Reddit reviews The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America
We found 5 Reddit comments about The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Little bit of Bugsy trivia-
Nobody called him Bugsy to his face. He would be mortified that he's remembered by that nickname. He was very eccentric, and "bugsy" was a then-common insult meaning crazy.
He was a notorious micro-manager. There are stories about how he would see a half built wall, demand that it be torn down and moved 10 feet closer to the pool, then come back a week later and demand it be moved 5 feet farther back. The mobsters assumed he was stealing that money, but it was really being spent on cost overruns.
The Flamingo started the trend of "carpet joints", casinos that had carpet on the floors instead of wood floors covered in sawdust to soak up tobacco spit.
Here's a book recommendation if you're interested in the crazy mobsters who created Vegas-
https://www.amazon.com/Money-Power-Making-Vegas-America/dp/0375701265
Preview- Meyer Lansky got involved in casinos because he was making so much money off of heroin that he couldn't launder it through corner grocery stores anymore.
In addition to being a CIA agent E Howard Hunt wrote spy novels. A principle character in his 1949 novel Bimini Run^1 is named Hank Sturgis.
(^1 sounds like a narcotrafficking operation!)
Implicated in the JFK assassination is another CIA man with a false identity and psuedonym, Frank Sturgis. He, like Hunt (and George Bush^2) was involved with anti-Castro Cubans exiled in South Florida. (^2 Take a look at the J Edgar Hoover memo about a young agent named George Bush whose job at the time was CIA handler for the Cubans exiled in Miami)
E Howard Hunt is very clearly seen in photos of the "Three Tramps" who were arrested fleeing the scene of the assassination pretending to be hobos.
E Howard Hunt's wife was also a career CIA agent, a Jewish woman named Dorothy Louise Wetzel, and rumored to be higher ranking than her husband in the intelligence community at the time. Listen to Hunt's children on youtube recount the travails of their CIA employed parents and how they were thrown under the bus. Hunt's CIA wife died in a suspicious commercial airline crash. It appears all the passengers were sacrificed just to kill her.
Jewish mob kingpin Meyer Lansky had a casino and criminal empire in pre-Castro Cuba. Lansky was also a CIA asset from the WWII, and he had a personal vendetta against Joe Kennedy Sr from the days of prohibition when they were both bootleggers after Joe ordered a hit on Lansky's smugglers.^3
This is one of those subjects that, when you look into it, get bigger and bigger, become ever increasingly astonishing.
I read this one forever ago and remember it being pretty good.
The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America https://www.amazon.com/dp/0375701265/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_j-WIBbRM24A7Y
This is a fantastic and heartbreaking story that takes place mostly in Vegas.
One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey ',The Kid', Ungar, The World's Greatest Poker Player https://www.amazon.com/dp/074347659X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_FaXIBbHX9ZZ5V
Stu Ungar was maybe the best Gin Rummy player in the world as a teenager. Since nobody would play him, he had to go to his second best card game- poker. He was maybe the best player in the world at that too.
Yeah let's not even broach the subject of drug money laundering and our corrupt foreign policy.
http://www.amazon.com/Money-Power-Making-Vegas-America/dp/0375701265
https://www.amazon.com/Money-Power-Making-Vegas-America/dp/0375701265
Vegas is the 'Rosetta Stone' of understanding the mob in America.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/607124.The_Gang_That_Couldn_t_Shoot_Straight
A Roman a clef ... very well researched by one of the best crime writers of that era.
PRIMITIVE REBELS by Eric Hobsawn
MAFIA & MAFIOSA by Henner Hess
Good places to start.