Vegas Vision It May Have Been The Mob That Started It 50 Years Ago, But The Corporate Giants Run The Las Vegas Show Today

Long before phony barges navigated a chlorinated Nile, before lava-less volcanoes erupted on schedule, before make-believe pirates sailed the desert, there was Bugsy.

Fifty years ago this month, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel opened the Flamingo Hotel. He set the stage for all that followed.

A notorious mobster thus became the founding father of what would grow and metamorphose into that glittering boulevard of excess, the Las Vegas Strip.

Hollywood immortalized him in the 1991 Warren Beatty movie “Bugsy.” But he remains a prophet without much honor here.

The Flamingo - now part of the Hilton empire - will not celebrate the golden anniversary of its criminally inspired birth.

“We don’t market Bugsy Siegel,” said Tamra Peterson, hotel spokeswoman. “It’s not a part of our history we’re particularly proud of.”

Some locals who fondly recall the days of bent noses and federal rap sheets say the Flamingo Hilton’s reluctance mirrors the attitude of many of Las Vegas’s boosters.

“They want to think Las Vegas is clean, corporate and pure, when its origin was Sodom and Gomorrah,” said Oscar Goodman, a Las Vegas lawyer whose clients included one Tony “The Ant” Spilotro. “I happen to like Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Today’s Las Vegas, a Sun Belt boomtown, has more than one million people in the metro area. Its growth leads the nation.

Tourism fuels the supercharged economy. What once was organized crime’s turf now belongs mainly to huge corporations. These days, corporate bonds, not Teamster funds, finance the building of gambling palaces.

“Casino executives don’t have to meet their stockbrokers in darkened … hotel rooms at 3 o’clock in the morning and be told they’re going to get their eyes plucked out,” writes mob chronicler Nicholas Pileggi.

The exodus of the mob, however, also has meant the loss of characters and intrigue.

“There’s no individuality out here anymore,” lamented Goodman, whose downtown Las Vegas office is informally known as “The House that Crime Built.”

Las Vegas began the 20th century as a railroad water stop. Two actions in the 1930s helped make it more than just another dusty tank town: The federal government built Hoover Dam nearby, and the state of Nevada legalized gambling.

In the early years, casinos clustered downtown - “sawdust joints” with cheap liquor and low stakes, and not a hint of glamour.

With the coming of the automobile age in the early 1940s, two casinos opened on the empty Los Angeles highway. But both clung to Western motifs; one even picked up visitors at the airport in a horse-drawn stagecoach.

Then Siegel showed up, bringing the unhinged mental state that earned him his nickname. The “dapper hoodlum,” as the papers later called him, owned a varied criminal past: extortion, hijacking, bookmaking, bootlegging, rape and murder, as well as close connections to the New York and California mob.

He also had a sense of style. His highway resort, the Flamingo, would be like nothing Las Vegas had seen.

“Siegel set the standard for the lush type of hotel,” said Eugene Moehring, a professor of history at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

Conceived as a remote pleasure dome - a classy refuge for the rich and famous - the Flamingo offered high-end gambling, entertainment, recreation and sex when it opened in December 1946.

All employees, from executives to janitors, wore tuxedos. Waterfalls danced in colorful lights. Guests dined with sterling silver place settings. Out front were two eight-story-high cylinders resembling cocktail glasses, neon-fizzing with pink champagne.

The hotel’s “Bugsy Suite” had bulletproof windowpanes and five secret exits. One included a ladder, leading from a closet to a basement tunnel to an underground garage. There, a chauffeured getaway car was said to be awaiting at all times.

Ornate it was, well-managed it wasn’t. The Flamingo’s mob backers were losing money by the bucketful. Six months after the hotel made its debut, Siegel was gunned down in the Beverly Hills mansion of his girlfriend.

He had, nevertheless, started something big. Other garish casino-hotels followed the Flamingo to the Strip, their evocative names on giant signs that used Hoover Dam juice to light the desert night: the Sahara, the Desert Inn, the Dunes, the Tropicana.

The Stardust, opening in 1958, was designed as the biggest resort in the world, complete with a French nude floor show. Caesars Palace brought the grandeur that was Rome, more or less, to the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Dunes Road.

Though still a relatively small place, Las Vegas cultivated its Sin City image. Meanwhile, the publicity machine cranked out breathless news of stars such as Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack, who cavorted at the Sands.

All was aimed at drawing high-rollers and their money to the gaming tables. “In the old days, everything was based on getting them into the casinos,” said Tony Zoppi, former entertainment director of the Riviera Hotel on the Strip.

The combination of isolation, money and licentiousness attracted rogues and adventurers.

Goodman, now 57, came to Las Vegas in 1964, fresh out of the University of Pennsylvania law school. “My father used to tell people I had moved to Arizona, because Las Vegas had such a bad reputation.”

The town was endlessly fascinating then, Goodman said. “Everybody had a story. There was the expectation of finding a Mafia don under every rock.”

He pointed to a photograph on his office wall, a dinner scene, 1970s vintage. “That was the old Las Vegas.” Among those smiling from the same table were a casino owner, a state senator and a mobster.

Goodman’s favorite client: Spilotro, alleged to be the Las Vegas enforcer for the Chicago organization. “Around here,” the lawyer said, “he was as kind and sweet and gentle as any human being can be.”

According to Pileggi’s nonfiction book, “Casino,” the FBI suspected Spilotro of being a hit man who had committed 12 homicides. He was alleged to have killed one man by squeezing his head in a vise.

“Now, I wasn’t with him when I was sleeping,” Goodman said. “So he must have been very busy at night.”

Deke Castleman, managing editor of a visitors’ newsletter called the “Las Vegas Advisor,” has heard plenty of reminiscing about the glory of yesteryear. “I know a lot of old-timers feel that way,” he said. “They say, ‘Oh, you could shoot craps next to a hit man.”

The hand of organized crime - hidden ownership and skimmed profits - was pervasive throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s. “They had a piece of every hotel out there,” said Zoppi, now of Dallas.

Federal authorities conducted a long campaign against the mob in Las Vegas. But the real crime-syndicate killer, according to author Pileggi, was a 1967 state law that allowed corporations to invest in casinos.

“That ended the mob’s power,” he said in an interview. “All the Dick Tracys and Elliot Nesses couldn’t get them out, but a single state law could.”

The flood of corporate money simply overwhelmed the crooks. “The mob couldn’t compete with Hilton,” said historian Moehring.

MBA-holders, not syndicate flunkies, keep track of the gambling take now. And the new Strip hotels, going up as fast as construction crews can work, are as much middle-America theme parks as casinos. They impart the illusion of wild abandon, with guardrails.

In a lagoon outside the Treasure Island hotel, actors dressed as pirates fight actors dressed as British sailors, drawing applause from sidewalk audiences. Next door, the natural-gas powered Mirage volcano erupts every 15 minutes from dusk to midnight.

Last year 29 million people visited Las Vegas, drawn by such spectacles as the Luxor hotel and casino, an imposing glass pyramid rising from the once-tatty south end of the Strip. The Luxor recreates ancient Egypt, if ancient Egypt had barges ferrying latter-day American Gothics to the quarter slots.

One block away, the New York-New York hotel and casino opens next year with 2,035 rooms. It will offer a sanitized replica of Manhattan - no grime, free parking - surrounded by a roller coaster.

Historians complain that Las Vegas is so busy becoming, it pays little attention to what it was.

The last traces of Siegel’s original creation vanished in a 1993 demolition, when the Flamingo Hilton wanted to make room for a wedding chapel and a pond for penguins.

Inside the present hotel, only a deli and a cocktail lounge called Bugsy’s recall the founder, without explanation.

The Hilton organization did erect an outdoor plaque, with a bas-relief sculpture of Siegel’s face. Obscured in a sidewalk cul-de-sac, the monument notes “the notorious” Siegel’s love of escape hatches, but doesn’t detail the cause of his notoriety or need for quick exit.

“Las Vegas makes very little of its history,” said Frank Wright, curator at the Nevada State Museum. He is putting together an exhibit on local lore that will include organized crime’s role.

“It’s been a little tricky,” he said. “Who do you identify as a mobster, and who don’t you identify as a mobster? For some people the line is pretty permeable.”

A number of former local officials who either profited from the mob presence or tolerated it are still around. “It’s still too raw,” said Moehring of UNLV.

Despite the changes, Las Vegas has its passionate defenders. Said newsletter editor Castleman: “Sure, it’s a corporate, number-crunching place now. But it’s a way exciting place now, too.”

Some consider it to be an overarching cultural phenomenon. A recent essay in the Los Angeles Times called Las Vegas “the last great, mythic city that Western Civilization will ever create.”

The September issue of the magazine Civilization had this to say: “Las Vegas is becoming an ever more pressing metaphor for American life overall. … It grows strong and stronger, a flaming bright heart of all-American darkness.”

Castleman is writing a novel of Las Vegas, set about 40 years from now. He sees the future city as the world capital of Internet gambling, online flamboyance, electronic thrill games and state-of-the-art cybersex.

It will be, in other words, an updated version of what Bugsy Siegel had in mind when he built the fabulous Flamingo.