December 18, 2024 Wednesday
I just finished an interview with Morgan White Jr. on his powerful Boston AM broadcast that reaches the eastern two-thirds of the country. We discussed Ben Siegel, who became interested in Nevada, when it became the only state to have legal sports betting, and he had a large illegal operation. During the last decade of his life, Siegel was the most sought after dinner guest by Hollywood’s producers, directors, and stars. We discussed the three largest Prohibition gangs. They imported the world’s most expensive liquors, and they and their associates built 80% of the Las Vegas Strip hotel-casino resorts in the 1950s and 1960s. Siegel was a leader of the largest gang.
I opened the first sports book in a Las Vegas Strip casino, the Castaways’ Hole-in-the-Wall. Morgan was a personal friend of my sports book director, Sonny Reizner. When Sonny put up his betting line each morning at 9:00 AM, all the illegal bookies across the nation copied it, as they started accepting betting by phone.
We also discussed the building of the huge Boulder Dam during the Great Depression in the 1930s. The current Las Vegas Strip was built on the west side of the town during World War II on the Los Angeles highway. The first strip of casino bars was on the Boulder Highway on the east side of the town that went into Arizona. The dam workers were on the job around the clock, and they drove to these bars to drink. When they returned, the contractors did not want someone under the influence of alcohol to climb up the tall concrete towers that were connected together to create the dam. Thus, the guards at the construction gate smelled the breath of all the workers in every arriving car. If they had an odor of alcohol, they were directed to a large nearby parking pen, where they slept until they could pass the test. This policy was in place for the five years of construction.
