Some Las Vegas stories I’ve posted conclude in downbeat fashion. But like the fables of old or even older Greek myths, morals, or at least lessons, are left behind.
I don’t mean any of the sunnier experiences recounted on these pages. Most of those highlighted reminiscences of old Las Vegas. The mobbed-up times that fueled the city’s luster. When visitors, no, life here in its entirety, had style; when the performers were legendary, and the ambient music better.
Stories from the spear carriers. The background personnel who made the city hum and the guests in it sing praises.
Waitresses. Bartenders. Cigarette girls. Showgirls. Strippers. Bell hops. Sparring partners. Housekeepers and maintenance men. Even a go-fer or two for one-time long-ago heavies.
In 2013, I had arrived just in time. All the above verged on final ways out after decades of retirement. A lot started Las Vegas careers in the late 1950s. Most would linger from the city’s extended Rat Pack glamor into the start of its current nickel-and-dime opulence.
The stories heard often trended more towards lost rough splendor.
Had Las Vegas come to fruit under corporate auspices instead of made-man drive and opportunism, the city would almost be as poky now as when outfits from Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Kansas City arrived to make the Mojave boom. Corporate America knows bottom lines. Corporate America does not know people.
The Strip today is undergoing doldrums. Price points have overtaken volume. The Friday afternoons of obeying the wild hair, getting a couple of buddies to join in a spur-of-the-moment larks into the Big Mayberry are toast.
Costs in Las Vegas now make such impulsive weekends enter the realms of deep philosophical contemplation.
Because that’s how much a 2026 weekend here may vacuum from wallets.
Mob guys knew people in this respect – they didn’t want prospective guests thinking. They wanted visitors to succumb to urges. Cheap and available erased a lot of thinking.
Where in the neon past the guys gladly had food and beverage as loss leaders, comped like it was autumn leaves falling off trees, and had their hostelries’ rack rates at maybe break-even or lower nightly tariffs, the MBA geniuses managing the LED present consult spreadsheets. Driven by orderly aligned figures on paper or screen, they’ve determined higher yields are to be realized through much higher room rates, amenities fees for once free stuff, paid parking supplanting gratis spots, with exquisite restaurants offering expensive diet-sized portions on big plates, and cocktails whose prices dissuade swilling or buying a lot of rounds.
In all of their running casinos like Fortune 500 businesses, the MBA suits forgot what the moneymaker is.
Gambling. Gambling is where the profits are. Gambling has always been where the profits are. Gambling is where the profits will always be.
Mob guys knew Saloon Running 101 by heart: entice customers inside then keep them anchored in the property. Offer drinks and meals whose purchase didn’t require loans to afford. Provide rooms at cost to guests who ideally wouldn’t be spending all that much time occupying them. Present entertainment which further loosened audiences’ optimism, thereby making them favorably expectant towards the waiting and hopefully rewarding main floor wagering opportunities.
Sad to say but thanks to the business school graduates now running much of Las Vegas’ wagering, hostelries, and entertainment attractions, the allure and fun once incumbent here have faded. Mind, visitors can still travel to the city and indulge in pastimes unfathomable wherever they live. But these fall below the levels of the Rat Pack era and the 1970s-80s tawdry kitsch which made the city such a garish and gaudy pleasure.
Despite the preponderance of omnipresent security, today’s visitors may get into occasions that leave bigger deeper dents than the prior times’ good frights. The kind which then sometimes stamped severe lessons. Never having been surveilled by the profusion of 21st century CCTV, we will never know how many of those Las Vegas visitors during the black & white, Kodachrome still photography decades earned anonymous desert plots or whose bodies were butchered and the parts perhaps strewn local pig farms pigpens.
Nonetheless there were instances when somehow merciful dese and dose guys spared issuing the judgments upon those who had been deserving of what had been anticipated. Seldom as these occasions likely were, sometimes that sad sack who’d strutted into Las Vegas believing it could be conquered by hook or crook or card counting or some gizmo affixed to machines that queered them, might’ve gotten a break. Beat up first but not dumped bleeding and bruised in an alley.
Who knows? Maybe one of the no-necks assigned to the deed saw how the sap resembled a relative as equally an unmitigated fuck-up. It was enough to have been slipped a “Get Out of Vegas Intact” card. Through it, a rough benefactor would’ve gotten the chump a hotel room, comped him a meal, and bought him bus fare back to wherever.
The next day making sure the gambling fiend didn’t deviate from departing, a couple of fellas would retrieve then drive him to the bus station. Before he climbed into the bus and before watching Graydog leave, they’d growl, “And don’t come back!”
Wonderful advice, no?
Had I heard that story once, I would’ve been skeptical. However, having heard it several times from casino pensioners …
Now with Las Vegas mobless, rehab centers have sprouted throughout the city like mushrooms on manure after rain. Not so much for the residents, who once they do recognize their addictions (gambling and/or alcohol) can find solutions in GA or AA branches. Either in English or Spanish.
The rehab centers address a unique to Las Vegas phenomenon. Visitors who only intended to stay and have fun for a prescribed period but get so immersed in aspects of “the Full Vegas” they maroon themselves here. Homes, jobs, families — forget all that! Whoever they once succumbed to Las Vegas’ “spells.”
As I tell people contemplating relocating here, if their impulse controls are weak — don’t!
Figuring visitors have cobbled together some kind of budget, one likely believes they’ll be leaving the moment their discretionary cash vanishes. However, there are visitors so enthralled and sucked in by the city it devours them. Rather than adhere to preset time limits, they’ll anchor. How they’ll live, where they’ll live doesn’t enter equations. Maybe they’ll have met someone at a table or in a club. And so taken by the new acquaintance decide to remain in surroundings as alien and unforgiving as alien and unforgiving can be.
Maybe the assumption is ‘If this goon or bunch of lightweights I’m sharing drugs with or matching cocktails while hell-with-it gambling or just laying up in the club can thrive in Las Vegas, why can’t I?’ Yes, it’s that easy to trip and fall in Las Vegas. As long as there’s money on hand, the city will speedily feed the vices of the weak and unwary.
But no one ever wonders what happens when the cash dries up.
A lot of the resultant horror stories wind up living rough. A good percentage of the city’s homeless are young impressionable Mountain West and West Coast adventurers who decided against letting their small dusty towns hold them, squeeze them, make them conform. They’ve come to Las Vegas seeking “freedom,” nebulous as that is, and lead nomadic lives on pavement.
Yet there is an unseen sizable portion as well.
They’re not the ragtag, grime-covered types who one might glimpse and instinctively avoid. Instead, sequestered behind the gates of innocuously named facilities, they benefit from gold-plated insurance or have remained in contact with families who still value them. Thus far. Inside these refuges, they are weaned off Las Vegas.
Upon patients’ discharges, the best part of the cure hasn’t been instilling them with 12 or however many steps mantras. That’s only rote. No, the best proof of cures’ effectiveness – at least apparently – is hearing the train wrecks admit how badly he or she had derailed. Unfortunately, rather than expressing gratitude for reprieve, too many seem ambivalent to have been saved.
It’s a decent assumption more than a few will return to and repeat their Las Vegas mishaps. Always bearing the confidence that previous experiences have taught how to sidestep the pratfalls which tripped up or snagged them during the prior go-round.
Experience is a fine teacher. Yet it helps immensely to also have learned the lesson.
Years ago, I performed a casual survey of the above patients. Nothing was scientific about it at all. Without overstepping, I asked just released patients how long they’d been in Las Vegas before crashing.
To a person it was three months. Three months!?
Consider them lucky. No telling how many of those who found themselves mired in similar destitution reached the same depths after the same months but circumstances didn’t permit rescue. Or worse, so embarrassed at the wreckage they’d become decided to spare risking further shame by not reconnecting with families for help or seeking whatever assistance Nevada’s social health services might provide.
The most extreme instance I ever heard of a “Full Vegas” must be a flipside of The Hangover. That movie was a farce. Back in the early part of this decade, I learned of a real “Full Vegas” whose denouement left the participant in a tragic aspect and foretold a murky future.
As often happens here in Las Vegas, I heard this misadventure in a bar. Not that I was eavesdropping, but the conversationalists either never learned or outright forgot there is no expectation of privacy in public. Living in the Big Mayberry, hurricane winds blow this caution hither and yon. How many people have I overheard talking about matters best kept close as they amplified them through microphones and speakers? Usually court dates and sentences.
The particular instance which follows was in that vein. Except higher. Like every misstep, stumble, and resultant consequence heard from until then lower grade knuckleheads.
This case had snared a woman from an affluent background. She’d emerged from a moneyed though not notable West Coast family. Impressive as the family bank account likely was, the name was too low on the fame/notoriety totem to earn screaming headlines and scalding media coverage.
Her family had dispatched an older sister to gather the facts, the prospects, and, most importantly, confer with Nevada authorities and a defense lawyer. Seems this relative now on the ground was just the sibling who may’ve had her own brush with Las Vegas mischance. she, though, had either been rescued or restrained by nick of time reluctance to venture further.
Listening to her converse over cocktails with a friend revealed a solid grasp of the city. Maybe she should’ve slipped her sister a study guide version.
Like countless others have and will, the younger sister had traveled from the Los Angeles basin in order to indulge in Las Vegas. Could she have been the worst sort of naif? One who mistook shallow experience for genuine worldliness. Maybe she’d been a frequent visitor. Or maybe she had the anvil drop on her head first time in town.
Anyway, the city’s addictiveness, or its eagerness to supply addictions, turned her trip into residence.
Coming from money as she had, she never knew any of the struggles overwhelmed younger newcomers commonly have while intending to plant flags in this part of the Mojave. Having money made it unnecessary to seek employment. Having money also made it unnecessary to find an apartment in which roommates would be essential towards the rent.
Freed from such boring concerns, that left plenty of time for clubbing and sleeping late. During one or more nighttime excursion she joined bad company. Not just easy enough to do in Las Vegas, but often hard to avoid.
Okay, sensible people would’ve recognized them as such. After getting vicarious thrills absorbed through shady characters, sensible people also would’ve skedaddled back to their safe, dull, routine lives. Though as adult participation trophies they would carry their brief proximity to sketchiness the remainder of their lives, reviving it anytime quotidian living threatened to crush them with its ho-hum, humdrumness.
The younger sister ignored the signs reading “Danger Ahead!” She did not have that lucid moment of clarity. Or if she did, dismissed the insight. She did not turn on her heel and flounce away. Instead, she sashayed deeper into the cave.
No pot of gold at the end. Rather, a felony jackpot that went all kinds of sideways. Gunplay led to homicide. The state wanted murder to be the cherry on top of this cordite sundae. Although the younger sister didn’t contribute to the act’s commission, she was seen as an accessory in the same way as drivers of any bank robbers’ getaway cars. While the younger sister did not throw down on any tellers or customers, she did help facilitate the crime.
Nonetheless, acknowledging her status as a first-time offender, the judge granted her attorney’s bail motion. But here’s where her affluent background made no difference. The amount set was a cool million.
It was at this juncture in the telling the older sister caught her breath in contemplation. A long pause contained a lot. The words spoken afterwards deliberate. A sibling remanded. How involved was the younger sister? Though the case in its preliminary phases, what might eventually be pled? If there was cooperation with the state, what about the aftermath? How hardcore were the main culprits? It was one thing to have the younger sister somehow skate, yet perhaps be chased throughout some subsequent portion of her freedom.
Vindictiveness knows no bounds with elements who carry guns and will travel.
All worthy considerations. And I wish the older sister had left it there. But even with the rich it often boomerangs back to money.
A million dollars for bail. No trouble finding a bail bondsman in Las Vegas. Probably just as many of them here as pawn shops and gun shops.
Yet no matter the verdict, 15% would remain with the bail agency. $150,000. She relayed this amount to be withheld to their father. A listener would’ve had no notion how much he cherished or whether he even much valued his younger daughter. The only thing learned was his indignance at the “highway robbery” fee to be mulcted.
In this regard, the older sister didn’t tip her hand either way. One supposed the younger sister’s plight horrified her. But no decision to pay bail nor money for it was hers.
She and her companion ordered another round of cocktails. Would probably drink one more glass of liquid fortification before setting off on the grim task that waited.
See, after these libations the older woman was off to visit the younger. By this her sister would be informed she’d be staying jail throughout the process.
Not enough alcohol in Nevada to anesthetize that.
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