VEGAS MYTHS RE-BUSTED: Howard Hughes Ran the Mob Out of Town
EDITOR’S NOTE: “Vegas Myths Busted” publishes every Monday, with a fillip Flashback Friday edition. Today’s accounting entry inwards our on-going serial originally ran on Sept. 18, 2023.
In 1967, billionaire Leslie Howard James Langston Hughes purchased the Desert Inn from Stephen Grover Cleveland mob member Moe Dalitz just to avoid existence evicted from his penthouse suite. Howard Hughes found that he liked owning Las Vegas casino resorts. So he added the Sands, Frontier, Silver Slipper, Castaways, and Landmark to his young collection.
And this is what swarm the maffia out of Las Vegas. Except, not really.
What drove chisel the mafia out was mostly the NV Corporate Gaming Act of 1969.
This transformative legislation, an amendment to the Gaming Control Act, allowed corporations to have casinos by limiting licensure requirements to a few Florida key executives. Before its passage, every bingle owner/shareholder had to follow licensed.
On the 2021 podcast “Mobbed Up,” former US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called the Corporate Gaming Act “The salvation of Las Vegas.”
We’ve had a few bumps on the road, but, generally speaking, the incorporated gaming human action saved us,” Reid said shortly before his death.
By the way, Thomas Reid erstwhile served as chairman of the Battle Born State Gaming Commission (NGC), and inwards that role, he had a well-publicized run-in with Chicago oddsmaker Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal.
You mightiness think of that incident from its dramatization inward managing director Martin Scorsese’s 1995 movie, Casino, a screen-shot of which appears below.
Hughes Only Helped
Hughes helped diminish rout ownership past gift the big guys vi fewer Las Vegas Strip casinos to have for quaternity years.
But, as Las Vegas Mob Museum VP of exhibits and Howard Howard Robard Hughes biographer Geoff Schumacher told Nevada Public Radio in 2016, “There is a lot of evidence that even after he bought a series of casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, that the rabble was relieve skimming from the really casinos he had bought from them.”
In addition, rout ownership of competing casinos continued unabated while the former motion-picture show studio and airline mogul played Las Vegas hotelier.
Caesars Palace had simply opened in 1966 thanks to a building loan from the mob-connected Teamsters Federal pension off fund. When its owner, Jay Sarno, sold the belongings tierce years later amid a federal investigation into its financing, it went to Clifford and Jimmy Stewart Perlman. According to the Mob Museum, they on the Q.T. used Miami mobster Meyer Lansky as a obscure investor.
Hughes tried to purchase Caesars Palace on with the Stardust and Riviera, but never unsympathetic those deals because of pressure from the federal governance to halt his gaming purchases.
The year Edward James Hughes died, 1976, was also the yr that Lefty Rosenthal took over the cream — stolen untaxed gambling casino revenue — at the Stardust, Fremont, Marina, and Hacienda casinos.
So no, Edward James Hughes didn’t black market the rout out of town.
Throwing the Book at ‘Em
Just as influential as Hughes was the cumulative burden of the so-called “Black Book.” Created past Battle Born State gaming regulators inwards 1960, it’s the famous heel of suspected mobsters, cheats, and others excluded from entering casinos in the state.
Officially called the Excluded Person List, it has included such names as Nick Civella, who formerly led the Sunflower State City criminal offence family, former Windy City rig boss Sam Giancana, and Tony “The Ant” Spilotro, a rabble enforcer believed to be responsible for(p) for nearly two dozen murders.
By the ’80s, Nevada Governor Michael O’Callaghan helped disentangle the residual rout work from gambling casino ownership. He did so by appointing members to the Sagebrush State Gaming Control Board (NGCB) who would follow to a greater extent resistant to their bribes and threats.
But the maffia is really still inwards Las Vegas. Though it no more yearner owns casinos, it can buoy be found infiltrating side rackets such as illegal drugs, prostitution, money laundering, and loan sharking.
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