December 18, 2024 • 40 mins
Morgan White Filled In On NightSide with Dan Rea
From author Bill Friedman comes the inside story about America’s most powerful gangland leaders. Learn about the roles these men played which eventually led to the creation of the Las Vegas Strip. Morgan and Friedman, author of 30 Illegal Years To The Strip: The Untold Stories of the Gangsters Who Built The Early Las Vegas Strip discussed them.
Ask Alexa to play WBZ NewsRadio on #iHeartRadio and listen to NightSide with Dan Rea Weeknights From 8PM-12AM!
From author Bill Friedman comes the inside story about America’s most powerful gangland leaders. Learn about the roles these men played which eventually led to the creation of the Las Vegas Strip. Morgan and Friedman, author of 30 Illegal Years To The Strip: The Untold Stories of the Gangsters Who Built The Early Las Vegas Strip discussed them.
Ask Alexa to play WBZ NewsRadio on #iHeartRadio and listen to NightSide with Dan Rea Weeknights From 8PM-12AM!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
It's night with Dan Ray. I'm telling you easy.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Power number three is underway if you would like to participate.
The gentleman I am about to introduce to you has
written a number of books, but his book on thirty
Years on the Strip is the book that we're going
to be focusing upon. He has another Vegas related book
(00:29):
within the year and a half two years. He keeps
busy and I always enjoy speaking with him. He and
I had a wonderful conversation earlier today because I needed
a guest. I had to get three guests for tonight's program,
and he helped me by saying yes to me. Bill.
(00:53):
Good evening to you, and thank you for saying yes.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Oh, thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Let's we're going to talk about the Vegas book, but
I also want to mention some of the thirties subjects
that we touched upon earlier, because at the time, one
of the biggest construction jobs in America was the Hoover Dam,
(01:24):
Hoover Dam, Boulderdam, Hoover Dam. We know if they settled
on Hoover, but they ran shifts twenty four hours a
day and they brought that whole project in years early
do you want to talk about that project.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
You said it was enormous. It is a site that
beholds still today. And the strip as we know it
today was built on what was in the west side. Obviously,
the town's grown tremendously, so it's in the heart, but
(02:06):
it was then in the west side. The Boulder Dam
was on the east side, and when the people got
off work, I knew a number of people that had
worked on it, and between the heat and of course
they were up very high. This thing was built very tall.
(02:26):
On all there was was the river there and that
the huge water behind it didn't occur till the dam
was completed and they were be exhausted, and so many
of them wanted to drink or gamble afterwards. And so
the original strip was built on the east side of
(02:47):
town on built Boulder Highway that people didn't want to
drive as far to get downtown. So there was a
string of bar casinos there and the people would come
in and drink and gamble and then they'd go back
to work. Well, they needed all of these workers, so
(03:08):
the laws as we know them today didn't apply when
the workers pulled up to get back in. They lived
there on the property. The guards smelled their breath and
if they had any sign of alcohol. They had a
big parking pen right there. They'd send them in it
(03:29):
and tell them to go to sleep until they woke
up and didn't smell, and they wouldn't let them get
up on that high rise dam until they were sober.
But for the entire ten years that thing was built,
that pen was every shift the guys pulled in and
they said, nah, you go over there till you're ready
(03:50):
to go to work.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
If you've been to Vegas recently, you live out there.
But I'm talking to my audience. We hit thirty eight
states and parts of Canada with our signal right now.
And if you've been to Vegas anytime over the past ten, fifteen,
maybe twenty years, you've noticed because it is a town
(04:15):
built for foot traffic. They even put walkways over the street.
So if you want to go from the Flamingo to Caesar's,
you don't have to cross the street. You go up
there's an elevator where you can walk upstairs, go across
the street on the pedestrian overpaths, and they've done that
(04:39):
various places on Las Vegas Boulevard. But as you walk
from hotel to hotel to hotel, you will notice a
lot of people on the street that, for lack of a
bit of term, are bums. They are homeless. They're holding
(04:59):
a up and asking for donations, and you just learned
to accept that as part of the landscape. But tell
people what an enterprising casino owner did back in the
forties with that sort of circumstance to make sure that
we didn't have bums on the street.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Well, it was actually during the depression, twenty five percent
of the workforce was out of work, and we developed
a group that were called hobos. And they're usually shown
as movies as just being bums that were on the railroads.
(05:45):
What it was was men would become unemployed and they
couldn't find any jobs in their towns, and they hopped
on box cars and rode to the next city and
tried to find jobs. And there was one of the
strip was started, or the downtown casinos were started nineteen
(06:08):
or legalized in nineteen thirty one, and one of the
owners there, because it was a very small town of
five thousand people, then one of the owners he had
his casino downstairs and his offices and everything, and nothing upstairs,
(06:30):
and this was a man who was a very dishonest man.
His tables were completely dishonest, ripped everybody off. I've never
liked anybody like that, but this guy won me over
because he had another side. He put cots across his
(06:53):
whole second floor, and when these guys would arrive in town,
he'd give him a cot for the night. He had
a shower and bathroom there for them to clean up.
And he he didn't have food. He made a deal
with a nearby restaurant and when they arrived that afternoon
(07:14):
or evening, he'd give him a dinner pass and they'd
take it to the restaurant. When they got up in
the morning, give him a breakfast pass. And many of
these people hadn't eaten for three four days, and they'd
try to find a job that they couldn't find it.
They were on the rails again. And he was one
(07:35):
of the most helpful people I ever met my life
to those in need. But anyone who got a job,
if they came in, he was going to try to
rip off every penny. He had these two different sides
to him, and because he had this good side, I
got to know that I really liked him as a
(07:56):
human being, but I would never want to do business
with him.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
The casino owner giveth and the casino owner taketh away.
Tell you what I've got to take a break, and
when we come back, I want to talk about the
movie Bugsy, that Warren Beatty film, and they toyed with
facts and truth, and I want to find out the
real truth of the history behind the Flamingo being erected.
(08:26):
And when I know you know the stories, you put
it in a book. And I also want to talk
about some of the legends of Vegas. Joey Brown, many
people that we've either heard of or know a little about.
Let's talk about them when we come back. Okay, you
(08:49):
got it, Thank you. Time and temperature here on wbz's
Night Side ten fifteen forty four degrees.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Now that to Dan Ray live from the Window World
night Side Studios on WBZ News Radio.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Dan is auf tonight. I'm Morgan filling in and I've
been here since eight o'clock. Hopefully you have as well
for this hour up until eleven o'clock. Bill Friedman is
here and he wrote a book. Book came out within
the past eight nine years and it's Bill. Why don't
(09:27):
you give the exact title, because I don't want to
miss it out.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
It's it's called thirty illegal Years to the Strip, and
what it's on of the strip started with high rolling
casinos in nineteen fifty and these resorts, eighty percent of
them over the next ten well actually twenty years, were
(09:54):
built by people that had been major illegal casino operator
around the country. Most had been in prohibition before, and
this is their history. Because these men were tied together,
they not only knew each other, but when guys had
(10:15):
illegal casinos, you couldn't. There was no case I ever
found where someone had a casino in a city they
didn't live in. The Law enforcement and the prosecutors who
took payoffs to let them operate wanted them write there
(10:38):
under their thumb, so they had control over them. But
what would happen if they got shut down? They lost everything.
So these guys came up with an interesting system. I'll
give you an example. But they had a partnerships of
various financial arrangements, but it typically was five guys in
(11:01):
five major cities, generally in different states, would go together
and they'd each own twenty percent of each of the
other four people in every single case, and I investigated
and studied the history of each one. The owner that
lived in that city had absolute control. The other partners
(11:24):
were nothing but investors. They ran the show, and once
a year they'd get together and they'd all share their
profits in cash with each other. And that way, if
one of them got closed down, the guy lost his
whole business, but he still kept eighty percent of his income.
And so I didn't know how to write the history
(11:47):
of all these individual places when their backgrounds were so
tied together. So this book is the history of the
biggest Prohibition gangs, the biggest illegal casine operators in the
twenty From nineteen twenty to nineteen thirty four, they had
(12:07):
by far the biggest Prohibition gangs. And instead of what
you see on TV where they're creating very cheap booze,
these guys did nothing but sell the finest liquors from
around the world in the finest restaurants, all illegally, of course.
(12:29):
And then after thirty four prohibition ended, they had to
make money and they opened these incredible casinos. And I
write about them because some of them were just unbelievably
elegant and beautiful and all the rich showed up and
they catered to the rich, not to the average person,
(12:52):
did they.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Let's back up, what are the five cities? I remember Cleveland,
naturally New York. What are the the five cities where
these individuals operations?
Speaker 3 (13:04):
Okay, well, the three biggest gangs. The biggest gang, uh
was one of the biggest two gangs were in uh Manhattan.
Manhattan had over half the wealthy people of the country
living there, so the income there was phenomenal and so
(13:30):
uh uh the there was The biggest group by far
was five equal partners, and that would include uh Meyer,
Lanski and Ben Siegel, who were Jewish. It included two
Italians Joe Adonnas and Vincent Ollo, and Vincinalo opened up
(13:55):
fabulous places outside of Miami. Later Donna's had one of
the most incredible casinos in New Jersey, right across from Manhattan.
And although they were equal partners, Charlie Luciano was so
incredibly respected. He was a very quiet man, but when
(14:17):
he spoke, everybody listened, and I felt it when I
got into the casino business. When his name came up,
it was like everybody stood because if he said something.
And these were the guys. All the casinos were dishonest
at that time, and these guys said, this is crazy.
(14:42):
All you're going to get is the addicted gamblers. We
want people that are out for entertainment regularly, and they're
the ones that brought honest gambling to the illegal casinos
and then brought it to Nevada. The second gang was
(15:02):
one man Frank Costello. He is famous because he had
the most famous nightclub in America called the Copa Cabana
in Manhattan. He'd never had his name on the ownership
because he had this background as a hood and then
(15:24):
he ran illegal slots in bars all over Manhattan and
then moved down just outside of New Orleans. He had
all the slots in New Orleans and this incredible casino
outs and showroom outside of it. And he built the
Tropicana in Las Vegas, which just came down. And the
(15:50):
third group was a group of five men forward Jewish
and one was I. And the only reason why I
mentioned that is most of the crime criminal groups you
hear about start as street gangs and they generally are
all of the same group. And all of these groups
(16:13):
were mixed and they dealt with everybody and that's why
they spread so powerfully. And he was in Detroit and Cleveland,
and he brought in the legitimate boost for Capone in
Chicago and sold it to him, and he became the
(16:38):
most powerful criminal that ever lived in Las Vegas. In
nineteen fifty he opened the Desert in which was the
first high rolling casino in Nevada. It was a luxury resort.
And then eight years later he opened the Stardust, which
(16:58):
was at the time the war world's biggest hotel and
the biggest casino, and that catered to everyone. And in
my whole life, I'm not talking about what has existed.
I'm talking what I've been exposed to. I never heard
of anyone who had the best of the high end
(17:22):
and the best of the low end simultaneously. And he
was the most powerful criminal out there, although he did
a great deal of good for the town. All the
there was twenty four mafia gangs in America, and the
(17:47):
Godfathers had control over their gang and anyone they could
be with. Daylitz had an ability. I knew him well
and couldn't be more impressed with them. As a man,
he had an ability to win people over, and he
had more professional hit men ready to kill for him
(18:11):
even after he got in Vegas than any godfather ever did.
And it was all one on one out of loyalty,
and it was just amazing to been pardon seeing all
of that.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
I've got a break to take for news, and when
we come back, I want to talk about the history
of the Flamingo through Bugsy, Siegell and beyond. And I'm
not saying it because I have my comp through the Flamingo,
which I do, but it's such an interesting story and
(18:50):
it got its name from the nickname of Virginia Hill,
Seagull's girlfriend at the time. There's so many interesting facts
about that property. So when we come back, can we
delve into that.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
You got it?
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Thank you, Bill. Bill Friedman is my guest. If you
want to call in, trust me. No one knows more
about Vegas than this gentleman. Phone number six one, seven, two, five,
fourteen thirty or eight eight, eight, nine to nine, ten
thirty Here on night Side with the time is ten
thirty forty four degrees.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ, Boston's news radio.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Dan is off tonight. My name is Morgan White Junior.
But I have strong guests for you to be entertained.
They will entertain you, inform you, and do the best
they can to keep your attention. Riveted to WBC Nightside.
Bill Friedman is my guest, and we're about to We've
talked about the history of Las Vegas as the gambling
(19:56):
community which it has become, and we're gonna talk about
the history of the first major hotel casino. And Bill
take us from the architects drawings to the construction to
the completion of that hotel casino, The Flamingo.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Yeah, the Flamingo was actually started by a man in
La that had a daily newspaper about what was going
on in Hollywood, and he also had many fine restaurants
(20:39):
and all the Hollywood celebrities went there to make him
feel good about them. And he decided he was a
addicted gambler and he would come up to the two
casinos in Vegas. But there was some really great places
(21:02):
in and around La illegal places, and one in Palm
Springs that he had and he decided, rather than playing
other people's casinos, he'd build it. And he started building
it and lost his money gambling. He'd come up to
(21:26):
look at it and loses money at the two other
properties and it went into auction and that's when Sieagel
bought it. So there's always this big debate who really
had it? Do you have enough facts? And I went
(21:46):
down to the county and to the men who drew it,
and all the documents do not have Seagull's name, for
the Flamingo have this man's name. So Siegel he got
involved in Nevada gambling because in nineteen forty one they
(22:12):
legalized sports books and it was the only state and
union that had legal sports gambling for decades, and that
fascinated him. And they called them sports books, but the
fact was until the mid to late fifties they did
(22:36):
nothing but book horse racing. When you hear that the
horse racing was kings, that is where the wealth went
when you went to racetracks in America. This was a
hangout for the wealthy. Enormous sums were bet. The biggest
(22:58):
gambler of the time, and boy, I'm not going to
remember his name now because I haven't thought about it
for years, but the biggest gambler you would know it
if you can think back of his time. I knew
two different men who were horse race of bookers, and
(23:25):
one traveled with this man for five years and another man.
They didn't have a big club they had back in
the nineteen thirties. They played every night of the wealthiest
player of poker players in the country showed up in
one game. And it was nothing for people back in
(23:47):
the nineteen thirties to win or lose three hundred to
six hundred thousand dollars a night, all in cash, and
they just stand there and book the horses from these people.
But that's how big the horse betting was. And so
when Nevada legalized legalized it, Siegel had a huge horse
(24:15):
betting operation, illegal of course, and with one of the
best bookies there was. And he decided, why not come
to Nevada where it's legal, and we can do it
there too. He bought two small casinos downtown and he
(24:36):
had them, and when this property came up for auction,
he said, I'm going out on the strip. There was
two places built at the beginning of the war and
World War two, and he built his right after World
War two, when there was a big boom in the economy.
(24:57):
Our soldiers had gone into the Pacific and there was
nowhere for them to spend their money on the boats.
So they all came home with everything they had earned.
And the men who fought, and I used men because
we did not have women fighters. Then when the men
came back from the European theater, most of them didn't
(25:22):
have much exposure to spend their money. They were out
in the battlefields. So there was just a huge amount
of cash. The greatest economic boom in history occurred, and
so Siegel decided to build the Flamingo. But it and
(25:42):
the reason was he was the biggest celebrity in Hollywood.
After Prohibition ended, he moved to Hollywood, and here you
had all of these Hollywood actors that were great celebrities,
and so where normally someone would love to have a
(26:04):
Hollywood celebrity for dinner, what did all the producers and
the directors and the stars do. He for fifteen years
was the most popular guest on demand for all these
big Hollywood dinners that they'd have at their homes or
(26:25):
at the clubs. And he was the one everyone wanted.
He was a real charming, very nice guy, and everybody
wanted him there. And he thought, you know, I can
get all those people to come to Nevada and make
all this money. Where he miscalculated was the roads were
(26:50):
not paved at the time, so it was a dirt road.
The highway was a two lane road, dirt the whole way.
There was limited plane service. And gamblers are very impulsive people.
They don't want to plan a trip. They want to
go to the place down the strip, down the street.
(27:12):
And there was these great casinos that I write about
in La and so he couldn't draw them. He never
got high end play because of it. He did make
a living at it, and the image of him he
(27:33):
was a first class businessman. Remember it was a small casino.
I knew very very well, his general manager, his accountant,
three of his key executives and hosts in the casino,
and everybody there just thought the world of him. Thought
(27:54):
he was just the opposite of everything you see, and
hear thought the world them. When he was killed, his
attorney was named Lou Wiener, and Lou was very important
to my research. Spent incredible hours interviewing him with all
the people he was involved with, and being Siegel's attorney.
(28:20):
When Siegel was killed in Hollywood, the sheriff came up
to see Lou Wiener first, he said, I want to
find out who killed him, and Lou Wiener said, look,
I don't know anyone in this town that didn't love
(28:41):
the guy. He said, I guarantee you no one here
did it. And three days later the sheriff came back.
He said, I'm on my way out of town. I've
talked to every key business person, every key politician, all
the casino people, and the one thing I've learned is
everybody in this town loved him. I know that whoever
(29:04):
killed him didn't come from here.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
I'm gonna throw a name at you. You were trying
to think of a name of a major player back
in the thirties. Was it Damon Runyon?
Speaker 3 (29:18):
No? No, this was there was a pure player, and
I just can't think of it because I haven't thought
about it for decades. He was the greatest gambler of
that era and never held a job, and no one
ever figured out where his money came from. I tried
for years, and everybody that had any closeness to him
(29:40):
I interviewed, and when everyone told me they had tried
to figure it out and couldn't, I gave up. Okay, Noah,
do you know it real well?
Speaker 2 (29:54):
It doesn't matter to the story but let me a
separate name. Did you ever run into a Sunny Risner?
Speaker 3 (30:04):
Oh? Yeah, a sunny I had. When they legalized sportsbooks
in nineteen forty one, they got they were nothing but races,
both legal and in Nevada and the illegal people until
the mid to late fifties. Television got rolling around nineteen
(30:28):
fifty and they started playing the Super Bowl and the
World Series and things like that, and all of a
sudden there was an interest embedding on those and so
they became popular. And I'm the only person that ever
(30:49):
ran two casinos on the strip at the same time.
There's companies that own multiple casinos, but I'm the only
person that ran to of them. They were all independently
operated and they stayed allowed for the first time after
(31:10):
I took over my first casino sportsbook betting as well
inside the casinos, and I was the first one on
the strip to open a sports book. And Sonny Reisner
was an unknown guy that had impressed me, and he
(31:31):
became my sportsbook manager, and he was the greatest odds
maker of his time. And we had even though Caesar's
Palace and all these places had very elegant sports books.
He was so famous that we were the most successful
(31:52):
book in town for all those years. And he set
the odds, and every day at nine am he put
the odds on the board. There was about thirty five men,
I don't know who they were, that were standing there.
And on sportsbook betting, you have all the games listed
(32:15):
and there's a master plan that everybody had. Today, of
course everything's on internet, but back then there was no sources,
and everyone had their page game one, two, three, four five,
and as he wrote them down, they all wrote them down,
ran the telephones, called all of the major illegal bookies
in the country. And so at nine o'clock our time
(32:39):
in Vegas, he put it up and at twelve noon
on the East coast you could bet the games that
were going to be played at one o'clock, and it
was all Sunny. Everybody in the country used Sunny's odds.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
I loved that man. He and I became very good friends.
First came aware of him when he worked at the Castaways,
and they built a sportsbook for him with his own design.
Requests at the rio, I'm late for my break. Let
me take my break, and when we get back, we'll
pick up. From this point time ten forty seven temperature
(33:18):
forty three degrees.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Now back to Dan ray Lie from the Window World
Night Sex Studios on WBZ News Radio.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Dan is off tonight, he should be here tomorrow. Across
our fingers am Morgan filling in for Dan. Bill Friedman
is my guest's guest with a tea, and we are
talking Las Vegas. It's history going all the way back
to the Dam and we're now talking about the history
of the Flamingo and some other major notables in the
(33:51):
world of Las Vegas. And I brought up the name
Sunny Reisner, who I met I'm going to say in
the mid eighties. He was working as the sportsbook director
at the Castaways no longer around. Good grief. There's so
many places in Vegas that help make Vegas Vegas. Like
(34:15):
we mentioned the Tropicana a while ago, and the Tropicana
has been leveled to make a baseball field for the Athletics.
Oakland Athletics will soon be the Las Vegas Athletics. And
I remember Bill, when you couldn't bet on any game
(34:37):
that was taking place in Las Vegas, any team that
was taking place in Las Vegas. And now we have
teams whose home is Las Vegas, the Golden Knights, the
Golden Knights Las Vegas based team, the Raiders, our Las
(34:57):
Vegas based team was so going to have a baseball
Las Vegas based team, and the only thing left is basketball.
I'm sure somebody will cover that. What do you think about?
And I've only got maybe four minutes of showtime left
with you. What do you think of Vegas? Let's go
(35:18):
from nineteen eighty to twenty twenty four. Give me your
honest opinion of how it's grown and where it's advantages
lay and where its mistakes are.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
The thing is, I focus on Vegas from nineteen twenty
to nineteen ninety, when the casino was the big revenue
maker and the big profit maker. In nineteen ninety they
built a place where the Castaways was called the Mirage,
which you told me then i'd see it come down.
(35:54):
I wouldn't have believed it, but it did this year.
And then after that they focused on the shopping, on
the other facilities, and gaming became a on amenity. And
(36:17):
so my whole research goes from nineteen twenty to nineteen ninety.
So the time you're talking about you and I saw it,
but I really didn't keep I don't have any inside
information about anything that went on, because that was just
no longer my world.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
All right, then let's stop at nineteen ninety. Let's say
from nineteen seventy five, there were still families that owned property,
but that was a dwindling proposition, and by nineteen eighty
it was all corporate, all companies. None of the family's
(37:00):
own Las Vegas hotel casinos anymore. They may have owned
ancillary properties around hotel casinos. But tell me your feeling
from let's say nineteen fifty to nineteen ninety.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
Well, that to me was the golden era. That's that's
when modale It's opened up the desert in and from
then on everything was fabulous. On the strip, rooms and
food were cheap, and the entertainment was fabulous, where today
(37:44):
they have people come in with long term residencies. Back then,
the showrooms generally had three weeks with each star, so
if you came every week, a few of the places
had new names. So there was always these the best
singers and comics of the time appeared in Vegas, and
(38:08):
every time you came every week and or every week,
there was new people there that were not there before,
and it was just this wonderful place of refreshing entertainment,
not just having major names that could be there for
six months or two years, but constantly a new flow.
(38:30):
Plus they had big lounges and they had really great
entertainment in them too.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
What do you think is next for Las Vegas?
Speaker 3 (38:40):
Oh, I have no clue where it headed. It was.
It's an industry I no longer understand.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Well, as we were just speaking about, you could come
to Vegas and go see the Red Sox play Oakland
with a tropic canon. One stood, you come to Vegas
and see the Bruins play the Golden Knights. And that
(39:09):
was not even on the drawing board back in the fifties,
sixties and seventies.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
No, they they they, In fact, the teams objected to
our betting them. They didn't want any association with gambling.
By the way, just before we end, I've sat here
because I haven't thought of him for decades, because I
wrote about him so many years ago. The gambler I
was trying to think about was Nick the Greek Dan.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Do good, That Jimmy the Greek Nick. No, Nick the
Greek yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Man who never worked a day in his life, and
he could bet a million dollars during you know, put
a million dollars on the table every evening and nobody
figured out where it ever came from.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
And you know what, they covered his pets. They were
not worried about getting paid if he lost. Bill. Thank you,
thank you for coming on. I hope you have a
wonderful holiday season. And when you're of the book books
come out, you've got my number call me.
Speaker 3 (40:18):
Okay, you got it, and thank you.
Speaker 2 (40:21):
All right, Bill, take care, good evening. Next hour. Ed Coleglely,
who's he? You'll just have to stick around to find out.
Time and temperature ten fifty eight forty three degrees
It's night with Dan Ray. I'm telling you easy.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Power number three is underway if you would like to participate.
The gentleman I am about to introduce to you has
written a number of books, but his book on thirty
Years on the Strip is the book that we're going
to be focusing upon. He has another Vegas related book
(00:29):
within the year and a half two years. He keeps
busy and I always enjoy speaking with him. He and
I had a wonderful conversation earlier today because I needed
a guest. I had to get three guests for tonight's program,
and he helped me by saying yes to me. Bill.
(00:53):
Good evening to you, and thank you for saying yes.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Oh, thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Let's we're going to talk about the Vegas book, but
I also want to mention some of the thirties subjects
that we touched upon earlier, because at the time, one
of the biggest construction jobs in America was the Hoover Dam,
(01:24):
Hoover Dam, Boulderdam, Hoover Dam. We know if they settled
on Hoover, but they ran shifts twenty four hours a
day and they brought that whole project in years early
do you want to talk about that project.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
You said it was enormous. It is a site that
beholds still today. And the strip as we know it
today was built on what was in the west side. Obviously,
the town's grown tremendously, so it's in the heart, but
(02:06):
it was then in the west side. The Boulder Dam
was on the east side, and when the people got
off work, I knew a number of people that had
worked on it, and between the heat and of course
they were up very high. This thing was built very tall.
(02:26):
On all there was was the river there and that
the huge water behind it didn't occur till the dam
was completed and they were be exhausted, and so many
of them wanted to drink or gamble afterwards. And so
the original strip was built on the east side of
(02:47):
town on built Boulder Highway that people didn't want to
drive as far to get downtown. So there was a
string of bar casinos there and the people would come
in and drink and gamble and then they'd go back
to work. Well, they needed all of these workers, so
(03:08):
the laws as we know them today didn't apply when
the workers pulled up to get back in. They lived
there on the property. The guards smelled their breath and
if they had any sign of alcohol. They had a
big parking pen right there. They'd send them in it
(03:29):
and tell them to go to sleep until they woke
up and didn't smell, and they wouldn't let them get
up on that high rise dam until they were sober.
But for the entire ten years that thing was built,
that pen was every shift the guys pulled in and
they said, nah, you go over there till you're ready
(03:50):
to go to work.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
If you've been to Vegas recently, you live out there.
But I'm talking to my audience. We hit thirty eight
states and parts of Canada with our signal right now.
And if you've been to Vegas anytime over the past ten, fifteen,
maybe twenty years, you've noticed because it is a town
(04:15):
built for foot traffic. They even put walkways over the street.
So if you want to go from the Flamingo to Caesar's,
you don't have to cross the street. You go up
there's an elevator where you can walk upstairs, go across
the street on the pedestrian overpaths, and they've done that
(04:39):
various places on Las Vegas Boulevard. But as you walk
from hotel to hotel to hotel, you will notice a
lot of people on the street that, for lack of a
bit of term, are bums. They are homeless. They're holding
(04:59):
a up and asking for donations, and you just learned
to accept that as part of the landscape. But tell
people what an enterprising casino owner did back in the
forties with that sort of circumstance to make sure that
we didn't have bums on the street.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Well, it was actually during the depression, twenty five percent
of the workforce was out of work, and we developed
a group that were called hobos. And they're usually shown
as movies as just being bums that were on the railroads.
(05:45):
What it was was men would become unemployed and they
couldn't find any jobs in their towns, and they hopped
on box cars and rode to the next city and
tried to find jobs. And there was one of the
strip was started, or the downtown casinos were started nineteen
(06:08):
or legalized in nineteen thirty one, and one of the
owners there, because it was a very small town of
five thousand people, then one of the owners he had
his casino downstairs and his offices and everything, and nothing upstairs,
(06:30):
and this was a man who was a very dishonest man.
His tables were completely dishonest, ripped everybody off. I've never
liked anybody like that, but this guy won me over
because he had another side. He put cots across his
(06:53):
whole second floor, and when these guys would arrive in town,
he'd give him a cot for the night. He had
a shower and bathroom there for them to clean up.
And he he didn't have food. He made a deal
with a nearby restaurant and when they arrived that afternoon
(07:14):
or evening, he'd give him a dinner pass and they'd
take it to the restaurant. When they got up in
the morning, give him a breakfast pass. And many of
these people hadn't eaten for three four days, and they'd
try to find a job that they couldn't find it.
They were on the rails again. And he was one
(07:35):
of the most helpful people I ever met my life
to those in need. But anyone who got a job,
if they came in, he was going to try to
rip off every penny. He had these two different sides
to him, and because he had this good side, I
got to know that I really liked him as a
(07:56):
human being, but I would never want to do business
with him.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
The casino owner giveth and the casino owner taketh away.
Tell you what I've got to take a break, and
when we come back, I want to talk about the
movie Bugsy, that Warren Beatty film, and they toyed with
facts and truth, and I want to find out the
real truth of the history behind the Flamingo being erected.
(08:26):
And when I know you know the stories, you put
it in a book. And I also want to talk
about some of the legends of Vegas. Joey Brown, many
people that we've either heard of or know a little about.
Let's talk about them when we come back. Okay, you
(08:49):
got it, Thank you. Time and temperature here on wbz's
Night Side ten fifteen forty four degrees.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Now that to Dan Ray live from the Window World
night Side Studios on WBZ News Radio.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Dan is auf tonight. I'm Morgan filling in and I've
been here since eight o'clock. Hopefully you have as well
for this hour up until eleven o'clock. Bill Friedman is
here and he wrote a book. Book came out within
the past eight nine years and it's Bill. Why don't
(09:27):
you give the exact title, because I don't want to
miss it out.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
It's it's called thirty illegal Years to the Strip, and
what it's on of the strip started with high rolling
casinos in nineteen fifty and these resorts, eighty percent of
them over the next ten well actually twenty years, were
(09:54):
built by people that had been major illegal casino operator
around the country. Most had been in prohibition before, and
this is their history. Because these men were tied together,
they not only knew each other, but when guys had
(10:15):
illegal casinos, you couldn't. There was no case I ever
found where someone had a casino in a city they
didn't live in. The Law enforcement and the prosecutors who
took payoffs to let them operate wanted them write there
(10:38):
under their thumb, so they had control over them. But
what would happen if they got shut down? They lost everything.
So these guys came up with an interesting system. I'll
give you an example. But they had a partnerships of
various financial arrangements, but it typically was five guys in
(11:01):
five major cities, generally in different states, would go together
and they'd each own twenty percent of each of the
other four people in every single case, and I investigated
and studied the history of each one. The owner that
lived in that city had absolute control. The other partners
(11:24):
were nothing but investors. They ran the show, and once
a year they'd get together and they'd all share their
profits in cash with each other. And that way, if
one of them got closed down, the guy lost his
whole business, but he still kept eighty percent of his income.
And so I didn't know how to write the history
(11:47):
of all these individual places when their backgrounds were so
tied together. So this book is the history of the
biggest Prohibition gangs, the biggest illegal casine operators in the
twenty From nineteen twenty to nineteen thirty four, they had
(12:07):
by far the biggest Prohibition gangs. And instead of what
you see on TV where they're creating very cheap booze,
these guys did nothing but sell the finest liquors from
around the world in the finest restaurants, all illegally, of course.
(12:29):
And then after thirty four prohibition ended, they had to
make money and they opened these incredible casinos. And I
write about them because some of them were just unbelievably
elegant and beautiful and all the rich showed up and
they catered to the rich, not to the average person,
(12:52):
did they.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Let's back up, what are the five cities? I remember Cleveland,
naturally New York. What are the the five cities where
these individuals operations?
Speaker 3 (13:04):
Okay, well, the three biggest gangs. The biggest gang, uh
was one of the biggest two gangs were in uh Manhattan.
Manhattan had over half the wealthy people of the country
living there, so the income there was phenomenal and so
(13:30):
uh uh the there was The biggest group by far
was five equal partners, and that would include uh Meyer,
Lanski and Ben Siegel, who were Jewish. It included two
Italians Joe Adonnas and Vincent Ollo, and Vincinalo opened up
(13:55):
fabulous places outside of Miami. Later Donna's had one of
the most incredible casinos in New Jersey, right across from Manhattan.
And although they were equal partners, Charlie Luciano was so
incredibly respected. He was a very quiet man, but when
(14:17):
he spoke, everybody listened, and I felt it when I
got into the casino business. When his name came up,
it was like everybody stood because if he said something.
And these were the guys. All the casinos were dishonest
at that time, and these guys said, this is crazy.
(14:42):
All you're going to get is the addicted gamblers. We
want people that are out for entertainment regularly, and they're
the ones that brought honest gambling to the illegal casinos
and then brought it to Nevada. The second gang was
(15:02):
one man Frank Costello. He is famous because he had
the most famous nightclub in America called the Copa Cabana
in Manhattan. He'd never had his name on the ownership
because he had this background as a hood and then
(15:24):
he ran illegal slots in bars all over Manhattan and
then moved down just outside of New Orleans. He had
all the slots in New Orleans and this incredible casino
outs and showroom outside of it. And he built the
Tropicana in Las Vegas, which just came down. And the
(15:50):
third group was a group of five men forward Jewish
and one was I. And the only reason why I
mentioned that is most of the crime criminal groups you
hear about start as street gangs and they generally are
all of the same group. And all of these groups
(16:13):
were mixed and they dealt with everybody and that's why
they spread so powerfully. And he was in Detroit and Cleveland,
and he brought in the legitimate boost for Capone in
Chicago and sold it to him, and he became the
(16:38):
most powerful criminal that ever lived in Las Vegas. In
nineteen fifty he opened the Desert in which was the
first high rolling casino in Nevada. It was a luxury resort.
And then eight years later he opened the Stardust, which
(16:58):
was at the time the war world's biggest hotel and
the biggest casino, and that catered to everyone. And in
my whole life, I'm not talking about what has existed.
I'm talking what I've been exposed to. I never heard
of anyone who had the best of the high end
(17:22):
and the best of the low end simultaneously. And he
was the most powerful criminal out there, although he did
a great deal of good for the town. All the
there was twenty four mafia gangs in America, and the
(17:47):
Godfathers had control over their gang and anyone they could
be with. Daylitz had an ability. I knew him well
and couldn't be more impressed with them. As a man,
he had an ability to win people over, and he
had more professional hit men ready to kill for him
(18:11):
even after he got in Vegas than any godfather ever did.
And it was all one on one out of loyalty,
and it was just amazing to been pardon seeing all
of that.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
I've got a break to take for news, and when
we come back, I want to talk about the history
of the Flamingo through Bugsy, Siegell and beyond. And I'm
not saying it because I have my comp through the Flamingo,
which I do, but it's such an interesting story and
(18:50):
it got its name from the nickname of Virginia Hill,
Seagull's girlfriend at the time. There's so many interesting facts
about that property. So when we come back, can we
delve into that.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
You got it?
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Thank you, Bill. Bill Friedman is my guest. If you
want to call in, trust me. No one knows more
about Vegas than this gentleman. Phone number six one, seven, two, five,
fourteen thirty or eight eight, eight, nine to nine, ten
thirty Here on night Side with the time is ten
thirty forty four degrees.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ, Boston's news radio.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Dan is off tonight. My name is Morgan White Junior.
But I have strong guests for you to be entertained.
They will entertain you, inform you, and do the best
they can to keep your attention. Riveted to WBC Nightside.
Bill Friedman is my guest, and we're about to We've
talked about the history of Las Vegas as the gambling
(19:56):
community which it has become, and we're gonna talk about
the history of the first major hotel casino. And Bill
take us from the architects drawings to the construction to
the completion of that hotel casino, The Flamingo.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Yeah, the Flamingo was actually started by a man in
La that had a daily newspaper about what was going
on in Hollywood, and he also had many fine restaurants
(20:39):
and all the Hollywood celebrities went there to make him
feel good about them. And he decided he was a
addicted gambler and he would come up to the two
casinos in Vegas. But there was some really great places
(21:02):
in and around La illegal places, and one in Palm
Springs that he had and he decided, rather than playing
other people's casinos, he'd build it. And he started building
it and lost his money gambling. He'd come up to
(21:26):
look at it and loses money at the two other
properties and it went into auction and that's when Sieagel
bought it. So there's always this big debate who really
had it? Do you have enough facts? And I went
(21:46):
down to the county and to the men who drew it,
and all the documents do not have Seagull's name, for
the Flamingo have this man's name. So Siegel he got
involved in Nevada gambling because in nineteen forty one they
(22:12):
legalized sports books and it was the only state and
union that had legal sports gambling for decades, and that
fascinated him. And they called them sports books, but the
fact was until the mid to late fifties they did
(22:36):
nothing but book horse racing. When you hear that the
horse racing was kings, that is where the wealth went
when you went to racetracks in America. This was a
hangout for the wealthy. Enormous sums were bet. The biggest
(22:58):
gambler of the time, and boy, I'm not going to
remember his name now because I haven't thought about it
for years, but the biggest gambler you would know it
if you can think back of his time. I knew
two different men who were horse race of bookers, and
(23:25):
one traveled with this man for five years and another man.
They didn't have a big club they had back in
the nineteen thirties. They played every night of the wealthiest
player of poker players in the country showed up in
one game. And it was nothing for people back in
(23:47):
the nineteen thirties to win or lose three hundred to
six hundred thousand dollars a night, all in cash, and
they just stand there and book the horses from these people.
But that's how big the horse betting was. And so
when Nevada legalized legalized it, Siegel had a huge horse
(24:15):
betting operation, illegal of course, and with one of the
best bookies there was. And he decided, why not come
to Nevada where it's legal, and we can do it
there too. He bought two small casinos downtown and he
(24:36):
had them, and when this property came up for auction,
he said, I'm going out on the strip. There was
two places built at the beginning of the war and
World War two, and he built his right after World
War two, when there was a big boom in the economy.
(24:57):
Our soldiers had gone into the Pacific and there was
nowhere for them to spend their money on the boats.
So they all came home with everything they had earned.
And the men who fought, and I used men because
we did not have women fighters. Then when the men
came back from the European theater, most of them didn't
(25:22):
have much exposure to spend their money. They were out
in the battlefields. So there was just a huge amount
of cash. The greatest economic boom in history occurred, and
so Siegel decided to build the Flamingo. But it and
(25:42):
the reason was he was the biggest celebrity in Hollywood.
After Prohibition ended, he moved to Hollywood, and here you
had all of these Hollywood actors that were great celebrities,
and so where normally someone would love to have a
(26:04):
Hollywood celebrity for dinner, what did all the producers and
the directors and the stars do. He for fifteen years
was the most popular guest on demand for all these
big Hollywood dinners that they'd have at their homes or
(26:25):
at the clubs. And he was the one everyone wanted.
He was a real charming, very nice guy, and everybody
wanted him there. And he thought, you know, I can
get all those people to come to Nevada and make
all this money. Where he miscalculated was the roads were
(26:50):
not paved at the time, so it was a dirt road.
The highway was a two lane road, dirt the whole way.
There was limited plane service. And gamblers are very impulsive people.
They don't want to plan a trip. They want to
go to the place down the strip, down the street.
(27:12):
And there was these great casinos that I write about
in La and so he couldn't draw them. He never
got high end play because of it. He did make
a living at it, and the image of him he
(27:33):
was a first class businessman. Remember it was a small casino.
I knew very very well, his general manager, his accountant,
three of his key executives and hosts in the casino,
and everybody there just thought the world of him. Thought
(27:54):
he was just the opposite of everything you see, and
hear thought the world them. When he was killed, his
attorney was named Lou Wiener, and Lou was very important
to my research. Spent incredible hours interviewing him with all
the people he was involved with, and being Siegel's attorney.
(28:20):
When Siegel was killed in Hollywood, the sheriff came up
to see Lou Wiener first, he said, I want to
find out who killed him, and Lou Wiener said, look,
I don't know anyone in this town that didn't love
(28:41):
the guy. He said, I guarantee you no one here
did it. And three days later the sheriff came back.
He said, I'm on my way out of town. I've
talked to every key business person, every key politician, all
the casino people, and the one thing I've learned is
everybody in this town loved him. I know that whoever
(29:04):
killed him didn't come from here.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
I'm gonna throw a name at you. You were trying
to think of a name of a major player back
in the thirties. Was it Damon Runyon?
Speaker 3 (29:18):
No? No, this was there was a pure player, and
I just can't think of it because I haven't thought
about it for decades. He was the greatest gambler of
that era and never held a job, and no one
ever figured out where his money came from. I tried
for years, and everybody that had any closeness to him
(29:40):
I interviewed, and when everyone told me they had tried
to figure it out and couldn't, I gave up. Okay, Noah,
do you know it real well?
Speaker 2 (29:54):
It doesn't matter to the story but let me a
separate name. Did you ever run into a Sunny Risner?
Speaker 3 (30:04):
Oh? Yeah, a sunny I had. When they legalized sportsbooks
in nineteen forty one, they got they were nothing but races,
both legal and in Nevada and the illegal people until
the mid to late fifties. Television got rolling around nineteen
(30:28):
fifty and they started playing the Super Bowl and the
World Series and things like that, and all of a
sudden there was an interest embedding on those and so
they became popular. And I'm the only person that ever
(30:49):
ran two casinos on the strip at the same time.
There's companies that own multiple casinos, but I'm the only
person that ran to of them. They were all independently
operated and they stayed allowed for the first time after
(31:10):
I took over my first casino sportsbook betting as well
inside the casinos, and I was the first one on
the strip to open a sports book. And Sonny Reisner
was an unknown guy that had impressed me, and he
(31:31):
became my sportsbook manager, and he was the greatest odds
maker of his time. And we had even though Caesar's
Palace and all these places had very elegant sports books.
He was so famous that we were the most successful
(31:52):
book in town for all those years. And he set
the odds, and every day at nine am he put
the odds on the board. There was about thirty five men,
I don't know who they were, that were standing there.
And on sportsbook betting, you have all the games listed
(32:15):
and there's a master plan that everybody had. Today, of
course everything's on internet, but back then there was no sources,
and everyone had their page game one, two, three, four five,
and as he wrote them down, they all wrote them down,
ran the telephones, called all of the major illegal bookies
in the country. And so at nine o'clock our time
(32:39):
in Vegas, he put it up and at twelve noon
on the East coast you could bet the games that
were going to be played at one o'clock, and it
was all Sunny. Everybody in the country used Sunny's odds.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
I loved that man. He and I became very good friends.
First came aware of him when he worked at the Castaways,
and they built a sportsbook for him with his own design.
Requests at the rio, I'm late for my break. Let
me take my break, and when we get back, we'll
pick up. From this point time ten forty seven temperature
(33:18):
forty three degrees.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Now back to Dan ray Lie from the Window World
Night Sex Studios on WBZ News Radio.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Dan is off tonight, he should be here tomorrow. Across
our fingers am Morgan filling in for Dan. Bill Friedman
is my guest's guest with a tea, and we are
talking Las Vegas. It's history going all the way back
to the Dam and we're now talking about the history
of the Flamingo and some other major notables in the
(33:51):
world of Las Vegas. And I brought up the name
Sunny Reisner, who I met I'm going to say in
the mid eighties. He was working as the sportsbook director
at the Castaways no longer around. Good grief. There's so
many places in Vegas that help make Vegas Vegas. Like
(34:15):
we mentioned the Tropicana a while ago, and the Tropicana
has been leveled to make a baseball field for the Athletics.
Oakland Athletics will soon be the Las Vegas Athletics. And
I remember Bill, when you couldn't bet on any game
(34:37):
that was taking place in Las Vegas, any team that
was taking place in Las Vegas. And now we have
teams whose home is Las Vegas, the Golden Knights, the
Golden Knights Las Vegas based team, the Raiders, our Las
(34:57):
Vegas based team was so going to have a baseball
Las Vegas based team, and the only thing left is basketball.
I'm sure somebody will cover that. What do you think about?
And I've only got maybe four minutes of showtime left
with you. What do you think of Vegas? Let's go
(35:18):
from nineteen eighty to twenty twenty four. Give me your
honest opinion of how it's grown and where it's advantages
lay and where its mistakes are.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
The thing is, I focus on Vegas from nineteen twenty
to nineteen ninety, when the casino was the big revenue
maker and the big profit maker. In nineteen ninety they
built a place where the Castaways was called the Mirage,
which you told me then i'd see it come down.
(35:54):
I wouldn't have believed it, but it did this year.
And then after that they focused on the shopping, on
the other facilities, and gaming became a on amenity. And
(36:17):
so my whole research goes from nineteen twenty to nineteen ninety.
So the time you're talking about you and I saw it,
but I really didn't keep I don't have any inside
information about anything that went on, because that was just
no longer my world.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
All right, then let's stop at nineteen ninety. Let's say
from nineteen seventy five, there were still families that owned property,
but that was a dwindling proposition, and by nineteen eighty
it was all corporate, all companies. None of the family's
(37:00):
own Las Vegas hotel casinos anymore. They may have owned
ancillary properties around hotel casinos. But tell me your feeling
from let's say nineteen fifty to nineteen ninety.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
Well, that to me was the golden era. That's that's
when modale It's opened up the desert in and from
then on everything was fabulous. On the strip, rooms and
food were cheap, and the entertainment was fabulous, where today
(37:44):
they have people come in with long term residencies. Back then,
the showrooms generally had three weeks with each star, so
if you came every week, a few of the places
had new names. So there was always these the best
singers and comics of the time appeared in Vegas, and
(38:08):
every time you came every week and or every week,
there was new people there that were not there before,
and it was just this wonderful place of refreshing entertainment,
not just having major names that could be there for
six months or two years, but constantly a new flow.
(38:30):
Plus they had big lounges and they had really great
entertainment in them too.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
What do you think is next for Las Vegas?
Speaker 3 (38:40):
Oh, I have no clue where it headed. It was.
It's an industry I no longer understand.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Well, as we were just speaking about, you could come
to Vegas and go see the Red Sox play Oakland
with a tropic canon. One stood, you come to Vegas
and see the Bruins play the Golden Knights. And that
(39:09):
was not even on the drawing board back in the fifties,
sixties and seventies.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
No, they they they, In fact, the teams objected to
our betting them. They didn't want any association with gambling.
By the way, just before we end, I've sat here
because I haven't thought of him for decades, because I
wrote about him so many years ago. The gambler I
was trying to think about was Nick the Greek Dan.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Do good, That Jimmy the Greek Nick. No, Nick the
Greek yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Man who never worked a day in his life, and
he could bet a million dollars during you know, put
a million dollars on the table every evening and nobody
figured out where it ever came from.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
And you know what, they covered his pets. They were
not worried about getting paid if he lost. Bill. Thank you,
thank you for coming on. I hope you have a
wonderful holiday season. And when you're of the book books
come out, you've got my number call me.
Speaker 3 (40:18):
Okay, you got it, and thank you.
Speaker 2 (40:21):
All right, Bill, take care, good evening. Next hour. Ed Coleglely,
who's he? You'll just have to stick around to find out.
Time and temperature ten fifty eight forty three degrees
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