Jeff Burbank - Las Vegas Babylon: The True Tales of Glitter, Glamour, and Greed

Las Vegas
Babylon

TRUE TALES OF GLITTER,
GLAMOUR, AND GREED

Jeff Burbank

Copyright 2008 by Jeff Burbank

Some of the material in this book was previously published in the column Vegas Babylon in Las Vegas Lite magazine ( www.lvlife.com ). It is printed by permission.

All interior photographs from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections, except the photo of Jim Morrison, from the Las Vegas Police Department.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data applied for

ISBN-13: 978-1-59077-136-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-1-59077-136-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

For Alessandro and Ansley

I will make the land of Babylon an everlasting ruin....
I will repay them for all they have done!

Jeremiah, chapter 25

I want first to acknowledge Kenneth Anger, author of Hollywood Babylon, whose fascinating and irreverent work inspired this book. I also would like to express my gratitude to my literary agent, Janet Rosen, of the Sheree Bykofsky Associates agency in New York, for her guidance and support.

In Las Vegas, I have to also acknowledge the editors, reporters, commentators, and others I met, worked with, and learned so much from over the years, starting with cartoonist Mike Smith and the rest of the staff of the feisty Las Vegas Sun, the newspaper I joined in 1987. Its then-editor, the late Sandy Thompson, hired me as a business reporter and later put me on the local gaming beat, including opening day of the Mirage Hotel in 1989. Next, I must tip my hat to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, where I joined the staff in 1990 and where I learned invaluable lessons about Las Vegas through reporting on police, fire, labor relations, and later gaming. The R-Js editors saw fit to assign me some of the choicest stories in town, including the openings of the MGM Grand, Treasure Island Hotel, and Luxor Hotel on the Strip. Though I left that paper back in 1995, I am still indebted to them for their confidence in me.

These and other experiences helped me discover the inner workings of the casino industry, the politics, and the social aspects of what is still a small town for its size. Others whose ideas and thoughts about Vegas have furthered my understandings, big time, include Dr. Michael Green, Las Vegass Historian to the Stars; Hugh Jackson, one of the important social and political commentators in town and one of its best writers; George McCabe, a former local reporter who knows a lot about what really happens in Vegas, especially for someone who works in public relations; Dr. Jeff Jablonski, of UNLVs English Department, who lets me teach business writing to hundreds of students at that growing university; Flo Rogers, head of KNPR-FM, the areas local public radio outlet, and her crew, for putting me on the air as a commentator, which also expanded my appreciation for the many complicated issues facing this town.

I must also acknowledge my parents, Dr. Rex Burbank, a retired university professor, author, and college testing expert, and Nancy Burbank, a retired R.N., for their lifelong encouragement while I continue to ride my roller coaster. I also want to thank my son, Alessandro, and my daughter, Ansley, for teaching me there are many things to appreciate in life beyond careerism. Also, kudos go out to my sister, Cindy Vandenberg, a writer living in paradise in Carmel-By-The Sea, and my San Francisco Bay Area lawyer brother, Scott. Oh, and I had better mention my ex-wives, Cristina and Andrea.

Does Las Vegas have any redeeming qualities? Lets see. There are blue skies and mostly warm weather about 320 days or more a year. You wont miss shoveling snow, except for the occasional freak storm. If youre kind of lonely, you can sit, drink, smoke, play a video slot, and watch sports all at once, at all hours, and that really comes in handy. And theres the comfortable feeling of freedom you get when you come off an airliner at McCarran International Airport, from anywhere, and you immediately see and hear the slot machines. While other, older large cities appear stagnant and overbuilt, Vegas always has more energy. Since the metro area just grows and grows like no other, its kind of like post-war America in Vegas all the time. Theres a feeling of reinvention herefrom fresh money constantly flowing into townwith new entertainment diversions at the hotels and pronouncements of multi-billion-dollar mixed use complexes on the Strip, even though many never make it. New career and business opportunities grow on trees, as do good news stories.

When I made the move east to Las Vegas from California back in 1987, it still had a small-town feel, with the novelty of the famous but frayed and out-of-date Strip hotels. These were places where you could go to slum and laugh hysterically at the old-fashioned, third-rate lounge acts and at the forced seriousness of the casino pit bosses in crumbling hotels like the Thunderbird, Landmark, Sands, and the demented Vegas World. But a number of major trends, in and out of town, were converging in the late 1980s, and things were about to change radically. It started when Deadwood, South Dakota, legalized casino games like blackjack and slots. Then the Mississippi River states started to okay riverboat casinos and Congress gave American Indians the right to open casinos. Gambling was almost everywhere by then. Companies could borrow hundreds of millions to build casinos and pay back the loans with the flowing and growing cash. On the Strip, while most of the big hotels were already building a lot more guest rooms to meet the volume of visitors, in 1989, Steve Wynn and the Mirage started the era Vegas is in now.

It really took off like hell in the 1990s. So many people moved to Vegas so quickly that all of a sudden there were huge new neighborhoods and sections of town that you had no idea about. And yet, you still had the same cast of characters in government and business, the dying fathers and ascending sons of Las Vegas, largely from its old Mormon and Jewish communities. That insular, small-town feel, many Vegas residents will tell you, still exists in the early twenty-first century. Part of the reason is theres so little of that sense of community thing here. Vegas, the fun getaway for so many millions of tourists, is the getaway spot for droves of new residents from out of the state, too. You can drive twenty miles from work to your suburban home, open your electronic garage door, and close it behind you. Your yard, if you have one, is so small theres no reason to go outside and see your neighbors (and, its probably too hot or cold, anyway). You can live for years and never know those who live in the homes beside you, or the parade of neighbors who have rented them and then left town, or the absentee landlords whove flipped them over and over for a profit in faster times, or have had to cover the mortgage payments themselves for months on end when home prices at last got too high from the demand for them. That happened around 2004.