Friday, Aug. 29, 2003 | 11:24 a.m.
From the large-scale Operation Yobo in the 1980s to the conviction of a Clark County justice of the peace caught buying cacti stolen from public lands in the 1990s, Las Vegas has had its share of political corruption drama.
The strip club raids in May in San Diego and Las Vegas -- which resulted in the indictment of seven people, including former County Commissioner Lance Malone and strip club owner Mike Galardi -- are the latest in a series of incidents that have resulted in political figures facing judicial action.
Operation Yobo resulted in the convictions of state Sens. Floyd Lamb and Gene Echols and Clark County Commissioners Jack Petitti and Woodrow Wilson on bribery charges in 1983 and 1984.
Michael Green, professor of history at the Community College of Southern Nevada, says it's not that there wasn't political corruption in Las Vegas before the 1980s, it's that booming growth since then has made the town too big for modern political figures to get away with stuff that the old guard did.
"Before the 1980s Las Vegas was a small town, where everyone would meet at the same watering hole every day and protect each other through their friendships," he said.
"Now, the town is too big -- it's big-city corruption. That's why Yobo was so significant because it shook up so many people to see that such important men from the old Las Vegas were being indicted. It makes you wonder just how much corruption really was going on in the old days."
Hal Rothman, author and chairman of the History Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said the strip-club scandal is "minor league" compared with past Las Vegas political scandals.
What's interesting though, Rothman said, is how Nevada politicians have reacted to the recent allegations of corruption.
"The last couple of times, Yobo in the '80s and in the '60's ... the state politicians jumped to the defense of the accused politicians," Rothman said. "That's not happening this time. They are running, fleeing, from these people."
Rothman said the change shows how Las Vegas has changed over the last 30 years.
"We don't wink at things the way we used to," he said. "The response to political corruption is what we would expect in the rest of the country. That's a pretty big change."
State Archivist Guy Rocha said early in the state's history corruption cases involved state officials stealing from state coffers.
In 1869 state officials discovered after his death that the first state treasurer, Evan Rhoades, had been embezzling from the state school lands fund.
"Right from the beginning as a state we were confronted by malfeasance in office," Rocha said. "The system did not allow for double checks. This resulted in reform of our fiscal system."
But it didn't stop a larger case decades later involving state Treasurer Ed Malley and Controller George Cole, who worked a scheme to embezzle money from the state. They were indicted in 1927 and were in prison from 1927 to 1931. Before the indictment, Cole did not run for re-election and Malley was removed from office when the indictment and conviction occurred.
Further fiscal reforms have stopped most stealing directly from the public coffers, Rocha said. Modern cases take a more indirect route.
"What we've got today is influence peddling," he said. "You've got outsiders who are allegedly influencing decision-making of elected officials. In this case elected officials are doing other people's bidding.
"I guess it raises the question of accountability and how we make those determinations. It strikes me in the Yobo case it took federal authorities" to dig out the corruption.
"Why aren't we discovering this with our own law enforcement?" Rocha asked. "Why does it always take the feds to expose this type of activity?"
While no case other than the present one has drawn as much attention to political corruption in Las Vegas in the last 20 years, misadventures of office holders on a smaller scale have been nonetheless intriguing.
For example, in 1996 Justice of the Peace Daniel Ahlstrom pleaded guilty to buying cacti stolen from public lands, a felony, in Arizona. A plea bargain forced him to surrender his robe after 18 years on the bench.
Ahlstrom, now public administrator, at the time said: "Life makes beginners out of all of us. I'll just start over as a beginner."
In 1998 District Judge Gerard Bongiovanni got a measure of vindication when he was found not guilty of 13 charges of federal bribery and wire fraud resulting from a two-year political corruption investigation.
The case nevertheless took a "terrible toll" on Bongiovanni, his attorney Tom Pitaro said. Bongiovanni was voted out of office in the 1996 primary after serving one term on the bench.
Bongiovanni said after the verdict he had no desire to return to the bench but instead would go back to being a lawyer. However, he ran last year for the newly created District Court Department 21 seat won by Valerie Adair.
The FBI had its fair share of success in Yobo, a sting operation that ended the political careers of four revered community leaders.
"There is no doubt in my mind to this day that I was set up," Echols, the only one of the four still living, said in a May 16 Sun story recalling Yobo in light of the strip club raids.
Echols, a former North Las Vegas mayor and a state senator for 10 years, pleaded guilty in 1984 to taking $1,000 from an FBI agent posing as a representative of Arizona chiropractors who wanted to set up local land deals. Echols sold real estate after a brief prison term and then retired.
Wilson, the first black elected to the Nevada Legislature and the second black man to serve on the County Commission, pleaded guilty to accepting a $5,000 bribe from an undercover FBI agent the day Echols entered his plea. He was given probation. He died Christmas Day 1999 at age 84.
Petitti, who served 12 years on the North Las Vegas City Council and 12 years on the County Commission, was convicted of taking a $5,000 bribe from an FBI agent posing as a developer of a fat farm on Mount Charleston. He served six months in prison and died in November 2000 at age 81.
Lamb, who served 27 years in the state Senate, was convicted in 1983 of accepting $20,000 from an undercover agent in exchange for a promise to help arrange a state loan to help purchase a Reno casino. He served eight months in prison. He died in June at age 87.
In another major political corruption case of the 1980s, U.S. District Judge Harry Claiborne faced bribery charges in a trial that ended in a hung jury in 1984.
For his second trial, federal prosecutors dropped the bribery charges and Claiborne was found guilty of tax evasion. He later was impeached and removed from office. He went back to his law practice, which he continues today.
Sun reporters
Dan Kulin and Jean Reid Norman contributed to this story.
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