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September 29, 2002
REVIEWS: Lights and crimes
Las Vegas (Nevada), the fastest growing metropolis in America, with its bright neon lights, casinos, hotels, clubs and bars, remains the premier entertainment centre in the world. The city’s luminance draws more than 50 million people every year.
But behind this brightness are the dark alleys where crime lurks. For Las Vegas is also the centre of a trillion dollar empire funded by narcotic traffickers and Wall Street financiers.
Once a secluded watering hole, a haven for horse thieves, and a lonesome stop on a rail line across a wasteland, the Las Vegas valley — Spanish for “the meadows” — is now filling with humanity. Founded as a city on May 15, 1905, it was transformed in 1931 when gambling was legalized in the state of Nevada. Within a month, Las Vegas issued six gambling licenses.
The city emerged as a nexus for crimes and today Las Vegas is the fount of legal and illegal cash drawing criminals, businessmen, and politicians from every continent. Meeting in Las Vegas for regular exchanges is an unbroken tradition now. American drug-money brokers own casinos and resorts, which are a place to do business and to celebrate. The largest, most comprehensive drug-money laundering case in the history of the United States took place in Las Vegas.
The money and the power is an account of the rise of Las Vegas, and its significance today. The book should interest those interested in knowing the realities behind the bright lights and well-built casinos of the city. It is a part of American history.
The authors, Sally Denton and Roger Morris, are award winners and have written books, which won them much acclaim. The book sets the city in a different perspective, when compared to other works on Las Vegas. The authors prove that by virtue of its influence on American politics and American society at large Las Vegas is the ‘first city of the twenty-first century’. According to them, “the greatest wonder of Las Vegas is mostly unseen — the truth about its past and the meaning of its present. The city, a spectacle of lights, has always depended on darkness”.
Las Vegas changed the lives of many, who ended up in Las Vegas, the centre for crime and corruption. For example, there was Yablonsky who had believed his entire life to be “one of the good guys”. Suddenly, in Las Vegas he became one of the bad ones. Similarly, gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel changed his own life along with the city’s character by constructing its first lavish hotel-casino in 1945. There followed a chain of lavishly decorated resort hotels and gambling casinos offering top-name entertainment and tourism and entertainment took over as the largest employer in the valley.
Denton and Morris say that Las Vegas is beyond cash and chips, ‘juice’ is the real currency. Who are the ‘juice’? They are the figures whose power and example are decisive for the city. They are the men who were not exactly the founders of the city but contributed to organized crime and, thus, to the development of Las Vegas. Their lives as narrated in the book bring out the true character of the city itself. Hence these biographical accounts are of utmost importance.
To name a few, Meyer Lansky originally from Poland, organized crime along corporate hierarchical lines. He promoted the centrality of drugs and money laundering as means of finance. Benny Binion’s town had twenty-seven casinos by the time he turned forty. He bribed local politicians, prosecutors, and police. The book also gives a detailed account of the family connections, disputes and alliances among those involved in criminal activities in Las Vegas. The reader also learns of the experiences of famous politicians like Joe Kennedy, who loved Las Vegas for its high life and easy access to political cash, and Ronald Reagan.
These accounts are the result of five years of intensive research by the writers. Written in an interesting style The money and the power establishes beyond doubt that money begets power. It sums up the history of America itself where the worship of money has become the norm.
One can hardly accept the spellbinding glorification of the dark world of Las Vegas. The reader might be stunned by the vices and criminal activities of Las Vegas — he might also be fascinated — but at the end of the day he cannot fail to see the corrupting influence of this city of crime and how it is a microcosm of America itself. As the writers observe, “ By the millennium the national surrender of democracy to oligarchy in the United States... had simply come into the open, where it had long been in Las Vegas... America has yet to come to term to its own hidden history, let alone the city’s..”
The money and the power: the making of Las Vegas and its hold on America, 1947-2000
By Sally Denton and
Roger Morris
Alfred A. Knopf, New York
Distributed in Pakistan by Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi
Tel: 021-5683026.
Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk
ISBN 0-375-40130-X
479pp. Rs1938
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