Both Reno and Las Vegas benefited greatly from Nevada’s legalisation of gambling in 1931. Like cities in New Jersey and Florida, they openly welcomed cards, dice, slot machines, roulette wheels and tourist dollars.
In particular, its proximity to a huge public works project—the construction of Boulder (Hoover) Dam—and location on the railroad between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City made Las Vegas the perfect Depression-era jumping off point, not only for visitors, but also for the operators of casinos elsewhere. Mob bosses like Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel already knew how to fleece customers illegally. Nevada had opened the door for them to do so with the state’s blessing.
Apart from table games, the bosses focused their attention on race and sports betting, setting up “wires” (telegraph connections) to relay results from tracks and stadiums across the country to bookmaking operations attached to the casinos. This enabled remote betting of a sort previously inconceivable. The result was the creation of a virtual monopoly on race and sports wagering nationwide.
For nearly two decades, Las Vegas developed largely through financing from the criminal syndicates, some from the East Coast and others fleeing ever-tighter California laws. Then in 1950~61, investigations by the U.S. government, first under Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver and later under Attorney General Robert Kennedy, exposed “organised crime in interstate commerce,” effectively forcing gangsters to divest themselves of interests in the Las Vegas casinos or else face prosecution.
The latter half of the 20th century would see casino after grand casino built in Nevada’s desert city—from the fabulous Flamingo to the Sahara, Tropicana, Caesar’s Palace, the Desert Inn, Harrah’s, the MGM…and so many, many more. Famous names, from Howard Hughes to Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, would become forever linked with Las Vegas. It would assume the crown once worn by Venice, Paris and Monte Carlo as the gambling capital of the world.
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