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• First Chapter: 'The Money and the Power'

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  By JAMES McMANUS

  THE MONEY AND THE POWER The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000. By Sally Denton and Roger Morris. Illustrated. 479 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

  xcept for the sun and the occasional thermonuclear blast, Las Vegas is the brightest source of light in our solar system. Little more than a desert rest stop 60 years ago, it is now the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country and is second only to Mecca in its number of annual pilgrims. Its most famous drink is the atomic cocktail -- vodka, brandy, Champagne, splash of sherry. Gamblers enjoying them in the 1950's were treated to views of hydrogen bombs going off 65 miles northwest of town.

  The mushrooming impact of this gaudy metropolis is the subject of ''The Money and the Power,'' Sally Denton and Roger Morris's magisterial, if one-sided, history of what they call ''America's criminal city-state.'' Denton is a reporter and the author of ''The Bluegrass Conspiracy''; Morris, her husband, was a senior staff member at the National Security Council during the Johnson and Nixon administrations and has written biographies of Richard Nixon and the Clintons. Together they arraign Las Vegas on charges of drug trafficking, money laundering and the corruption of politicians, including nearly every president since Dwight Eisenhower.

  Their story begins with Meyer Lansky, whose working assumption was that Wall Street firms, banks, industrial giants, labor unions and political parties were ''de facto gangs'' from which he should learn; the term ''Lansky operation'' soon came to define a blending of criminal with legitimate business practices. He bankrolled Bugsy Siegel's vision of Las Vegas, seeing the Mojave Desert as a critical asset. Once tourists ate and drank all they could, only two choices remained: sex and gambling.

  Americans' love-hate relationship with those pleasures is best embodied by the two middle sons of Joseph P. Kennedy. Like his father, John Kennedy loved Nevada's wide-open fiscal and sexual ethos, and the close parallel between the meteoric rise of the Strip and his own political career was hardly a coincidence. Denton and Morris assert that friendly hotel owners and entertainers (Frank Sinatra foremost among them) used a brown leather satchel to contribute $1 million in cash to his 1960 campaign. They also introduced him to Judy Campbell, who happened to be the Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana's concubine, and John's compromising liaison with her lasted well into his presidency. His younger brother Robert inherited more of their mother's Catholic piety. As attorney general, he reversed the priorities of J. Edgar Hoover, who had assigned 400 New York F.B.I. agents to investigate Communism, 10 to look into organized crime. While Hoover had focused exclusively on a Sicilian Cosa Nostra, Robert acknowledged the rise of a multiethnic syndicate.

   

  Kim Jew/Alfred A. Knopf

  Sally Denton and Roger Morris

  After the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy foreign policy placed Fidel Castro center stage. From documents declassified after the cold war, the authors conclude that the planet's first nuclear showdown ensued from a ''tantrum'' in which ''an American president and his brother . . . stalked a foreign head of state,'' forcing Nikita Khrushchev to protect his client by placing missiles in Cuba. The book then marshals new circumstantial evidence that Castro and the syndicate were behind the assassination of President Kennedy. The authors assert that Jack Ruby flew to Las Vegas the weekend before he shot Lee Harvey Oswald and that Oswald's widow, Marina, received ''legal aid and patronage'' from the Great Southwest Corporation of Dallas, a real estate company with ties to the Teamsters' pension fund and Vegas. For his part, Robert Kennedy, the authors say, was silenced by his own complicity, having ''taken the favors of Las Vegas, become indebted to it, in the election of 1960, and . . . used its men and its power in the dark war against Castro.'' Referring to the events in Dallas, Robert admitted: ''I found out something I never knew. I found out my world was not the real world.''

  The real world, it seemed, was now being run by the likes of the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. He had bought most of the major hotels on the Strip but was always too ill and addled by painkillers to oversee them. Federal investigations were canceled and Teamster loans repaid, but syndicate bosses still skimmed the profits. In the meantime, the authors maintain, both of Nixon's presidential campaigns were lavishly financed by the Hughes puppeteers Moe Dalitz and Robert Maheu, and they argue that Nixon's obsessive fear that Maheu might leak incriminating information inspired his ''plumbers'' unit, thus planting the seeds of his own resignation.

  In one of their most illuminating passages, the authors double back to 1954 in order to trace, often in hilarious detail, Ronald Reagan's demise as a left-leaning actor and phoenix-like rebirth as a pitchman for reactionary causes. With his election in 1980, they say, he assumed the role of ''emcee'' of a ''slow-motion coup d'état'' largely underwritten by the syndicate. While the president unctuously swore to ''get rid of the mob,'' his administration slashed the budgets of the F.B.I., D.E.A. and S.E.C. while fostering huge tax cuts for corporations and the already wealthy. ''The hogs were really feeding,'' Reagan's own budget director would say, looking back.

  In the 90's, Michael Milken and Steve Wynn took over as Sin City became Family Vegas. The authors report that a 1999 study showed that for decades ''half and often more of the campaign funds of winning candidates'' in Nevada ''had come from the casinos and their masters.'' At the national level, Bill Clinton's shrewdly deniable quid pro quos became political state of the art. As he quipped to supporters at a $10,000-a-plate luncheon in Vegas, ''You're intelligent enough to support Democrats so that you can continue to live like Republicans.''

  Denton and Morris have orchestrated a vast array of sources into a nuanced indictment. Their profiles of Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Benny Binion, the founder of the Horseshoe casino, and dozens of others bring to life what might have been a legalistic chronicle. Their stern moral tone seems adopted from Tacitus, the Roman historian who in A.D. 98 wrote of the barbarians, ''Under the influence of uncontrollable ecstasy, the players gambled their wives, their children and ultimately themselves into captivity.''

  What the authors have failed to provide is a sense of their subject's appeal. Quoting with approval Noël Coward's opinion of Las Vegas tourists -- earnest morons flinging their money down the drain'' -- is representative of their contempt for a place where ordinary people come to feel, for a weekend, like big shots. Another fact they seem to resent is that governments make unrealistic laws, people break them, and the opportunists who help inevitably become rich and powerful. As the popular and critical success of ''The Sopranos,'' ''The Godfather'' and ''Traffic'' makes plain, the drama of bending the law touches deep human chords. For Denton and Morris, even to wear tailored clothes indicates crooked venality.

  ike many two-person writing teams, this one produces its share of three-legged prose and redundancy. A more serious hitch is the authors' wont to conflate facts misleadingly. They write that Benny Binion's son Ted ''was murdered amid a family quarrel over control of the now national Binion empire.'' A legal feud was under way among Benny's children when Ted was murdered in 1998 (not 1999, as they state), but it was his live-in girlfriend, Sandy Murphy, and her latest lover who drugged, then suffocated, the wayward casino mogul. No member of his family was even remotely involved.

  Most of the book's soundings seem true nonetheless. Degrees of separation between gangsters and friends of gangsters, between homicidal goons and corporate hustlers, are somehow less meaningful now that gambling stocks owned by Harvard University and the California State Employees Pension Fund are part of what the authors call a ''grand alliance of upperworld and underworld.''

  Witness the attorney Oscar B. Goodman. His clients have included Lansky; the hit man Tony (the Ant) Spilotro; the narcotics importer Jimmy Chagra, for whom Goodman won acquittal in the killing of a federal judge; and the stripper turned murderer Sandy Murphy, whose case he relinquished only when he decided to run for public office. In June 1999 the citizens of Las Vegas elected Goodman their mayor in a landslide, and he now has designs on national office. Tacitus himself couldn't make a much tighter case that one empire had seen better days while another was feeling its oats.
  

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  James McManus's most recent novel is ''Going to the Sun.'' He is at work on ''Positively Fifth Street,'' an account of the murder of the casino operator Ted Binion and the 2000 World Series of Poker.

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MORE REVIEWS: 
Just released and available at online sites including amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.   

By:  Peter Dale Scott

  "'The Money and the Power' is essential reading for all those who want to understand the hidden history of how we've been governed.  Through this riveting narrative of Las Vegas, not only do we see how it became a center for national campaign financing and international money-laundering, mocking law enforcement, we also gain a whole new perspective on our nation in the last half-century, and the melding of upper- and underworld finance that increasingly dominates the world.  A breathtaking book."   By: Nicholas Peleggi

    "Riveting and provacative.  It's all here.  An unforgettable portrait of the world's most fascinating city and its characters.  Your view of Las Vegas and America will never be the same."

    By: Anthony Summers

    "An outstanding book, at once majestic and terrible in its symmertry.  Denton and Morris have cracked a key part of the genetic code of the modern United States, with the resolve that led scientists to unravel DNA.  There is a skein that links mobsters and multiple presidents, Mormons and money men, the darker machinations of the CIA and the old FBI, hard drugs and apple pie -- and it winds out from the back to Las Vegas.  'The Money and the Power' sounds a warning call for the millennium."

    By:  Jim Hougan

    "What a good book this is.  From the pioneering Mormons to the racketeering Mob, this book is a terrific read, an investigative biography and secret history of America's most surreal and wired city.  With characters like Bugsy Siegel and Benny Binion, 'The Money and the Power' is proof-positive that Las Vegas is not only stranger than fiction -- it's scarier."

      Credits:

    Peter Dale Scott: "Cocaine Politics" and "Iran-Contra Connection"

    Nicholas Pileggi: "Casino" and "Wiseguy"

    Anthony Summers: "The Arrogance of Power: The Secret world of Richard Nixon"

    Jim Hougan:  "Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA"  

Reviewed by Chris Rasmussen
Sunday, April 8, 2001; Page BW03

THE MONEY AND THE POWER
The Making of Las Vegas And Its Hold on America, 1947-2000
By Sally Denton and Roger Morris
Knopf. 479 pp. $26.95

The Las Vegas Strip is not only the most famous street on Earth but the most visible sign of human habitation from outer space, a beacon of civilization nearly five miles long. Yet, as Sally Denton and Roger Morris observe, Vegas's gleaming facades conceal a history relentlessly dark. Worse, this island of hedonism and corruption in the middle of the Mojave desert is no longer a remote outpost but has extended its values and influence across the United States.

Denton and Morris's Las Vegas is no mere tourist destination. Instead, it is America's "shadow capital," the nexus where the lines of the American power grid -- politicians, organized crime, labor and corporate capital -- combine to rule the nation. Only in Las Vegas, they contend, is the intimate connection between upperworld and underworld, the seen and unseen, revealed. The Money and the Power offers not merely a history of Las Vegas's astonishing boom over the past half-century but also a view of recent American history from the jaded vantage of the Strip.

Denton and Morris have a keen eye for scandal: She is author of a revealing exposé of drug trafficking, while he has chronicled the boundless ambition and duplicity that propelled Richard Nixon and the Clintons to political power. Their new book is a history not of the city of Las Vegas or its phenomenally successful tourist industry but of the corrupt political and business dealings of the city's elite. Although the history of Vegas's dark underside is not altogether new, it has seldom been so abundantly researched and compellingly told.

The mob launched the city's boom in the 1940s, building casinos to launder its multi-million dollar take from narcotics and corruption throughout the nation. Nevadans, residents of a desperately poor state of already dubious moral repute for its legal gambling and lax divorce laws, tacitly condoned political corruption and rule by the mob in exchange for an infusion of cash and jobs. Over the past 50 years, an oligarchy of thugs and megalomaniacs has hoarded the wealth and political clout that rule Las Vegas -- they have, and are, that preeminent currency in the Vegas economy: "the Juice." Vegas's peculiar line of succession is filled with mobsters and casino moguls: Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Howard Hughes, Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian. Today the keepers of the Juice preside over corporations instead of the syndicate, and have draped a veil of legitimacy over the "gaming industry." They not only control the city, and the state of Nevada, but wield considerable power across the nation. Gambling's power can scarcely be overstated: Americans gamble more money than they spend on all other forms of entertainment combined.

As Las Vegas grew from a tiny desert town into a hugely popular tourist destination, the city's extraordinary wealth made it irresistible to politicians and other would-be power brokers. Organized labor, especially when Jimmy Hoffa ruled the Teamsters, invested heavily in Vegas as the city boomed. Aspiring politicians eagerly tapped casino heads for campaign funds. John Kennedy loved Vegas (he was attracted by more than political contributions). Ronald Reagan bombed in Vegas when he emceed a variety revue at the end of his sagging film career, but, in the 1980s, President Reagan's endorsement of the free market legitimized Vegas's rapacious ethos, enabling casinos to join the ranks of reputable businesses. The syndicate, long underground, at last ventured into the upperworld, and Las Vegas, formerly scorned as a tawdry exception among American cities, emerged as the embodiment of no-holds-barred capitalism and self-indulgence.

Not content to trace the convergence of money and power in Vegas, Denton and Morris pinpoint Vegas as the epicenter of recent American history as well. After establishing the Kennedys' considerable ties to Vegas, for instance, they credit the city with JFK's rise and fall. Did Las Vegas mobsters, angered by Robert Kennedy's determination to investigate organized crime, play a role in JFK's assassination? "It hardly mattered in the end who killed JFK," because "in the end, Las Vegas had won." This Vegas-centric perspective of America, no less than the provincialism of the Manhattanite or Beltway insider, considerably overstates the city's influence.

The Strip's headiness can be disorienting. Its gleaming but ersatz facades may be less consequential than the unseen history of Las Vegas, a history that the city's media and power brokers have consistently tried to suppress. The authors' sleuthing in the shady world behind Vegas's golden veneer uncovers disturbing ties between underworld and upperworld, organized crime and corporations, mobsters and presidents. As they observe, Las Vegas, a crossroads for gangsters, politicians, financiers, swindlers and spies, proves a unique place for "connecting the unconnectable." Characterizing the city as the nation's "shadow capital," however, and making it the point of origin for disasters ranging from the Kennedy assassination to Watergate, only mirrors the hyperbole that is Vegas's vernacular. Sin City's notoriety is well-earned, as this disturbing tale of corruption reminds us, but Las Vegas is not the gateway that links this world to Hades. •

Chris Rasmussen teaches American history at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.