The Last Don - Mario Puzo [73]
But then, Pippi cautiously pointed out, despite all this there came times when risks had to be taken, when an iron fist must be shown. This the Family did with the utmost discretion and with terminal ferocity. And that was when you must earn the good life you led, when you truly earned your daily bread.
Shortly after his twenty-first birthday, Cross was finally put to the test.
One of the most prized political assets of the Clericuzio Family was Walter Wavven, the governor of Nevada. He was a man in his early fifties, tall and lanky, who wore a cowboy hat but dressed in perfectly tailored suits. He was a handsome man and though married had a lusty appetite for the female sex. He also enjoyed good food and good drink, loved to bet sports, and was an enthusiastic casino gambler. He was too tender of public feelings to expose these traits, or to risk romantic seductions. So he relied on Alfred Gronevelt and the Xanadu Hotel to satisfy these appetites while preserving his political and personal image of the God-fearing, steadfast believer in old-fashioned family values.
Gronevelt had recognized Wavven’s special gifts early on and provided the financial base that enabled Wavven to climb the political ladder. When Wavven became governor of Nevada and wanted a relaxing weekend, Gronevelt gave him one of the prized Villas.
The Villas had been Gronevelt’s greatest inspiration. . . .
Gronevelt had come to Vegas early, when it was still basically a western cowboy gambling town, and he had studied gambling and gamblers as a brilliant scientist might study an insect important to evolution. The one great mystery that would never be solved was why very rich men still wasted time gambling to win money they did not need. Gronevelt decided they did so to hide other vices, or they desired to conquer fate itself, but more than anything it was to show some sort of superiority to their fellow creatures. Therefore he reasoned that when they gambled they should be treated as gods. They would gamble as the gods gambled or the kings of France in Versailles.
So Gronevelt spent $100 million to build seven luxurious Villas and a special jewel-box casino on the grounds of the Xanadu Hotel (with his usual foresight he had bought much more land than the Xanadu needed). These Villas were small palaces, each could sleep six couples in six separate apartments, not merely suites. The furnishings were lavish: hand-woven rugs, marble floors, gold bathrooms, rich fabrics on the walls; dining rooms and kitchens staffed by the Hotel. The latest audiovisual equipment turned living rooms into theaters. The bars of these Villas were stocked with the finest wines and liquors and a box of illegal Havana cigars. Each Villa had its own outdoor swimming pool and inside Jacuzzi. All free to the gambler.
In the special security area that held the Villas was the small oval casino called the Pearl, where the high rollers could play in privacy and where the minimum bet in baccarat was a thousand dollars. The chips in this casino were also different, the black one-hundred-dollar chip was the lowest denominator; the five hundred, pale white threaded with gold; a gold-barred blue chip for the thousand; and the specially designed ten-thousand-dollar chip, with a real diamond embedded in the center of its gold surface. However, as a concession to the ladies, the roulette wheel would change hundred-dollar chips into five-dollar chips.
It was amazing that enormously wealthy men and women would take this bait. Gronevelt figured that all these extravagant RFB comps ran the Hotel fifty thousand dollars a week on the cost sheet. But these were written off on tax reports. Plus the prices of everything were inflated on paper. Figures (he kept a separate accounting) showed that each Villa made an average profit of a million dollars a week. The very fancy restaurants that served the Villas’ and other important guests also made a profit as tax write-offs. On the cost sheets, a dinner for four