Old Vegas drew dreamers, toughs

By Jack Sheehan

Sunday, Feb. 17, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Bent-nosed hoods in pinstriped suits.

Off-duty showgirls sitting cross-legged at the bar with eyelashes like bats preparing for flight, looking for Mr. Right, or even Mr. Right Now.

Ex-boxers stationed by the front door of casinos greeting customers by their first names and asking about the little tyke.

Big Julie’s junket junkies parading through the Dunes, requesting another marker and piling up the comped drinks and show tickets.

The shark-finned Cadillac cruising into the still night with a lifeless body in the trunk.

The cocktail server in the miniskirt drawing whistles as she picks up bacon and eggs on her way home from the graveyard shift.

The Checkmates rocking a lounge with more stars in the audience than can be found beyond the horizon on a sterile desert night.

The croupier blowing his toke envelope at the casino across the street, in denial over what he’s come to know over the most recent cold streak but won’t accept: that the casual gambler nearly always loses.

• • •

The stereotypical image of Las Vegas in the 1960s and ’70s was that of a catchall community of second-chancers, bail-jumpers, pipe-dreamers, entrepreneurs looking for open spaces, divorcees looking for a quick nip and tuck, saints and sinners, and everything in between.

The movie that came closest to getting it right was Francis Ford Coppola’s classic “One from the Heart.” For his brave effort, the director of “The Godfather” went into bankruptcy.

Hunter Thompson came to Las Vegas back then for an off-road race and ingested more drugs than a heavy-metal band on sabbatical.

John Gregory Dunne came here because it felt like an ideal spot to end his own life. What he found were other lives so twisted or in tatters that he began to feel better about himself.

Tom Wolfe came here and witnessed such jaundiced behavior that his Vegas weekend melded perfectly into a new style of journalism, chock full of fragments and ellipses and exclamation marks.

• • •

When I ask friends who moved to Las Vegas, as I did, in that bygone era to explain their reasons for transplanting to a place almost universally derided for its amorality, lack of culture and desolate landscape, they seldom have an answer underscored by noble intentions.

They usually respond with something like, “I was leaving a busted romance,” or “I just wanted to play for a few months, and I ran out of cash and got stuck here,” or “I needed excitement, and (Boise or Topeka or Moline or Spokane) just wasn’t cutting it.”

My rationale was that my hometown wasn’t offering enough inspiration for an aspiring scribbler, and Vegas felt like an ideal sanctuary from an icy winter while I took stock of the rest of my life. Once settled, I could never shake myself free of the city’s Byzantine allure.

The mob was still entrenched here in the mid-’70s. Tough Tony Spilotro was riding high with his band of burglars and hit men. Lefty Rosenthal, a convicted sports fixer, was a front man at the Stardust, where the counting-room skim was in full bloom. And Jerry Tarkanian’s hardscrabble Boys Town refugees had found their Father Flanagan, who showed them how to throw up 110 points a game against West-Coast patsies and the occasional Top 20 team. (Had there been a three-point line back then, they’d have averaged 125. You wanted to take a shot on that team? Get a rebound.)

A Metro homicide detective I’d once profiled knocked on the door of my home one day to alert me to the fact that my next door neighbor was a hit man for the Buffalo mob. “He’s killed more than a dozen people,” the cop said. “Watch your back.”

The killer’s kid was my paperboy. I gave him generous tips on holidays, a twisted form of life insurance.

Ink-stained, rolled-up-sleeves newspaper columnist Ned Day, who would become a good friend, was reveling in it all, initially for slave wages at the punk-nosed third newspaper, the Valley Times, and then later to a wider audience at the Review-Journal and on Channel 8 News. Ned was fearless. He called Spilotro a fire hydrant who walked like a man, and labeled henchman Dominic Spinale “little Dickie.”

Everyone with a vested interest in Sin City read Ned’s column three days a week back then and marveled at his audacity. To get your name mentioned was an honor, unless you were on the wrong side of the law. Then you either went into hiding or called his bluff.

Ned once plopped some Polaroids of severed body parts on my desk. They had been mailed to him with a threatening letter.

“They think this crap will scare me off,” he cackled. “You gotta love this town.”

In his next column he fired back at the thugs, hurling more grenades their way. The dude had guts.

A few years later Ned never made it out of the shallow surf in Hawaii, and his last newspaper column, published posthumously, implied that he might be sleeping with the fishes soon. We’ll never fully know what happened there, but we have our suspicions.

The 1970s also marked the heyday of Jimmy Chagra, the world’s biggest weed peddler, who laundered millions through several casinos, particularly one with a Roman theme. He was later indicted on a charge of arranging the murder of a federal judge about to preside over his trial. The convicted hit man was actor Woody Harrelson’s papa.

Jimmy beat the conspiracy rap, thanks to several Perry Mason moments from his brilliant legal counsel, our own Mayor Oscar Goodman. But he served nearly a quarter century in federal pens for other offenses.

I’ve come to know and befriend Chagra, who lives quietly in the Southwest with a new wife and a feisty Chihuahua that’s as tough as his old man.

Jimmy’s tales of how it used to be in Las Vegas are both thrilling and chilling.

Was Vegas better off then? Sure, it was more personal, less corporate. You could patronize a local watering hole and know everyone in the place, but if you crossed the wrong crowd you might end up with your head in a vise.

A Gallup Poll would probably call it a split decision, but one thing is certain:

No place evolves faster than Las Vegas, whether we like it or not.