The Money And The Power
The Rise and Reign of Las Vegas
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Sally Denton and Roger Morris make clear how and why Las Vegas became the greatest 'business success story' of the twentieth century, and how the rest of America ensured this success by contributing capital as well as customers. Headquarters of a trillion-dollar worldwide empire, the site of unprecedented political and economic power, Las Vegas is by no means an aberrant sin city. Denton and Morris demonstrate how it has grown out of, and reflects, a corruption and a worship of money that have crept into American life since Prohibition. They trace the original funds for the founding of the Las Vegas we know today to nationwide narcotics trafficking. They show how deeply a multiethnic criminal syndicate, in part feeding off gambling profits and the skim in Las Vegas, came to influence American politics and the larger society, and how pervasively its 'style of business' has penetrated the entire nation. Denton and Morris detail the amazing rise and reach of Meyer Lansky - the mind that ran the city; exactly how criminals, politicians, and businessmen worked together to control Las Vegas; the curious interplay of the city with the fates of Joseph, John F., and Robert Kennedy; how Mormon bankers and Wall Street financiers have bankrolled and profited from casinos ruled by organised crime; how a handful of dedicated journalists and law enforcement officers were destroyed before they could expose the city's secrets. The Money and the Power is a detailed and illuminating chronicle of an extraordinary place and time - and a provocative reinterpretation of twentieth-century American history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This ambitious, jolting investigative history simultaneously explores the "secret history" of Las Vegas malfeasance and the expansion of the city's ethos of greed and artifice into a wholesale American model. Married co-authors Denton (The Bluegrass Conspiracy) and Morris (Partners in Power) offer an expansive, finely detailed, slightly convoluted cultural narrative, beginning with concise biographies of key figures (mobsters Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, news tycoon Hank Greenspun, anti-crime-crusading Senator Estes Kefauver). Failed 1950s reform movements allowed for the ascendance of organized crime, fortified by huge "skim" profits from casinos. Operation Underworld, a WWII collaboration between government and "Syndicate" forces, forged extensive relationships between federal agencies, corrupted police and gangsters that proved central to Las Vegas's economic boom. The profits radiated corruption outward, evinced in such "blowback" as repeated CIA-Mob assassination attempts on Castro. Formidable researchers, Denton and Morris train gimlet eyes on compromised officials like J. Edgar Hoover, gambling tycoons like Benny Binion and killers-cum-businessmen like Sam Giancana. They look into the growth of more malignant, polyethnic (and, they claim) CIA-supported organized crime facilitated by stereotyping of the Italian Mafia. Although their conflation of glitzy Vegas profligacy with corporate politics and consumerism may seem unwieldy, the book is undeniably disturbing and engrossing. It concludes with the 1999 mayoral election of Oscar Goodman, notorious Syndicate attorney, which was an augury of business as usual in what the authors portray as democracy's spiritual capital. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Mar. 26)