Episode 36: Las Vegas Field Trip, Part 1 – The Past Comes to the Surface

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My Dark Path Podcast
Las Vegas Field Trip, Part 1 – The Past Comes to the Surface

This is the My Dark Path podcast.

In early May of this year, a barrel was discovered peeking up from the shallow waters of a drying reservoir in Nevada called Lake Mead. The water levels in the lake have been dropping steadily for years, 140 feet just since the year 2000. They’re now at record lows. Authorities have determined that this barrel has likely been underwater for at least 40 or 50 years, weighed down by the contents sealed inside - a human body.

On examining the body, authorities theorized that the cause of death was most likely a gunshot wound. The victim was then stuffed in this barrel and dumped in the lake. Eerily, when NPR covered the story, local law enforcement expressed a morbid confidence that they would find more bodies like this as the Lake continues to recede.

Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States, a beacon of cool, still blue rin the middle of the dusty Nevada landscape. It offers respite from the thick, hot air of the desert, and locals and tourists alike spend many happy weekends camping near its bank and dipping their toes in its gentle waves.

It’s not here from natural evolution. Lake Mead exists because of the Hoover Dam - one of the mammoth engineering projects of early 20th century America. Intense flooding of the Colorado River made life dangerous throughout Nevada, Southern California, and Arizona. The Dam not only controlled that flooding and created this reservoir, it provided a transformative amount of hydroelectric power to the American Southwest. Vast swaths of land that had previously been considered inhospitable, suddenly opened up.

The ability to live comfortably and safely in the middle of the desert came with unintended consequences. Not far from the dam as a little town of just 8,000 people, called Las Vegas. With safe and steady supplies of water and electricity, the town began to grow; until it became the capital of legal gambling in America, a cultural icon of neon lights and round-the-clock vice. And with this growth, came opportunity. And the first generation of people to take advantage of the opportunities in Las Vegas, where the vast, overlapping network of criminal organizations we call the mob. For decades following World War II, the City of Las Vegas was one of the most lucrative actvities the mob became involved in; and the gambling part, at least, was perfectly legal.

You can’t tell the stoy of Las Vegas without talking about organized crime, and the way this unique place allowed them to operate quasi-openly for the first time. They’re an inseparable art of the flair and mystique of this place - the tempting promise of living like a high-roller, having whatever you want. But it’s no surprise that a town that can wipe you out with a roll of the dice has less savory stories to tell. Almost every street in this City is a dark path, one that, we can now confirm, leads all the way out to the man-made shores of Lake Mead.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt celebrated the opening of the Hoover Dam, it’s safe to assume he didn't intend for one of his greatest legacies to secretly serve as a burial ground for the mob. Still, year after year, while the Hoover Dam sustained life here and for many miles around, below the surface, stories are waiting to be re-discovered, bobbing in the deep like rotting barrels.

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Hi, I’m MF Thomas and this is the My Dark Path podcast. In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal. So, if you geek out over these subjects, you’re among friends here at My Dark Path. Since friends stay in touch, please reach out to me on Instagram, sign up for our newsletter at mydarkpath.com, or just send an email to explore@mydarkpath.com. I’d love to hear from you.

Finally, thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me. Let’s get started with Episode 210: Vegas Field Trip, Part 1.

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PART ONE

Our team here at My Dark Path is scattered all over the United States and even across the Atlantic Ocean. We’ve worked through the restrictions of COVID-19 in the way that modern technology makes possible; through Zooms and emails and Slack, and we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished. But we think our stories resonate best when they carry the personal touch, the up-close flavor of having actually visited the places where it all happened. And as it’s become more safe and accepted to travel, we wanted to celebrate by trying something a little different. We’d been in touch with Veronica Hodur, a fan of the show and a local expert on the dark history of Las Vegas who writes for Vegas.com. We were excited to tap into her knowledge to bring you some stories.

Both our staff writer Laura Townsend and our senior story editor Nicholas Thurkettle are based in Southern California, where weekend road trips to Vegas are a popular enough activity to cram the freeways every Friday afternoon of the year. So we sent them to meet up with Veronica, so they could learn this history in the places where it actually happened. They truly immersed themselves in the legends of Las Vegas - exploring some of the oldest (and most haunted) spots along historic Fremont Street and The Strip, speaking with locals about bone chilling encounters in spooky hotels and casinos, and diving into the history of the mob in the very places where big guns like Bugsy Siegel and Tony Spilatro once laid their deadly plans.

It was a wildly successful experiment; they came back with enough stories to fill multiple episodes; so we’re going to focus this time on the criminal past of Sin City, its long association with organized crime. And next time we’re going to delve into the supernatural - the ghost stories lurking down hallways and on casino floors where tragedy once struck. Call it our first My Dark Path field trip.

in our next episode you’ll get to hear some of the conversations they recorded in restaurants and bars and hotels; it’s engrossing stuff that I can’t wait to share with you. And before we fly back 100 years to the dusty beginnings of Las Vegas, I wanted first to chat for a couple of minutes with Laura, who dove headlong into this topic despite having almost no experience with this place. I wanted to get her impressions coming back from this unique opportunity to learn about some of the history countless tourists stroll right by.

INTERVIEW SEGMENT HERE

Now let’s travel back to 1931, when this whole place was just a sleepy one-horse town; a quiet, friendly place where everyone knew their neighbors.

***

If you visited Las Vegas in 1931, you would probably walk along the street at the heart of everything - Fremont Street. Like most small towns, its main drag was dotted with drug stores, boutique shops, a few local eateries. You could see a show at the popular El Portal Theater, or grab a scoop of ice cream at the parlor just across the street. It was a quaint, wholesome thoroughfare that proudly served its community of just over 5000 people. Beyond were scattered, dusty neighborhoods and uncountable miles of vacant desert. But Fremont Street in 1931 sounds like a nice place to raise your kids.

The Nevada State Legislature had no idea the change they were about to bring to Fremont Street on March 19th of that year. At the depths of both the Great Depression and Prohibition, the State was desperate for any means to bring jobs and revenue to its citizens. And so they made the decision that permanently re-shaped Nevada, Las Vegas, and every storefront on Fremont Street - they legalized gambling.

Even in a city that’s now infamous for staying open 24 hours, the change didn’t seem that drastic at first. People everywhere enjoy casually putting money down on card games - now they could do it in public without fear. Slot machines were a fun way to pass the time. Communities around the Hoover Dam were swelling as construction workers brought to the area bought homes, started families. With alcohol still illegal, gambling in Nevada became the popular adult entertainment for anyone with a little extra money in their pocket. And unlike drinking, gambling always offered that tease that you might just strike it rich. You can imagine how appealing that sounded to the overworked and underprotected construction workers.

And as the town grew, gambling grew beyond a leisure activity for the locals. People began to travel to Las Vegas for that purpose, the same way people might plan a trip to New York to see a Broadway show. The experiment by the Nevada State Legislature was paying off; though they had no idea just how much money was going to start flowing. And anytime you have a large flow of money without much oversight; you’re going to attract people with a nose for illicit opportunities.

In our episode about WITSEC and the history of the New York mob, we talked about, let’s call it, the diverse entrepreneurial interests of mobsters. They want big, easy money, the bigger and easier the better. So it’s no surprise that, long before the big resort companies that now run the city, it was the mobsters who saw the possibilities of Las Vegas first.

Prohibition was, ironically, one of the best things that ever happened for them. Criminals who were getting by on loan sharking and blackmailing where suddenly in a position to serve America’s unquenched thirst for alcohol. They created a whole sophisticated underground industry, that required boat pilots and warehouse workers, lawyers and accountants, club owners willing to operate speakeasies; and, of course, protection from judges, politicians, and rivals who carried guns. And everyone got paid.

And it was at this same moment - while the mob was swelling from bootlegging money, and as Nevada was legalizing gambling, that “Lucky” Luciano ended the constant warring between New York’s Mafia rivals by establishing the Commission - the forum where the heads of the Five Families could resolve their disputes without killing. This is, arguably, the decision that really put the word “organized” in organized crime.

It looked like the good times were rolling for the Mob - at least, that is, until two years later, when America changed its mind about Prohibition and revoked it. It’s the only time in America where a Constitutional Amendment was passed whose only intention was to cancel a previous Constitutional Amendment.

Mobs all over America lost their best source of income almost overnight - who wanted to risk their health on bathtub gin when there was legal stuff available? In order to survive, they needed a new source of wealth.

They already knew how to operate clubs where illegal activity happened behind the facade, so it wasn’t much of an adjustment to create illegal gambling halls. They had particular sucess with this in Southern California, where people flush with money from the oil industry or Hollywood liked to play for big stakes.

But in 1938, L.A. Mayor Fletcher Bowron started a major crackdown on illegal gambling; and suddenly both the players and the criminals were looking for alternatives. Las Vegas had been growing as a gambling destination for several years; and didn’t it sound a lot simpler and easier to gamble where it was legal? Less risk, more reward.

In 1945, members of the New York Mafia made their first move to set up shop in Sin City. And they were led by a man whose name is still synonymous with what Las Vegas has become - Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.

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PART TWO

I should tell you up-front that it would have been a very bad idea to call Benjamin Siegel by his nickname to his face. He hated the name Bugsy, and he got it because of his impulsive, violent temper; so you wouldn’t want to ever provoke him. His friends described him as “crazy as a bedbug”, and the name stuck.

He grew up in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. His family lived in crippling poverty and, as a child, Siegel watched his parents work long hours at physically taxing jobs that never paid enough to put food on the table. They were Jewish immigrants who fled Poland, looking for the American dream. Benjamin, second of five children, saw that all America gave them was overcrowded housing, filthy city streets, and no chance to ever get ahead. His mother spoke only Yiddish, and struggled to hold jobs.

When he was a child, the family moved to the Lower East Side. He grew up surrounded by families like his own, immigrant parents struggling to make a brighter future for their children, but never able to make progress no matter how hard they worked.

The Lower East Side was a true melting pot neighborhood, with a large Jewish population, but a myriad of other ethnic groups in the community - Germans, Italians, Irish, Polish, and others. Most of the work was in garment factories that were attached to the spaces where the families lived. Tenement housing would squeeze large families into just 300 square feet of living space. People had to compete for jobs in unregulated sweatshops; where injuries and even fatalities were terrifyingly common. In 1911, the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, where employees were locked in to prevent them from taking unauthorized breaks, killed 146 workers, some of them as young as 14. Sometimes fires like these would spread to the apartments in the same building.

Benjamin Siegel was known as a dreamer even when he was young. He wanted no part of the struggles his parents faced - he yearned for a better life for himself. He wanted wealth and he wanted power. He found an opportunity for both by turning to crime.

We have ample evidence that poverty without opportunity breeds crime. Desperate people do desperate things; and burglaries, assaults, and even murder were part of normal life in the Lower East Side. We also know that fear drives people towards what’s familiar, to offer a sense of protection. And so the varied ethnic groups in the community instinctively stuck with each other; and against others.

Gangs formed throughout the neighborhoods. They offered a measure of protection; but for the gang members, they offered opportunity. If you were smart about it, the money came bigger and faster than it would from slaving away for abusive bosses at the garment factory. Crime offered them the chance to be their own boss, and keep what they earned. We’ve talked before about the peculiar resemblance of criminal ambition to entrepreneuriship in our Season One Episode “More Than the Money”.

This environment was made for someone with the temperament of Bugsy Siegel. He believed with every fiber that people who played by the rules were suckers, doomed to be exploited. Breaking the rules was how you got ahead; and, he believed, if you got far enough, you became untouchable. He was fourteen when he dropped out of school, gathered his most loyal and fearless pals, and stated making his living on the street.

A lot of business in the neighborhood was done on pushcarts - peddlers wheeling their goods onto the street to sell. They were vulnerable to being robbed; so young Bugsy, and his rough-looking friends, would make peddlers an offer - pay him a fee, and they would never be robbed. Refuse to pay him, and he’d pour kerosene on their pushcarts and light a match. It didn't take long for the peddlers to learn that Siegel was perfectly willing to follow through on his threat - and soon, they knew they had no choice but to pay him what he wanted.

Early in his career, he met another teenage child of Jewish immigrants. His name was Meyer Lansky, and they became lifelong friends and partners; bonded in their belief that you had to do whatever it took to break free from poverty. That power was better than compassion, and guilt was just an obstacle to overcome. The mob of Bugs and Meyer seized the opportunity offered by Prohibition, and profited well.

Siegel established a relationship with the Syndicate, the loose nationwide network of mobs in major cities around America. He met “Lucky” Luciano, and helped him commit one of the most important murders of his career. By working directly for Luciano, he had access to money and connections beyond anything on the Lower East Side. The Bugs and Meyer mob was effectively dismantled. In the corporate world, we’d call that a merger.

Siegel helped to found a new division within the Syndicate - Murder, Incorporated. That’s not code for anything, the enforcers of Murder, Inc. were there to solve the Mob’s most serious problems, and then get rid of the bodies. Siegel, not surprisingly, wasn’t just the founder, he was one of the most enthusiastic operatives.

The Feds caught wind of Murder, Inc., and in order to escape scrutiny, Siegel left New York City behind for good. Lucky Luciano found work for him out in the sunny climate of Los Angeles. He would be a bagman, collecting skimmed money for a Chicago boss named Sidney Korshak, helping out with the drug trade in Mexico, and whatever other assignments they could find for him.

Siegel blossomed on the West Coast. It was everything he had ever fantasized about and more. He bought a mansion in Beverly Hills, dressed in silk shirts and designer jackets. He befriended some of the biggest names in Hollywood, the movie star Jean Harlow was even godmother to his daughter.

But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough. Bugsy wanted more.

His old friend Meyer Lansky was plugged in at the highest levels to the conversations the Mob was having about the growing little town of Las Vegas. It must have seemed like a potter stumbling across an untouched block of clay. The mob could make this place into whatever they wanted to be. They could own it, they could run it, and, best of all, it would all be legal.

Lansky instructed Siegel to go to Vegas and check it out for himself. And Siegel sensed that this was his opportunity to do something more spectacular than anything he’d done before.

They partnered with Gus Greenbaum and Moe Sedway, and purchased the El Cortez Hotel for $600,000. That’s about $10 Million in today’s money, not a small investment at all. The El Cortez still exists in the historic downtown area of Vegas, and has been extensively remodeled to evoke that classic post World War II feel. Our team took some pictures you can see on our website. Today, its name sparkles in neon lights, and the word GAMBLING appears in bold, blue letters; but back when these partners from the mob took over, there was nothing so spectacular or showy about it. It had three brick archways marking its entrance, with a modest sign that read "El Cortez Motel". But Siegel had a vision that it could be made into something much bigger.

Once they took over, they saw a satisfying profit from the El Cortez, but Siegel wasn’t satisfied. It wasn’t as glamorous as he wanted; didn’t fulfill the potential he imagined. In his fantasy, he saw magnetizing luxury hotels, destinations where guests could enjoy fine dining, elite entertainment, high-stakes gambling, and a refreshing dip in a cool swimming pool. All the finer things in life; and if it was all right there at the hotel, that meant that the bosses could keep every penny. If you didn’t lose your money gambling, they’d get it with dazzle. It seems so familiar now as to be obvious; but Siegel was dreaming of something the world hadn’t seen yet - the first major resort and casino in Las Vegas.

His enthusiasm was persuasive, and the mob was willing to back it. They believed that, if he pulled this off, celebrities, high rollers, and tourists alike would be mingling in a playground they controlled. It could be the ultimate cash cow. Benjamin Siegel named his passion project The Flamingo.

The cost to build it was a full million dollars. That might not seem like much when modern Vegas resorts can cost a billion or more; but remember that to the outside world, Las Vegas was a dusty little cowtown, if they’d heard of it at all. But Siegel spared no expense to realize his vision, combining cutting-edge design with Art Deco interiors. It was the biggest gamble of his life - the mob would not be forgiving if he failed.

Unfortunately for him, it turned out that his life of experience stealing, intimidating, and killing didn’t necessarily translate into legitimate business management. He made a fateful decision - choosing to stick to the opening night he’d announced - December 26th, 1946. He opened the doors of the Flamingo, and welcomed the world to an incomplete hotel.

Instead of glitz, glamour, and stars, guests saw unopened restaurants, stages that weren’t ready for performances. Once they had their fill of gambling, there was nowhere else in the hotel to spend money. So they went elsewhere. This one, disastrous opening night cost the Flamingo’s investors lost almost $300,000.

They closed down temporarily, reopening in March after construction was actually complete. This was far more successful; but it was too late for Siegel. His regular violent tantrums and bad business habits had always made him difficult to deal with; but as long he delivered success, the mob would tolerate it. Now, this humiliating and costly failure was hanging around his neck. Rumors spread that he had been skimming money out of the casino to keep for himself.

Just six months after The Flamingo opened its doors, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was shot to death at his home in Beverly Hills. His murder remains unsolved to this day; but it almost doesn’t matter who pulled the trigger or triggers. We know who dunnit. Siegel achieved his dream of escaping the endless struggle, poverty, and indignity of the Lower East Side. He’d lived a life of mansions and Hollywood stars; and his vision for what Las Vegas could be turned out to be true. But he never saw it for himself, dying in a hail of bullets at the age of 41.

After his death, his old partners from the El Cortez, Mo Sedway and Gus Greenbaum, took over operations at the new resort. They proved to be better at legitimate business operations than Siegel ever was, and they were the ones who turned the Flamingo into the destination he had imagined.

The Flamingo remains the oldest operating resort and casino on The Strip. It's changed hands many times since those early days and today, nothing remains of the original build. Like so much of Vegas history, it exists in layer upon layer of things built, destroyed, buried, and re-built. Still, it has remained committed to both its history and the aura of glamour its founder demanded - one of its on-site restaurants is Siegel’s Steakhouse, and on the exact spot where the original building once stood, a family of real-life flamingos live on a gorgeous pond. They get their pictures taken as often as any Las Vegas headliner.

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PART THREE

The Flamingo was a success, which meant that soon, other families in the Syndicate took notice, and were hungry for a slice of the lucrative Las Vegas cake. But they’d learned from the example of Siegel - this wasn’t a place for erratic big spenders; the generation that moved to the desert would be led by some of the Mob’s most reliable operators.

Meyer Lansky, still trusted by New York despite the failings of his lifelong friend and partner, opened another casino - The Thunderbird. The Cleveland mob came to town and opened The Desert Inn. The Chicago Outfit - possibly the biggest and most powerful crime family in America, opened The Riviera, the city’s first high-rise hotel. One after another they sprouted up along the new Las Vegas Strip - The Sands, The Dunes, The Sahara, The Hacienda, Tropicana, and The Stardust. Suddenly, the older hotels clustered around Fremont Street, the true downtown of the city of Las Vegas, seemed lost in a bygone era. The Strip was the heart of the new city - and every one of these towering, high-end resorts was backed by the mob.

We don’t know when the skimming started - after all, that’s the whole point, to dip an opportunistic hand into the fast-flowing money and take a little for yourself. But the most common belief is that it was the Chicago Outfit that started doing it habitually - taking a little off the top, falsifying the accounting records, and making the money disappear. Now they had two streams of income - the legitimate and the illegitimate. And the money was pouring into their pockets at a speed they’d never imagined.

By the 1950's, the mob controlled about 90% of the Las Vegas's resorts and casinos; the city had become a nationwide destination. World War 2 was over and Americans were ready to party. And the more they came, the more employees were required to meet their needs. In less than a decade, the population of the city swelled from just 8,000 to over 45,000.

And a whole lot of the new citizens were mobsters. But, it was no longer as dangerous for people to know that they were; gambling was not only legal, the tax revenue from it was allowing the city to grow with its citizens and thrive. The Clark County School District opened its doors, Government services on every level grew, the University of Nevada Las Vegas was founded; and the landscape was dotted with parks and playgrounds. It had turned from a quiet desert cowtown into a bustling community.

Mob families lived in the wealthy suburbs, sent their children to its public schools. Behind the scenes, they may have been skimming casinos, torturing and murdering their enemies, burglarizing local businesses, and blackmailing politicians; but they were also donating to city charities, attending PTA meetings, and driving their kids to soccer practice. They were living the American dream that Bugsy Siegel’s parents never got to - as long as you didn’t look too far below the surface.

There was nowhere really like this in America. Outside of New York and its Five Families, most major cities in the U.S. were under the control of one mob - Cleveland, Chicago, Kansas City. But Vegas was different. It was the goose laying golden eggs, and everyone understood that they would kill it if rivalries got out of control. Everyone agreed that Sin City was an Open City no single family could have total control.

They could certainly compete for customers, by signing flashy entertainers, trying to outdoor one another in luxury. But that’s just normal business. And, in another unusual change from normal operations, they would invest in one another, even help out! The Stardust, for example, was run as a collaboration between Cleveland and the Chicago Outfit.

But what they had going was so popular, even they couldn’t keep up with the growth in demand. They needed to build more and build bigger; bigger than Bugsy Siegel’s grandest vision for the Flamingo. But they didn’t have access to that kind of money. Legitimate banks considered gambling to be scandalous and untrustworthy. So the mob turned to an old friend; Jimmy Hoffa.

Hoffa controlled the Teamsters, the largest union in America, and also controlled their Central States Pension Fund. The goal of any pension fund is to park the retirement money of employees in smart, stable investments that will allow it to grow. But Hoffa used it as more of a massive slush fund to make friends in influential places. He had longstanding personal relationships with many mobsters, and Las Vegas couldn’t operate without Teamsters labor. So, in their own corrupt way, this was a win-win. He approved loan after loan from the Pension Fund for new hotel construction in Las Vegas, and hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into the building of resorts like Caesar’s Palace, Circus Cirus, and the Aladdin.

This high-rolling run couldn’t last. Hoffa was imprisoned for a multitude of crimes, and ultimately disappeared without a trace, presumed murdered, in a case which remains unsolved to this day. Plenty of mobsters will tell you their theories, though.

Maybe my favorite detail in all of this, though, is that despite all the stealing and skimming committed by the mob, all the doubts mainstream banks had about investing in Vegas hotels, those new hotels (with a little government encouragement,) eventually paid back every single one of their loans, with interest. The Teamsters had made a good investment.

It was clear, though, that the government was paying attention to what was happening out in the desert, and that over twenty years of rampant prosperity was making it difficult for the mob to keep discipline over their most lucrative operation. Territorial skirmishes broke out despite their best intentions. Low-level mobsters ran their own scams and burglaries, attracting unwanted attention. Someone needed to step in.

PART FOUR

In 1971, The Chicago Outfit sent mob man Tony Spilotro to take the reins of their interests in Las Vegas. Like Bugsy Siegel before him, Spilotro came to the criminal lifestyle while still a teenager - committing burglaries, theft, and even murder before he was old enough to graduate high school. One of five sons of Italian immigrants, Spilotro grew up around mambers of The Outfit, who frequented his parents’ restaurant, Patsy's.

At this time, Spilotro was 34 years old, and considered a reliable and loyal member of The Outfit. But like many before him, once he got a taste of the unimaginable wealth you could make in the desert, he didn’t stick to his assignment. To fulfill his appetites, he wanted some side income.

He formed the now infamous "Hole in the Wall Gang", a group of thieves, safecrackers, and enforcers that would execute robberies around the city with him. Beyond the reference to the Old West robberies commited by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, their name also referenced their unusual method for stealing - literally drilling holes into the walls of people's homes to get inside of them.

The Hole in the Wall Gang committed dozens upon dozens of burglaries - targeting everything from wholesome suburban houses to bustling businesses on the strip. Success got to their heads and they decided to aim even bigger. Just off the strip, on East Sahara Ave., was a bustling local business - Bertha's Gifts and Home Furnishings. Everyone knew it brought brought in a huge volume of cash, and Tony Spilotro wanted it, plain and simple.

This would be their biggest hit yet - so they spent weeks thoroughly planning every detail before they dared attempt to break in. They chose July 4th for the job; knowing that on such a busy holiday the police would be tied up on The Strip.

The job had a smooth start. The robbers gathered on the roof of the shop and drilled a hole through the ceiling to get inside. But once they entered, they found themselves surrounded by police officers. One of their members, as it turned out, was a rat - and had been informing the authorities of every detail of their planning for weeks.

Tony Spilotro wasn’t there to get arrested; he was the boss, not a hands-on employee. So while his most trusted gang members were rounded up, he was unscathed. But he was on much thinner ice with the Outfit - this was the opposite of what they had sent them there to do. The FBI was watching every move he made - running the Hole in the Wall Gang was almost suicidally bad judgment.

And with longtime friends and associates now facing long jail sentences, old bonds of loyalty were being broken, as it so often happens. Frank Cullotta had been Tony’s close friend since childhood. But now that the Feds had their hands on him, they played him a wiretap recording they’d captured of Tony talking about him, and using the ominous phrase “clean our dirty laundry”. Frank had run with mobsters long enough to infer what the FBI wanted him to, that his old friend was plotting to kill him to tie up loose ends.

Cullotta had actually left a life of crime behind before, after a bust in Chicago. He had only come back to this life because Tony had begged him to come out to Vegas with him. And now Cullotta was not just betrayed by his old friend, his life could be at stake.

In a pit of fear and rage, Frank Cullotta made the decision to save himself, and became a government witness against Tony Spilotro.

Not long after, Spilotro was arrested for the murder of Sherwin "Jerry" Lisner, a con man who was found dead in his swimming pool after crossing Spilotro. Cullotta had committed the murder under orders from his friend, and now he was going to testify to that fact. The FBI promised him a sentence of just a few years in prison, followed by a new home and identity in the Witness Protection Program.

In September of 1983, Spilotro posted $100,000 bail to get out of jail pending trial. A month later, Frank Cullotta testified that he had committed over 300 crimes on orders from his friend, including at least three murders. In the most gruesome, he crushed a man's head in a vice before slashing his throat and stuffing him in the trunk of a car with his friend. Cullotta had strangled the friend.

And despite the prosecution having the most important tool you need in organized crime cases, Tony Spilotro was acquitted. His defense lawyer was Oscar Goodman, a legendary defense attorney who had handled countless cases for mobsters. Later on, he was elected mayor.

In June 1986, Spilotro had yet another court date coming; but he asked the court for special permission to travel to Chicago for a funeral. He had never missed a court date, so they didn’t consider him a flight risk.

But on June 14th, he was reported missing in the Windy City. His brother was missing, too. Retracing his steps, authorities learned that the two brothers had left Michael’s house for a meeting with other Outfit members. That was the last anyone saw them. Several days later, Michael's 1986 Lincoln was found abandoned near Chicago’s O'Hare International Airport. And then, on June 22nd, Tony and Michael's bodies were found rotting in a field in Indiana.

Unlike Bugsy Siegel's murder or Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance, this mob crime has been solved. Tony and his brother had been lured to a house in Bensenville, Illinois, where they were promised that Michael would be initiated into full membership in the Outfit. Instead, full of frustration over Tony’s mismanagement of Vegas, the mobsters dragged the two brothers into the basement, and beat them to death. They were buried in an unsuspecting farmer’s cornfield outside the town of Enos.

Around the time of Spilotro's death, the FBI had finally gathered definite proof of illegal mob skimming taking place at the Stardust, Fremont, and Tropicana casinos. The key to the case fell into their laps as a happy accident. Kansas City police had been running wiretaps on local mobsters, investigating a murder case; and in the course of their conversation, those mobsters blurted out confirmation about all the money they were bringing in from Las Vegas.

The FBI successfully prosecuted bosses throughout the Midwest. And the Mob, which had managed to rule Las Vegas uncontested for almost 40 years, got muscled out by even bigger players - global corporations.

Today, the casino business in Vegas is almost entirely controlled by four companies - Las Vegas Sands, MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, and Wynn Resorts. They have their own scandals - Wynn Resorts founder Steve Wynn resigned from his own company during a blizzard of sexual misconduct allegations. Las Vegas Sands admitted to the SEC that it likely violated federal laws against bribery of foreign officials. And after the horrific mass shooting at an outdoor country music festival in 2017 which left 60 dead and over 400 injured, MGM Resorts actually sued the survivors and family members of the dead, a pre-emptive manuever that may have been a play to get a friendlier judge for a legal settlement. The public response was, understandably, one of horror.

Las Vegas is still a place worth unimaginable money to whoever controls it, and you have to hand it to these modern corporations - they have the opportunity to commit offenses on a scale that mobsters from the Lower East Side could never have imagined.

***

At the top of the episode, we mentioned the body that recently resurfaced in a 40-year old barrel in Lake Mead. Incredibly, just in the time we’ve been revising and fact-checking this script, another corpse has been discovered in the same waters. Each one hints at the existence of yet another story of the wages of sin in the Nevada desert; whether they were innocent, guilty, or somewhere in between, this cool and peaceful oasis was the end of the dark path their lives followed through Las Vegas.

When President Roosevelt dedicated the Hoover Dam on September 30th 1935, he said, quote, "Ten years ago the place where we are gathered was an unpeopled, forbidding desert. In the bottom of a gloomy canyon, whose precipitous walls rose to a height of more than a thousand feet, flowed a turbulent, dangerous river. The mountains on either side of the canyon were difficult to access with neither road nor trail, and their rocks were protected by neither trees nor grass from the blazing heat of the sun. The site of Boulder City was a cactus-covered waste. The transformation wrought here in these years is a twentieth-century marvel."

A marvel is the right word for what followed - the prosperity, the transformation wrought in Las Vegas; the overwhelming experience of visiting America’s capital of gambling today. The city openly acknowledges its mob past - our team enjoyed Prohibition-style cocktails in a faux speakeasy in the basement of the city’s original courthouse. They even needed a password to get in; but these days, you can learn the password on Instagram.

There’s a tension here that can never quite be reconciled - whether we should see this as entertaining local color, or something much more haunting. All cliches aside, when it comes to the real harm this place can cause, what happens in Vegas doesn’t actually stay in Vegas. Whoever was in that barrel, they probably have living relatives.

It’s hard enough to reckon with darkness in history, and in Las Vegas you have a place designed from the ground up to distract you from such thoughts, to surround you so thoroughly with neon and noise, sequins and superstars, temptations beyond imagining, that you can’t even tell what time it is. And in a city so disorienting, and with so many deadly secrets hidden in the shadows, it’s no surprise that people here whisper about things even stranger than mobsters. But those stories are for next time, when Part Two of our field trip takes us to the haunted side of Sin City. Make sure you’re subscribed so you can hear it.

***

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with Ashley Whitesides and Evadne Hendrix; and our creative director is Dom Purdie. This story was prepared for us by Laura Townsend, with major assistance from our special Las Vegas expert and tour guide, Veronica Hodur. Check out her writings on Vegas.com. Our Senior Story Editor is Nicholas Thurkettle, and our fact-checker Nicholas Abraham; big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.

Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5-star rating wherever you’re listening. It really helps the show, and we love to hear from you.

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.

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