Las Vegas News and Casino News

      Las Vegas’s success as our perpetual playground has always been based on the town’s uncanny timing to know just when to change its image… and put on a brand new face. This time around Vegas is back as a global theme park — a place some say has forsaken its own storied past.
      “This is a town I’m not familiar with now,” says comedian Alan King. But he says, “I’m very pleased for the town.”
      King feels there’s something missing from the new Vegas playground. “The soul’s gone. There is no soul, you know, in Disneyland. Now, it’s bigger, but it’s not as much fun.”
      The intimacy this town banked on is long gone. The strip’s been sanitized for public consumption by the only people with the cash to pull it off — corporate America.

“It really was the corporations and not the FBI that drove the mob out of town,” says author Peter Earley, who spent a year on the strip writing the book “Super Casino.”

      “You’ll never find a place like Las Vegas. And it is pure American. Where else but in the middle of the desert, where there should be nothing at all… would you build this great sanctuary to excess?”
      What’s really transformed the Las Vegas landscape is the emergence of the so-called super casinos — whether it’s the pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, or the entire NYC skyline, they’re actually hotels — hotels that are bigger, glitzier, more extravagant and expensive than any hotel man has ever built before anywhere.
      The Luxor — you could park nine 747’s in the lobby. It’s ancient Egypt with air conditioning… and over four thousand rooms.
      The Paris — France without attitude with cobblestone streets leading you through a constantly charming French village.
      And the Bellagio with Lake Como — tailored for tourists with dancing fountains and a Broadway beat.

A gondola ride at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas

      It’s an American fantasy, a glossy postcard from anywhere and everywhere you’d want to be. A city with an ambience and architecture only a genius or a child might dream up.
      Sheldon Adelson is the latest billionaire to reshape Vegas… a master builder.
      He brought Venice to the desert as a gift to his wife.
      “She said the combination of luxury, romance, and excitement would give us the longevity we were looking for,” says Adelson.
      More than two billion dollars was the price tag for that gift.
      Adelson says with laughter, “but who’s counting?”
      Is it a risky venture, so much capital invested?
      It isn’t, in Adelson’s mind.

He was certain that if he built it, we would come to Venice all cleaned up without the flooding, no odor and no unsightly things floating in the canal.
Adelson has duplicated every column, every bridge, every detail in his 3,000-room hotel… the Venetian.

What’s really transformed the Las Vegas landscape is the emergence of the so-called super casinos — whether it’s the pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, or the entire NYC skyline, they’re actually hotels — hotels that are bigger, glitzier, more extravagant and expensive than any hotel man has ever built before anywhere.

      Right down to the pigeons on the piazza.
      The town’s vision of leisure as lifestyle has evolved to suit the whims of today’s world of armchair travelers and their disposable income. For professor Hal Rothman, Vegas is a window like none other on American culture.
      “What Las Vegas does is take the rough edges off of Paris or New York and clean’em off for you and make it a place where middle class America is very comfortable,” says Rothman.
      Adelson says, “Las Vegas is truly a form of entertainment — that capital of entertainment. But the definition of entertainment has changed.”
      That change is felt by those who were one headliners in the old Las Vegas.
      “No, there’s very little [work] … there’s few places for me to work,” says King.
      And there’s only one performer who’s remained in the spotlight through all the remakes and changing times. That’s why he’s known as Mr. Las Vegas.
      “Part of what made Vegas great is the star policy entertainer. The saloon singer if you will… Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis… those are the people that made Las Vegas what it is,” says current Vegas headliner Wayne Newton.

Wayne Newton, nightclub singer, kisses his fans during a performance.

      In fact, as the casinos have been recast as a spectacle for mass consumption, so has the entertainment industry.
      From King Arthur’s court, to a pirate battle, headliners like Wayne Newton now have to share the strip with white tigers and a host of newcomers.
      Like Stella Umeh, a former Olympic gymnast, who’s just come to town to be part of Cirque de Soliel’s “Mystere.”
      Selling out 3,000 seats a night, Stella is part of a cast of hundreds.
      “It’s performance art yet coupled with gymnastics and dance and acrobatics. So there are all these crazy circus things mixed in with the theater. So it is totally different from what a usual patron might be used to,” says Umeh.
      It’s a very long way from the Vegas made famous in the fiction of Martin Scorcese’s “Casino.”
      That was a time when the mob took its daily skim. The character Robert DeNiro played was Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, a bookie turned top casino boss.
      “The aura, the feeling, the service was so far superior to today’s modern-day Las Vegas,” says Rosenthal.
      Today, Lefty’s banned from the casinos, blacklisted by an industry that he says has turned the town pedestrian and commonplace.
      “The best analogy I can give you is today it’s a subway scene, when I was there, it was limousine.”
      These days, Lefty and the mob are largely gone from Vegas. All you can find is one man who even knew the wise guys of the past.
      Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman says, “I’ve been here 35 years practicing law and the characters in the film ‘Casino’ I mean in real life they were all my clients.”
      Oscar Goodman built his reputation defending notorious Vegas mobsters like Tony Spilotro… but Goodman reinvented himself to suit a changing Vegas, and in 1999, was elected mayor. “I think that if we forget where we come from we lose our mystique. I often say that people want to see a little Bugsy Siegel around here and not a little Mickey Mouse.”
      But is city hall run by the mob? Goodman says no.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman

      “City hall’s just not run by the mob… it’s run by the mayor. And the mayor… his relationship with the mob is a thing of the past.”
      Financial analyst Jason Ader says the mob is also a thing of the past with gambling in Vegas also. “There’s no fooling around anymore and for all intents and purposes the Mafia is out of the Las Vegas business, out of the casino business overall.”
      It’s the staggering profits now at stake — seven billion dollars a year — that keep Ader busy full time, keeping track of the super casinos for their new “boss” — Wall Street.
      He says, “if you are looking to deploy capitol into an exciting area that’s also generating a meaningful amount of profits, the casinos will show up as one of the best places to do that.”
      And with that kind of legitimate backing behind the new Vegas, the X-rated side of town is tougher to find.
      Is it still sin city?
      Goodman says no. “There are more things to do here for adults than anyplace.”
      But Vegas isn’t just anyplace. For a century, its essence has been about pushing the boundaries of illicit fun. But, despite the town’s corporate clean up, its naughty reputation lives on.
      “Vegas has history,” says one stripper. “It’s the excitement of Vegas — everyone wants to come here.”
      “You can behave in ways that people at home would be embarrassed for you and here it’s totally acceptable, why because it’s Las Vegas, because it’s a sin-free zone. It’s a place where you can do whatever it is you want to do as long as you are willing to pay for it,” says Rothman.
      Earley says, “Vegas is a town of glitz and glamour, but underneath there’s also this underbelly of despair, of heartache, of sex. It’s the mirror image of the glitz and the glamour and it’s a very sad story.”
      It’s a story that lives in the shadows of the strip. But even there, the trail of money kicked off by the super casinos means business… even if it’s illegal prostitution.

The super casinos have brought more business, says this Las Vegas prostitute.

      A Vegas prostitute says the super casinos have brought her more business.
      What does she know about Vegas that the rest of the country doesn’t?
      “Well, we say they come to gamble and pick up hookers. Well that’s basically what they do.”
      If the chamber of commerce says they come for the gaming and the entertainment, she say she is part of the entertainment.
      That’s about all that’s left of the old image of sin city. Today’s Vegas is being cleaned and scrubbed and remade, by a new force of legitimate working women and men. They are the ones making Las Vegas a different type of destination — a land of opportunity for those chasing the American fantasy of a better life.

      If the super casinos are what makes Las Vegas an irresistible draw for millions of tourists… it’s the jobs those casinos create that make Vegas a land of opportunity for the people who actually live here. This may be the best town in America for working men and women. It’s a new hot-bed of union power, a place where blue-collar dreams still come true. And as millions of American jobs continue to be exported overseas and factories continue to close down, many are calling Las Vegas the last Detroit.
      Glen Arnodo says “It’s pretty much the untold story of the American labor movement.”
      When Glen Arnado moved to Vegas in 1985, he thought it would be a lonely outpost for a labor organizer.
      Then came September 21, 1991, and the beginning of one of the hardest-fought battles in American union history.
      The marathon strike by the Frontier workers over wages and benefits was at times turbulent and violent.
      But it would galvanize the rank and file of Vegas into a national labor powerhouse.
      “It took a tremendous toll on people. We had a number of strikers die during the six and a half year strike. Uh, it was very hard… very hard. But on the other hand, it made the union real,” says Arnodo.
      “For the worker, for the immigrant, there’s no other way but the union way,” says Esmeralda Guzman.
      For 10 years, beginning as a teenager, Mexican-American Esmeralda Guzman picked fruit in the bitter fields of California’s San Joaquin Valley. But in 1993 she made her move to Vegas and found a way to begin breaking out of the cycle of permanent poverty.
      Why did she come to Vegas?
      Guzman says it was the economic opportunities that attracted her and her family.
      “I guess the best way to describe it is that people are handing out jobs left and right.”
      Workers are flocking to Vegas, 6,000 strong a month. Since the arrival of the super casinos, union membership has tripled — making this town one of the few places in the country where union power is on the rise.
      Arnodo says, “and so, we get people migrating or immigrating to Las Vegas from every point in the United States, and every country in the world.”
      For blue-collar workers, Vegas is perhaps the only place in America where they can earn as much as $75,000 a year.
      It’s the human dimension of the new incarnation of the Las Vegas strip, the working class flipside generated by the explosive growth of the super casinos.
      “And for every room that we build here, for every new room, there are five families that have to move in to service it,” says Goodman.
      “This is where the action is, if you want to be excited about work, about play — this is the town to come to,” says Hattie Canty who supervises a training center for anyone willing to work. A former chambermaid, she is now president of the 50,000 member union representing cooks, dishwashers and maids. “And I’ve always said that the maids in this town carries this town on it’s back,” she says.
      And with over 200,000 beds to make every day, Vegas has ironically become a new version of the classic American factory town.
      Guzman says, “Maybe it’s pretty good wages compared to the rest of the country. But could you imagine doing it?”
      She admits it is rough work.
      “Could you imagine cleaning 16 toilets, making 24 beds? There’s not a price on it.”
      The working class Vegas is rooted in the immigrant ideal of making life better for the next generation — even if it means enduring backbreaking work.

      “My Mom, she’s just like, comes home from work. She’ll eat like some food. Little dinner. She’ll go straight to bed,” says Abraham. He and his friends at Rancho High understand the depth of the sacrifice their parents have made.
      “It’s just the end of my mom’s health, you know? She’s a very hard-working woman. And um, she’s wearing herself out,” says Mariana.
      The teens believe the hardest part of their parents working so hard was that they had to basically raise themselves.
      That’s because Abraham’s mother Noemi Bresano — an educated woman from Guadalajara in Mexico has kept house in Vegas for more people than she can count.
      “In Las Vegas? In 7 years? Probably like 12,000… or more” says Bresano.
      Now she has her own.
      But the payoff for Noemi and Esmeralda’s families is the kind of modest, affordable home that can change their very lives.
      Guzman describes the day she first moved into her house.
      “Sometimes you think it’s never gonna happen. But it was like success. It was sweet.”
      This is where you will find the pioneer spirit of the old Vegas alive and well. With new homes going for as low as $70,000 these communities are changing the ethnic make-up of the Las Vegas Valley — now close to 200,000 Latino residents.
      “You can walk into any casino, and the work force there, they’re Latino,” says Amanda.
      She says while most of the customers are Anglos, the service people are Latinos.
      And what would happen to Vegas if all the Latinos walked off the job?
      “Man, that wouldn’t be Las Vegas,” says Amanda.
      These kids understand that the tourists who pack the super casinos are roped off in the fun house — oblivious to the real lives being led off the strip.
      Amanda says, “they don’t realize there’s communities here, and they don’t realize there’s families here, you know? I can’t count how many times I’ve been asked, uh, which casino do you live in? What do you mean what casino do I live in? I live in a house.”
      The legions of tourists and the people who service them live in a parallel universe — with little in common.
      But has the fantasy world of the super casinos come at the price of ignoring the real world needs of Vegas’s new work force.
      The answer may be yes — at least judging by the way 23,000 kids must go to school each day — jammed into stuffy, windowless boxes.
      The students agree that the city needs to catch up a little bit more… and less focus on casinos and a little more on education.
      “They put up casinos and bring them down so fast, it’s amazing. But yeah our schools need help,” says Amanda.
      Five minority high school students suggest that the casinos get all the action, they get all the priority from government and that their schools… they lag behind.
      “Well, they’re not right,” says Mayor Goodman. “These youngsters, they may have that feeling that the hotels are favored. If the youngsters feel they’re getting the short end of the stick, have’em come down to city hall, the mayor’ll take care of ‘em.”
      The truth is this is now the country’s fastest growing school system — adding 15,000 new students and building a dozen new schools a year.
      And it’s not just the schools… everywhere Vegas is bursting at the seams.
      Not enough roads for all the cars, not enough access to the water needed for all the growth and good times.
      And a dusty haze hanging over the once pristine valley.
      Can they manage the growth?
      “We have to manage the growth. We don’t have a choice. Because that’s what makes Las Vegas great,” says Goodman.
      “I don’t think it would be possible for any city to really keep up with growth like this. I think the growth is… the growth rate is just phenomenal. And I don’t know that there’s another example of it in… in American history, much less in the last fifty years,” says Rothman.
      It’s the new frontier, a magnet for working people happy to overlook this town’s growing pains for a shot at a place in the latest version of Vegas.
      So, Vegas may not be Sin City anymore, but is it the place where the American Dream lives?
      Glen Arnodo still thinks so.

      “It really is. You know, uh, again, I, I can’t imagine many places where if you’re a hotel maid and you end up cleaning fifteen or sixteen rooms every day, at the end of the day you go home to your own house and uh, you can really achieve the American Dream, and have a pretty decent life for you and your kids.”
      But there’s another kind of American dream in Vegas. It’s as old as the town itself — it’s an unattainable expectation of beating the house.
      Peter Earley thinks it’s about getting something for nothing. “It’s about putting a quarter in the machine and winning a million dollars. It’s about imagining riches you could never win any other way.”
      Building the American dream in Las Vegas has not come without a price.
      “As you drive by the volcano and you drive by the New York skyline and you drive by the wonderful pyramid, they are the reminder that some people have lost everything to build these castles in the sky,” says Earley.
      The arrival of Las Vegas as a world-class destination has come with a cost not tallied in fantasies fulfilled or casino profits — but rather in lives destroyed by gambling
      “Just thought about committing suicide, that’s all, I just wanted to die,” says Liz Neubauer, a gambling addict.
      Liz is one of thousands of people the casinos would rather not talk about — a mother of three — she cheated her family as her gambling problem began to consume every aspect of her life.
      “I wouldn’t even get in the doors — the video poker machines are right there and the first one that was vacant, that was mine. It’s cost me as much as $500 for a gallon of milk and I’ve gone home without the milk or the bread,” says Neubauer.
      Liz’s home life became a ritual of lies to her loved ones.

LIz Neubauer, a gambling addict.

      “I told my family I’ve been robbed. I took my son’s car payments and gambled it.”
      What did Liz tell her son when she spent the car payment?
      “Nothing… nothing,” says Neubauer.
      Those who treat gambling addicts hear stories like Liz’s all the time.
      “I would much rather be a heroin addict than a pathological gambler,” says Dr. Robert Hunter.
      Hunter knows Liz’s story and the stories of countless other victims of Vegas.
      “Prior to gambling, I think, you learn to deal with feelings primarily by pushing them down and away.”
      Hunter runs the only non-profit clinic in town to help treat gambling addicts… those drawn to the county’s four thousand gaming tables and more than 130,000 slot machines.
      “It is the silent addiction,” he says. “It is the hidden addiction. One of the old cliches is they don’t recognize us cause they don’t smell the cards on our breath.”
      Why does Hunter feel this addiction is so secretive among gambling addicts?
      “I think that the stigma for gamblers, it’s similar, I think, maybe to that of drug and alcohol patients thirty or forty years ago,” he says.
      It’s an American addiction that doctors are just beginning to study and attempt to understand. At its heart is a compulsion as fierce as any addict strung out on drugs or alcohol.
      “And I could just sit and, and I could zone out on those cards. And I didn’t have to think of where I should be, who I should be with or what I should be doing,” says Neubauer.
      Liz says she worked just to support her gambling habit.
      For all the changes that have come to Vegas, the workhorse of the casino floor continues to be the slot machine, the game of choice for middle America, especially women. Close to 70 percent of all gambling revenue flows through these one-armed bandits. It’s escape… it’s excitement… it’s a long-shot chance to win a jackpot that could be worth millions. But for some, it’s also a lonely compulsion — a solitary obsession. And one game in particular is undergoing increasing scrutiny charged with inflicting devastating human casualties. If gambling is like a drug than video poker is its crack cocaine.

Video poker machines are everywhere in Las Vegas, including laundromats.

      “My track marks were video poker,” says Tami Coder, a mother of three, who deals blackjack in a casino. She must fight on and off the job to keep her addiction from tearing her family apart.
      “I managed to gamble through an entire pregnancy with my youngest daughter. And uh, you know there’s a lot of guilt and shame that goes along with this. You feel like a monster,” says Coder.
      Her husband Michael says it was a tough situation to deal with.
      “It’s real emotional because it’s, this is something that had divided us. And has caused a great deal of anger and frustration in our family.”
      So Tami and her husband found help from Dr. Hunter… where Michael’s revelation was the role he played in his own wife’s addiction.
      “I think it was my fault. I introduced her to video poker,” says Michael.
      “My patients gamble to escape, video poker is the perfect game to get lost in. It’s the distilled essence of gambling,” says Hunter.
      Video poker takes down its victims — costing them their cars, homes, marriages — at a staggering rate… faster than drugs, alcohol or even other forms of gambling.
      Hunter says, “the average problem gambler, it’s roughly twenty years from their first bet to what we call bottom. For video poker players it’s about two and a half years.”
      And the machines can be found everywhere.
      Tami says, “it’s very hard here if you have this problem, because you can’t get away from the video poker machines. They’re in the grocery stores. They’re in the 7-Eleven’s.”
      The Coders say they have considered leaving Las Vegas because of the plethora of slot machines in the city.
      Former Vegas Mayor Jan Jones condemns the everyday availability of gambling.
      “I think that slot machines in supermarkets, in 7-Eleven’s and convenient stores, that’s not about entertainment. There’s a real difference there. That’s just about gambling.”

“Las Vegas is the city that we love to hate. But I think there is also an underlying guilt that there really shouldn’t be a Sodom and Gomorrah. Where people can go and spend money foolishly and get drunk and do crazy things and possibly win a lot of money.

      “It probably took me about five months, it took, to lose it all,” says Carl Neilson, and the others like him who don’t know where to turn to get help for their gambling addiction and are trapped on skid row.
      Eric Fricker of the metro police spends his days coping with the most severe causalities of Las Vegas. “We’ve interviewed thousands of homeless and there is a good percentage who are here because of gambling… but the other downside is once they do become homeless, the gambling helps keep them down sometimes. They’re gonna put their last quarter in and try to hit it big and maybe get out of being homeless.”
      Neilson agrees. “Regardless of if you’re rich or you’re poor or you’re homeless... if you’ve got a gambling problem, you’re gonna go in that casino and play your last five dollars.”
      And when it comes to problem gamblers, like everything in Vegas, it’s a question of the numbers.
      Some experts think as many as six percent of the population find it impossible to walk away from a bet or a machine. If those numbers are correct that’s more than 75,000 people in the Las Vegas valley alone.
      However the mayor feels that percentage is too high.
      “The problem is really overstated. One percent has a problem as far as addiction is concerned,” says Goodman. “Okay… four percent’s a lot, one percent’s a lot. And we are trying to address that problem,” he adds.
      With gambling luring millions of visitors to Las Vegas, super casino owners like Sheldon Aldelson are put on the defensive at the suggestion that they profit off the problems of gambling addicts.
      “I think Las Vegas does do a lot to help problem gamblers. All of our employees are conversant at helping problem gamblers. When people seem to go overboard when they are playing, our people will put their arm around and say, uh, you know, we want to help you, what can we do, maybe you are playing a little too much,” says Adelson.
      But should more be done?
      “When you have someone who’s losing the farm, you can tell. And I don’t know of anyone who has ever been banned from a casino because they’re an addict,” says Earley.
      And although the super casinos netted seven billion dollars, Hunter’s clinic to help gambling addicts has only received $100,000 in corporate contributions.
      Its doors could very well close in the next three months.

      And yet the rule of the casino is to make money. How do you know when to stop?
      “Where does the responsibility end? It’s an excellent question… we enforce that responsibility on drinking. If you’re a bartender and you serve somebody who’s drunk, obviously you can have some liability,” says Earley.
      But in the end, the responsibility still falls on the shoulders of the addicts… and their willingness to try and turn away from the tantalizing web spun by an industry that could ultimately destroy their lives.
      Neubauer says, “…I know that if I go back out there again I’m dead.”
      But the kaleidoscope of dreams and desire that Vegas has become is something that others will never begin to understand.
      Earley says, “Las Vegas is the city that we love to hate. But I think there is also an underlying guilt that there really shouldn’t be a Sodom and Gomorrah. Where people can go and spend money foolishly and get drunk and do crazy things and possibly win a lot of money. And I think sometimes that fear of letting yourself go, which is what Vegas is really all about, makes us kind of say, oh, isn’t this a horrible place? When can I book the next flight?”
      This year another 33 million tourists from all over the world will be booking their flights to Las Vegas — coming for their cut of the American fantasy.
      What they’ll have no trouble finding is all the excess of America. It’s reflected by the neon strip and the decadence of the super casinos. It’s testimony to the credo of pleasure and endless good times.
      But if they look further they’ll also uncover the same news we did — that Las Vegas has become the latest outpost for a working person’s wager and that payoff is far richer in the long run than a good night at the slots.
      Busgy Siegel’s town has gone corporate and that surprise has a whole new generation betting real-life odds on Las Vegas.