The Money and the Power

Starred review from February 26, 2001

This ambitious, jolting investigative history simultaneously explores the "secret history" of Las Vegas malfeasance and the expansion of the city's ethos of greed and artifice into a wholesale American model. Married co-authors Denton (The Bluegrass Conspiracy) and Morris (Partners in Power) offer an expansive, finely detailed, slightly convoluted cultural narrative, beginning with concise biographies of key figures (mobsters Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, news tycoon Hank Greenspun, anti-crime-crusading Senator Estes Kefauver). Failed 1950s reform movements allowed for the ascendance of organized crime, fortified by huge "skim" profits from casinos. Operation Underworld, a WWII collaboration between government and "Syndicate" forces, forged extensive relationships between federal agencies, corrupted police and gangsters that proved central to Las Vegas's economic boom. The profits radiated corruption outward, evinced in such "blowback" as repeated CIA-Mob assassination attempts on Castro. Formidable researchers, Denton and Morris train gimlet eyes on compromised officials like J. Edgar Hoover, gambling tycoons like Benny Binion and killers-cum-businessmen like Sam Giancana. They look into the growth of more malignant, polyethnic (and, they claim) CIA-supported organized crime facilitated by stereotyping of the Italian Mafia. Although their conflation of glitzy Vegas profligacy with corporate politics and consumerism may seem unwieldy, the book is undeniably disturbing and engrossing. It concludes with the 1999 mayoral election of Oscar Goodman, notorious Syndicate attorney, which was an augury of business as usual in what the authors portray as democracy's spiritual capital. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Mar. 26)Forecast:With the authors' good reputations, the first printing of 75,000 copies, the nine-city tour (including a Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette author luncheon), the unending fascination with Las Vegas–style debauchery and the Mafia, and certain media interest, this book can expect a big audience.

October 1, 2000
Award-winning investigative reporter Denton and her husband, formerly with the National Security Council, show how corruption built Las Vegas.

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2001
The idea of Las Vegas as the epitome of crass American pop culture has become at least a surface truism in most circles. But Denton and Morris--the former an award-winning investigative reporter and the latter an award-winning author and a senior staffer on the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon--go much deeper than the surface in this sobering account of the famous Nevada resort town. In their exhaustive history of Las Vegas, they offer in-depth profiles of the major players who turned "a gritty, wind-whipped crossroads of faded whorehouses and honky-tonks" into what has become a vacation spot that "nearly half of America has [visited], more than any other locale in the nation." Vegas, they argue, was founded with and is still kept afloat by drug money (now it's international drug money). What is even more disturbing is that the criminal forces at work in Vegas have permeated into high levels of both business and government. The authors present compelling evidence to suggest that corruption in Las Vegas has a profound effect on American life. The city is, in their view, a huge neon symbol of "the open collusion of government, business, and criminal commerce that has become a governing force in the American system." This is strong stuff and sure to be controversial; expect demand to follow in the authors' wake as they tour the talk shows.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)