Book review: Exposing the greed, glitter of Las Vegas

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Shortly before his assassination, Robert F. Kennedy referred to the killing of his brother John F. Kennedy in Dallas five years earlier and made a chilling observation:

"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, $26.95

With that haunting quote, Sally Denton and Roger Morris encapsulate the lingering effect that their new book, "The Money and the Power," will likely have on many of its readers.

The real world portrayed in this fascinating, hard-to-put-down book is a disturbing political and economic landscape in which big crime, big business and government feed off one another in pursuit of their sometimes-separate, sometimes-mutual interests.

Denton and Morris say the epicenter of this world is Las Vegas, the international capital of gambling and glittering laundry for money obtained from narcotics trafficking and other illegal activities.

The authors maintain that the profits from the Las Vegas casinos are skimmed so deeply that less than a third is counted for tax purposes. And even that is taxed at very low rates.

Nevada, therefore, does not get enough revenue from its biggest industry to adequately support its public schools and services.

Money skimmed from the casinos, Denton and Morris write, is distributed to mob bosses around the country. For most of the latter half of the just-ended century, the distribution, they say, was handled by Meyer Lansky, who owned a percentage of most of the casinos.

It was Lansky's idea, not Ben "Bugsy" Siegel's, they insist, to transform a hick-town stopover in the Nevada desert into a gambling Shangri-La.

The cast of this ambitious investigative report reads like a rogues' gallery of every bad movie ever made about the Mafia. Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, New Orleans gang leader Carlos Marcello, the New England Patriarca family and singer-actor Frank Sinatra are among those represented.

Among the prominent politicians caught up in this high-stakes game of power and greed, the authors place the Kennedy family patriarch, Joseph Kennedy Sr.; Lyndon Johnson; Richard Nixon; Ronald Reagan; and U.S. Sens. Pat McCarran and Paul Laxalt of Nevada.

Denton and Morris suggest a connection between the assassination of JFK and backfired plans involving organized crime and the CIA to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Johnson, they write, spoke of "a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean" and told a reporter off the record: "Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got him first."

They also make the case that the Watergate burglars were not trying to find damaging information to use against the Democrats. Instead, they were on a mission to find and destroy information that Nixon was afraid would link him to criminal elements in Las Vegas.

One of the more engrossing profiles in the book focuses on billionaire Howard Hughes' buying most of "Glitter Gulch." Hughes by that time was so sick physically and mentally that he had no control over his financial empire and hardly any grip on reality.

Others were making the decisions. Hughes supposedly cleaned up the city, but the same people who sold out to him were left to run the show.

This book is not mere conspiracy-mongering. The 62 pages of documentation testify to the depth and breadth of the authors' research.

Denton and Morris have solid reputations as investigative journalists. Their book is must reading for every American concerned about the political and economic direction of this nation.