My latest book, Vegas and the Chicago Outfit, took a little longer to finish researching than I had hoped. Instead of a year to research, write, and edit, my plan for October 2020 somehow went south. That's my way of saying I'm two years late getting my most detailed compilation of the rise of the Chicago Outfit and their inexhaustible takeover of every money-making casino in Las Vegas down in book form.
If that description sounds exaggerated, it's not. The Chicago Outfit came to the party in Las Vegas a bit later than the New York families. Still, by the late 1940s, the Windy City group had firm control of a half-dozen casinos from the Flamingo to the El Rancho, Thunderbird, and others.
By the 1960s, they had skimming operations in the Sands, Dunes, Aladdin, Riviera, Mint, Fremont, Stardust, Desert Inn, and of course, Caesars Palace.
The Chicago Outfit simply took the reins and shook harder than any other families, even with Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, Kansas City, Buffalo, and Milwaukee beating on the count room doors and demanding their "fair share."
Al Capone may have been a vicious psychopath and the mastermind of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre (that's explained in the book), but he was in prison by the '30s. It was Tony Accardo and Sam Giancana that saw Vegas as the ultimate cash cow as long as they killed off their rivals. It worked well.
So well that Giancana was raking in more than $1 million each month just from his cut of the skim gushing out of Vegas toward Chicago and places east through a hazy chain of runners with bags stuffed with unreported cash. A pretty fancy trick considering Giancana was helping the CIA in Nicaragua, Cuba, Iran and reporting on an upcoming assassination that rocked the world in the early 1960s.
Read for the Thrill - Not the Footnotes
As usual with my books, there are no footnotes. I hate footnotes. There is a full Index at the end of the paperback edition that the Kindle edition isn't graced with. You can look up Tony "The Ant" Spilotro, Marshall Caifano, Moe Sedway, Murray Humphreys, Estes Kefauver, Russian Louie, and hundreds of other noted characters - they're all in the book and the Index. But not in the footnotes.
If you want a textbook, sorry, this book reads more like the story it tells, chronologically, with highlights on the major casinos in Nevada - mostly in Las Vegas - the movers in the industry like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, Gus Greenbaum, Davie Berman, Jay Sarno, Howard Hughes, and others. And there's plenty about what was going on around the country while the casinos in Vegas were growing, prospering, and getting skimmed dry.
If you love Chicago Outfit stories, Las Vegas, casinos, and mobsters, you'll get a great view of Chicago from the days before Al Capone to the shakedowns of the bosses in the 1980s. But that's just the beginning because Vegas has always been the star, so enjoy Vegas and the Chicago Outfit and drop me a line here if you want!
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