Episode 142--30 Illegal Years To The Strip: The Untold Stories of the Gangsters Who Built The Early Las Vegas Strip

Bill Friedman wrote the award-winning, Depression era, true-crime All Against The Law. He wrote the groundbreaking research work Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition, published by the University of Nevada Reno. He is also author of the seminal book for succeeding in the casino business, Casino Management. He taught the pioneer course in casino management for UNLV’s College of Hotel Administration during the decade of the 1970s. Friedman was president of the Castaways Hotel and Casino and the Silver Slipper Casino in the heart of the Las Vegas Strip for thirteen years. He transformed them from perennial losers into super successes, consistently in the top of Nevada’s highest profit-per-square-foot performers. Friedman is president of the Friedman Management Group, which specializes in solving casino marketing, design, and operations problems. He has consulted for forty years to casinos in the U.S. and in England, Monaco, Russia, South Africa, Australia, Canada, and several Caribbean Islands. www.BillFriedmanAuthor.com
30 Illegal Years To The Strip is the inside story of Prohibition’s most powerful leaders, who later ran elegant, illegal casinos across America, before moving on to build the glamorous Las Vegas Strip gambling resorts.
The seven leaders of the three dominating Prohibition gangs imported the world’s finest liquors on a massive scale. Although in an illegal and dangerous business, these seven espoused traditional business values and rejected the key tools of organized crime - monopoly, violence, and vendetta. This made them the most unlikely gangsters to rise to underworld leadership. But they earned every criminal’s respect, and fate made them the most powerful gangland leaders in American history.
In the mid 1900s, these seven leaders stood up to, and restrained, America’s worst villains. The seven prevented many gangland wars and killings. Unbelievably, the most murderous and most psychopathic gang leaders not only admired them but supported them in gangland conflicts.
These were the first gangs to work closely together in mutual interest. Joining these three dominating liquor-importers was the violent Chicago Capone gang, as they partnered in both illegal and legal businesses during and after Prohibition. They were also close allies in the complexities, treachery, and violence of underworld politics. Exposed for the first time are the roles actually played by gang leaders Ben Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Charlie Luciano, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Al Capone, John Torrio, Frank Nitti, and Moe Dalitz.
Some of these seven leaders became powerful over world political kingmakers. Allied with them in New York City politics was Arnold Rothstein, the ultimate gambler. His murder is one of several major gangland killings finally solved here.
The biggest-drawing entertainer in these gang leaders’ illegal-casino and Strip-resort showrooms was comedian Joe E. Lewis. He single-highhandedly saved the Copacabana from bankruptcy and turned it into America’s most famous and glamorous nightclub.
The careers and relationships of the gang leaders, who together would go on to build the Las Vegas Strip, are presented for the first time in this thoroughly documented, in-depth, authentic history of how organized crime developed. It contains 546 source notes, and many addendum’s that expose the serious fallacies and outright fictions of previous books about early organized crime.
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