Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [63]
It may have been a setup from the start. Maheu’s Mafia pal John Roselli claimed the whole Desert Inn eviction crisis was a Syndicate scam. “We roped Hughes into buying the D.I.,” Roselli reportedly told hit-man-turned-informer Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno. “Now it looks like he wants to buy the whole town, if we let him. He’s just what we need, especially with Maheu running the show.”
Clearly, Hughes was not running it. Apparently the Mob kept real control of his casinos, sold him their gambling emporiums at inflated prices, and kept right on picking his pocket, raking off millions. A secret IRS investigation would later conclude that Hughes had been the victim of a vast Mob skim, perhaps topping $50 million.
If that was true, Hughes was blissfully unaware of it, and for the moment seemed surprisingly untroubled by his casinos’ puzzling losses. And while he saw the Mob as a dangerous contaminant, he also saw a way he could use their threat to get on with his Monopoly game.
He would save Las Vegas from the gangsters, and he would save it from the gangbusters as well. For a price.
“Today, the President is chaffing at the bit in his eagerness to get at Nevada with a massive crime crusade, in order to divert public attention away from his failure to improve the Vietnam situation,” wrote Hughes.
“I think that you can argue with Gov. Laxalt that every day the situation continues brings with it an ever increasing risk of the entire beautiful castle of Nevada gaming coming crashing down in one overwhelming debacle which could be blown up to rival Tea Pot Dome.
“The President and his advisors would like nothing in this world so much as to find a basis under which he may attack Nevada gambling, because that is where the really big money is being made.
“He comes out against organized crime, but, in the absence of uncovering some huge underworld casino or some huge undercover brothel, which is not likely—in the absence of something like this, the President has no photos, no actual symbol, no example he can point to, in his efforts to attack crime.
“Bob, if he could just blacken Nevada gaming to the point where he could link it to organized crime, and make Nevada gaming the symbol of organized crime, then he could use all the figures, all the photos of Nevada casinos, all the pictures of Fremont Street with the flashing signs.
“All this would immediately become the vivid symbol of organized crime. Las Vegas would be pictured as Sin City.
“All the figures of gross gaming revenue, the figures of employment, the increased population, all this would be pictured to the public as one gigantic beehive of crime, a vast metropolis of sin, a vast factory for the industry of sin.
“I tell you, when the nation reaches a point where they need only say a man is ‘linked to Nevada Gaming’ to villify him beyond measure, and practically strap him in the electric chair, then I say it is time to worry about it.”
Hughes was getting so carried away in his lurid presentation of the threat that he almost lost sight of his plot: to present himself as savior, as the man who could grant a stay of execution.
“So, I want you to convince the Governor that I will use every last dollar I have to prevent the President from using Nevada as his political football in his attack on organized crime,” he continued,