cast of notorious and ruthless Las Vegas players, stressing the immigrant contribution to the building of this American dream city. Racketeer and Mob boss Meyer Lansky, playboy-killer Bugsy Siegel, Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun, and careful crime boss Moe Dalitz all contributed to the making of a city that “reflects more than ever the character and legacy of its true fathers.”

Other names with ties to the city entered public memory through political maneuverings on Capitol Hill. Senator Joe McCarran was “intent on getting as much money for the state out of Washington as the process would allow,” the authors write. Paul Laxalt, the Basque-American Senator Reagan favored over Bush as his Republican successor to the White House, paved the way for eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes’ massive buy-out of organized crime holdings in the city. “I can buy any man in the world,” Hughes once said; he purchased some of the most powerful men in America, including President Richard Nixon. The ironically named U.S. Senators Alan Bible and Howard Cannon together received more than $100,000 through connections to Hughes’ money passed from the cashier’s cage of a Hughes-owned casino.

In 1958, Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa began financing construction of casinos and other projects with money collected from teamster retirement pensions. Two years later, John F. Kennedy would narrowly win election to the White House with “bags of cash from the Sands and other joints” supporting his bid for president. “Powerful men in Las Vegas believed they had made a president,” so it would come as a surprise that newly appointed Attorney General Robert Kennedy would investigate Teamster investments and other organized crime linked to a city responsible for his brother’s success. By November 1963 it would appear there had been a consolidation of power, and “in Strip terms” the Kennedys had “cheated the house, played it for a sucker.” But for Denton and Morris, “it hardly mattered in the end who killed John Kennedy. Las Vegas had won.”

But The Money and the Power is more than a history of Las Vegas; it is a study of the American West and its continued transformation and exploitation by the Mob, Wall Street, and Washington. It’s a damning tale of corruption, but it also reveals the complex web of interests that animate a town on the boom for more than 40 years. Las Vegas “was not only a reflection of culture and values and the near-complete rule of money in American life,” the authors write. It became “the greatest business success story of the twentieth century” supported by a nation that embraced “the ethic of greed and exploitation.” If Las Vegas is a city built on dreams and desire, it also plunders them, and in that way, at least, Las Vegas is a microcosm of the nation.

This article appears in May 11 • 2001.