Before the corporate towers, before   Steve Win, before the theme parks and   the buffets and the billiondoll resort   fees, Las Vegas belonged to somebody   else. Not the bankers, not the   shareholders, not the men in suits who   show up in the annual reports. It   belonged to a group of men in Chicago   who never set foot on the casino floor,   never dealt a single card, never pulled   a single lever.

 

  But every week without fail, the money   found its way back to them. This is how   the Chicago outfit secretly ran Las   Vegas for 30 years and almost got away   with it forever. To understand how   Chicago took Las Vegas, you first have   to understand what Las Vegas was before   they got there.

 

 In the late 1940s,      Nevada was the only state in America   where casino gambling was legal. That’s   it. One state. And the men who figured   that out first  were not   businessmen. They were gangsters.   Specifically, they were Benjamin Bugsy   Seagull, a New York mobster with a   vision and a temper.

 

 And his    backers, the National Crime Syndicate, a   loose confederation of mob families   stretching from New York to Chicago to   Kansas City to Cleveland.    Seagull built the Flamingo in   1946.   He went over budget. He skimmed money   from the construction funds. And in June   of 1947,   somebody put six bullets in him through   the window of his girlfriend’s living   room in Beverly Hills.

 

 The mob didn’t   like losing money. They liked it even   less when one of their own was the   reason. But the flamingo didn’t close.   It kept running. And it kept making   money. And the men who had backed   Seagull, the men sitting in Chicago and   New York and Kansas City, they looked at   what was happening in that desert and   they understood something fundamental.

 

  Las Vegas wasn’t just a casino town. It   was a machine. A machine that turned   cash into more cash endlessly,   invisibly, with no paper trail and   almost no oversight. Nevada had no   corporate gaming regulations in those   early years. You didn’t need a spotless   background to get a license. You needed   money and the right friends, and the mob   had both.

 

  So, they moved in. Not all at once, not   loudly. They moved in the way the mob   always moved in. quietly    through intermediaries, through   frontmen, through lawyers and   businessmen who could sit across from a   licensing board and smile and say the   right things while the real owners sat a   thousand miles away and waited for the   envelopes.

 

  Chicago saw the desert for exactly what   it was. A place where the rules had not   been written yet,  and they   intended to write them first. The   Chicago outfit was not like the New York    families. New York was loud,   territorial, constantly at war with   itself.

 

 Five families fighting over the    same streets. Chicago operated   differently. The outfit was one   organization, one boss, one set of   rules. And by the early 1950s,   under boss Tony Aardo, the outfit was   the most disciplined, most profitable   criminal organization in the country.   Aardo understood something that a lot of   mob bosses did  not.

 

 Violence was   a tool, not a hobby. You used it when   you needed to, and  you kept   quiet the rest of the time. He kept the   FBI at arms length and the politicians   on the payroll and the money flowing.   And when he looked west at Las Vegas, he   did not see a gamble. He saw  an   investment.

 

 The outfit’s entry into Las   Vegas was methodical. They did not just   walk in and demand a piece. They sent   representatives.  They installed   frontmen. They cut deals with local   operators who needed capital and did not   ask too many questions about where it   came  from. The Stardust was the   crown jewel.

 

 Opened in 1958,    it was for years the largest hotel in   the world. And almost from the day it   opened, it was tied to Chicago. The man   who ran it on paper was different from   the men who ran it in reality. That gap   between the name on the license and the   name on the money, that gap was the   whole ball game.

 

 The Desert Inn had   connections. The Fremont had   connections. The Horseshoe, the Hienda,   the Riviera. One by one, Chicago either   moved in directly  or made   arrangements with the operators already   there. They did not need to own   everything. They just needed a piece of   everything.  A percentage here, a   percentage there.

 

 In a town that    was processing millions of dollars a   week in cash, even a small percentage   was a fortune.   The key to understanding how this worked   is understanding the nature of a casino.   In that era, every night, hundreds of   thousands of dollars passed through   those buildings. Most of it in cash.   Small bills, large bills, chips   converted back to currency.

 

 All of it   moving so fast and in such volume that   tracking it was nearly impossible. The   mob did not create that chaos. They just   learned to live inside it. and   eventually they learned to profit from   it in a way that would take the FBI   almost three decades to fully untangle.    If you want to understand the   Chicago outfit’s relationship with Las   Vegas, you need to understand one word,   the skim.

  The skim was elegant   in its simplicity. Before the casino’s   cash was counted for tax purposes,    before it was recorded, before   it entered any ledger that a government   auditor might ever see, a portion of it   disappeared, taken right out of the   counting room, removed before the   numbers were written down, gone. It   sounds almost too simple.

 

 But in the   1960s and the 1970s, Las Vegas counting   rooms were not the hermetically sealed,   camera monitored, triple audited   operations they are today. They were   rooms where a handful of trusted   employees counted enormous amounts of   cash under the supervision of men who   reported to men who reported to men in   Chicago.

 

 The system relied on loyalty,   fear, and the understanding that if you   talked, you were dead. The mechanics   varied by casino.   at the Stardust. According  to   federal investigators, the skim involved   casino managers physically removing cash   from the dropboxes before the official   count. The money was bundled, wrapped,   and handed off.

 

 It moved through   couriers, sometimes hidden in ordinary   objects, sometimes carried on the   person, sometimes shipped through the   mail.   It traveled from Las Vegas to Kansas   City to Milwaukee to Chicago,   distributed among the families who had a   stake in the operation.   FBI agents who worked the case in the   1970s described it as one of the most   sophisticated financial crimes they had   ever encountered.

 

 Not because it was   technically complex. It wasn’t. It was   sophisticated because it was hidden   inside a legitimate business, inside the   noise and volume of a real casino floor,   inside the daily chaos of thousands of   transactions.   The skim didn’t look like theft because   everything around it looked like normal   business.

 

 How much money are we talking   about?   Federal prosecutors estimated that over   the course of roughly two decades, the   Stardust skim alone amounted to   somewhere between 7 and $15 million.   Across all the mob connected casinos   across the full span of the operation,   the total figure was staggering.   Some estimates put it north of $40   million untaxed, untraced, gone.

 

 The men   who received that money in Chicago never   set foot in Nevada. Tony Accardo   received his cut. Joey Aayupa received   his cut. The bosses in Kansas City and   Milwaukee and Cleveland took their   percentages.   Las Vegas was not just a city. It was a   revenue stream. A dividend that paid out   week after week, year after year, as   long as the right people stayed in place   and the counting  room stayed   quiet.

 

 Nick Calibrizzy, the Chicago   hitman who eventually became the   government’s most important mob witness,    later described the skim in   simple terms. The money came in from   Vegas. It got split up. Everybody got   their end. That was the deal. That was   always the deal. By the early 1970s,   Chicago had a problem.

 

 The operation in   Las Vegas was massive. The money was   flowing. But money that size    moving through a city that was   increasingly attracting federal   attention needed protection, not legal   protection, the other kind. So Chicago   sent Tony Spelotro.   Anthony Spelotro was born in Chicago in   1938, the fourth of six sons in an   Italian-American family on the west   side.

 

 From the time he was a teenager,   he was  running with the outfit.   He was small, barely 5’4,   but he had a reputation for violence   that was outsized even by mob standards.   The FBI  considered him one of   the most dangerous men in Chicago. His   fellow outfit members called him Tony   the  Ant, not as a compliment.   Spelotro arrived in Las Vegas  in   1971   with a jewelry store as his cover and   the entire outfit’s western operation as   his real responsibility.

 

  His job was to oversee the skim, manage   the outfit’s  interests on the   ground, and deal with anyone who   threatened those interests. Deal with,   in mob terms, was a flexible phrase. He   was supposed to be invisible. He was   anything but. Spilotro set up a crew in   Las Vegas that became known as the hole   in the wall gang.

 A burglary ring that   hit high-end homes across the valley.   He ran lone sharking operations,   extortion rackets, drug distribution.   He was everywhere, loud,    visible, and completely uninterested in   the low profile that Chicago desperately   needed him to maintain. He also fell in   love with Jerry McGee, the wife of his   closest friend and the man Chicago    had installed as the front man   of the Stardust, Frank Rosenthal.

 

 That   affair wasn’t just a personal betrayal.    It was a liability. It was   exactly the kind of chaos that brought   heat. And heat was the one thing the   operation could not afford. The FBI had   been watching Spelotro since the day he   arrived. By the late 1970s, he had   become one of the most surveiled men in   Nevada.

 

 Federal agents photographed his   meetings, tracked his movements,   documented his crew. Every day Spelotro   stayed in Las Vegas was another day the   entire operation was exposed. Chicago   tolerated him for years because he was   effective. But effectiveness has limits.   And by the mid 1980s, Spelotro had   crossed too many lines.

 

 He was facing   multiple federal indictments. His crew   was compromised. His affair with Jerry    Rosenthal was public knowledge.   And he had begun, according to sources   who later testified,    to talk about taking over the Chicago   outfit itself, building his own power    base, going around the bosses.

 

  That was the last line. Nobody went   around the bosses.   In June of 1986, Tony Spelotro and his   brother Michael were called back to   Chicago. They were told Tony  was   getting a promotion. Instead, they were   taken to a basement in the quiet Chicago   suburb of Bensonville, and six men beat   them to death with their bare hands.

 

  Their bodies were buried in an Indiana   cornfield.    They were found 9 days later by a farmer   who noticed his corn wasn’t growing   right in one corner of his field. Tony   Spelotro was Chicago’s solution to Las   Vegas.   And then he became Chicago’s problem.   And then he became a body in the ground.   That’s how the outfit handled its   mistakes.

 

  The skim was how Chicago  took   money out of Las Vegas. But to   understand the full scope of the   operation, you have to understand how   the money got into Las Vegas in the   first place. And that story runs   straight through the International      Brotherhood of Teamsters and a man named   Alan Dorfman.

 

 The Teamsters Central   States Pension Fund was one of the   largest pools of money in America in the   1960s and the 1970s.   It held hundreds of millions of dollars   in retirement contributions from truck   drivers across the country.   and through the influence of mob   connected Teamsters boss Jimmy Hawa and   later through the work of Alan Dorfman,   the son of one of Hoffa’s closest   associates.

 That pension fund became   essentially a private bank for organized   crime. Dorfman was not a made member of   the mob. He wasn’t Italian, but he was   trusted in the way that only the most   valuable    associates are trusted. He controlled   access to the money and access to that   money meant access to Las Vegas. Casino   after casino on the strip was built or   expanded using Teamster’s pension fund   loans.

 

 The Stardust, the Fremont, the   Horseshoe, Caesar’s Palace in its early   years. The list goes on. These weren’t   necessarily corrupt loans in the   traditional sense. The casinos were real   businesses making real money. The loans   got repaid mostly, but the terms, the   conditions, the decisions about who got   the money and who didn’t, all of that   flowed through Dorfman and through the   mob families he answered to.

 

 In return,   Chicago and its allies got influence,   got a seat at the table, got the ability   to install their people in key positions   inside the casinos that borrowed the   money. The pension fund was not just a   bank.  It was leverage. And in   the hands of the outfit, leverage was   everything.

 

 Dorfman was indicted   repeatedly throughout the 1970s.    He beat cases, paid fines, kept   operating. But by the early 1980s, the   walls were closing in. In January of   1983,  federal prosecutors   obtained a conviction against Dorfman   for bribery. He was facing a lengthy   prison sentence and the FBI was   convinced    based on surveillance and informant   information that the outfit had decided   Dorfman knew too much to be allowed to   go to prison. They were right.

 

 On   January 20th, 1983, Alan Dorfman walked   out of a hotel in Lincolnwood, Illinois   with a Teamsters associate. Two gunmen   approached him in the parking lot and   shot him multiple times in the head. He   died at the scene. Nobody was ever   charged with his murder.  With   Dorfman gone, one of the last pillars of   the Teamster’s money pipeline collapsed.

 

  The FBI had been methodically   dismantling the infrastructure for   years. And by the mid1 1980s, the   combination of federal prosecutions,    casino regulation reforms, and   the increased scrutiny on the   Teamsters’s pension fund had effectively    cut off the flow of mob capital   into Las Vegas.

 

  The machine was still running, but it   was running on fumes.   The FBI investigation into mob control   of Las Vegas casinos    was one of the longest and most complex   organized crime cases in American   history.   It didn’t start with a single tip or a   single informant.   It started with the money.

 

 In the early   1970s,  agents in the FBI’s   organized crime units in Chicago, Kansas   City, and Las Vegas began comparing   notes. They saw the same names appearing   in different cities. They saw cash   moving in  patterns that didn’t   match legitimate business operations.   They started pulling threads.   The challenge was the same challenge the   FBI always faced with the outfit.

 

     These were disciplined people. Tony   Iardo had a rule that went back decades.    You don’t talk on the phone. You   don’t talk in cars. You don’t talk in   restaurants. You meet face to    face in trusted locations. And even   then, you say as little as possible. The    outfit had been operating under   that discipline since before most of the   FBI agents investigating them were born.

 

  But the bureau  was patient. They   planted informants. They ran   surveillance. They waited  and   slowly over years they built a picture.   Operation  Straw Man was the name   the FBI gave to the investigation into   the Las Vegas skim. By the late 1970s,    agents had enough information to   begin seeking court authorization for   wiretaps on key figures in Chicago,   Kansas City, and Las Vegas.

 

 What they   captured on those wire taps was   extraordinary conversations about the   skim, about distribution of money,    about which casinos were   performing and which weren’t, about the   relationships between Chicago and its   partner families in other cities. In   September of 1983, federal grand juries   in Kansas City and Las Vegas returned   indictments    against a remarkable collection of mob   figures.

 

 Chicago boss Joey    Aayupa, under boss Jackie Cerrone,   Kansas City boss Nick Sevela, and   several of his associates,   Milwaukee boss Frank Bistrieri.   The charges were racketeering and   conspiracy,    specifically related to the Las Vegas   ski. The trial that followed in 1985 and   1986 in Kansas City was a landmark in   organized crime prosecution.

 

 For the   first time,  the government put   on evidence that systematically   documented the entire infrastructure of   mob control over Las Vegas    casinos. The wiretap recordings were   devastating. Jury selection alone took   weeks because the defendant list read   like a who’s who of American organized   crime.

 

 In January of 1986, the verdicts   came in. Aayupa, Cerone, CLA,   Balistrieri, and multiple others were   convicted.   Sentences ranged from 10 years to 30    years. Most of the men convicted   were in their 60s and 70s.   Several would  die in prison. It   was by any measure the most significant   blow to the Chicago outfits  Las   Vegas operation in its entire history.

 

  But the FBI wasn’t done.   The trials that broke the outfit, the   1986 Kansas  City verdicts were a   turning point. They did not end the   story.  They began the last   chapter of it. In the years that   followed, the Chicago outfit continued   to operate in Las Vegas, but at a   diminished capacity.

 

  The   leadership had been devastated by the   convictions. The Teamster’s money   pipeline was gone.   Tony Spelotro  was found dead in   an Indiana cornfield.   Frank Rosenthal, the front man who had   run the Stardust for over a decade, had   been blown up by a car bomb in a   McDonald’s parking lot in 1982, survived   by sheer luck and eventually fled Las   Vegas for good.

 

 The infrastructure that   had made the whole operation possible   was collapsing  from every   direction at once. Nevada itself was   changing. In 1969, the state passed    the Corporate Gaming Act, which   allowed publicly traded corporations to   own casinos. That opened the door for   legitimate  capital on a massive   scale.

 

 Howard Hughes had already started   buying properties in the late 1960s. By   the 1980s, corporate operators were   transforming the strip into something   the mob had never intended it to become,   clean and transparent, the opposite of   everything that had made it so   profitable for so long.   The Nevada  Gaming Control Board   was getting serious.

 

 Background   investigations became rigorous and   licensing requirements became strict.   The  era when a frontman with the   right connections could walk into a   hearing and smile his way through was   over.   And then came the cooperating    witnesses.   Nick Calibrizzy, the Chicago hitman who   agreed to testify against his own   brother and the rest of the outfit’s    leadership in the family secrets   trial of 2007, gave federal prosecutors   something they had never had before.

 

 He   was a full member of the Chicago outfit,   a man who had participated in murders,   who  had attended making   ceremonies, who had sat in rooms where   decisions were made, and who was willing   to tell everything.   Calibres’s  testimony confirmed   what investigators had long suspected   about the Spelotro murders and dozens of   other crimes.

 

    But it also filled in gaps about the LS   Vegas operation, about who gave    orders and who carried them out, and who   received money from a desert city a   thousand miles away from Chicago.   The family secrets trial resulted in   convictions for mob boss James Marcelo,   who received a life sentence.

 

 Joey the   Clown Lombardo, one of the most colorful   and feared figures in Chicago mob   history,  was convicted on   multiple counts, including his role in   the Spilotro murders. He had spent    months as a fugitive, actually   placing a classified ad in a Chicago   newspaper  declaring he was not a   member of organized crime before being   captured and brought to trial.

 

 He too   received a life sentence. These were not   just convictions. They were the final   accounting.  The men who had   built and operated the Chicago outfits   Las Vegas empire or who had inherited it   were now dying in federal prison one by   one.    The Stardust, the casino that had been   the heart of the operation for so many    years, was demolished in 2007.

 

  It was imploded on a Tuesday morning.   The footage of that implosion,    the tower collapsing in a cloud of dust   and debris, felt like a metaphor that   was almost too obvious. A whole era gone   in 11 seconds. By the time the    Stardust came down, the MOBs Las Vegas   was already ancient history.

 

 But for a   long time, the transition was not   obvious to the people living inside it.   Through the late 1970s and into the   early 1980s, even as federal pressure   mounted and convictions began to pile   up, the outfit maintained the illusion   of control. The counting rooms still   operated.    The courier still moved money.

 

 The phone   calls still got made more carefully now,   shorter,  less specific, but   still made. Frank Rosenthal was still   running the Stardust  and the   Fremont and the Marina and the Hienda.   booking entertainment, setting lines on   sporting events, operating what was on   the surface one of the most successful   casino operations in Nevada history.

 

 His   relationship with Tony Spelotro, once    close, had collapsed into mutual   suspicion and barely contained hatred.   His marriage to Jerry McGee was in open   warfare. His position was increasingly   untenable. The FBI was everywhere.   Rosenthal had been denied a gaming   license by the Nevada Gaming Commission   in 1976 and denied again on appeal in   1979.

 

  He operated anyway under a series of   technical  workarounds and job   titles that kept him technically inside   the law while doing everything a   licensed operator  would do. In   October of 1982, someone wired a bomb   under the driver’s  seat of his   car, a two-tone Cadillac El Dorado,   parked outside a Tony Roma’s restaurant   in Las Vegas.

 

  Rosenthal  turned the key and the   explosion blew out the windows and sent   the car doors into the parking lot. He   survived  because the car   happened to have a metal plate a fallet   under the seat, a factory anomaly that   absorbed most of the blast. Nobody was   ever charged.

 

 After that, Rosenthal’s   days in Las Vegas were numbered. He left    eventually, relocated to Florida   and then California,   and spent the rest of his life as a    sports handicapper and radio   host, technically a private citizen,   occasionally a consultant.    He died in 2008.   The people who replaced him,  the   people Chicago sent after Spelotro was   gone and the old infrastructure had   crumbled, were managing a retreat.

 

 They   were not building an empire. They were   protecting what little remained.   By the early 1990s,  the   corporate transformation of Las Vegas   was essentially complete. Steve Wyn had   opened the Mirage in 1989, and nothing   was the same after that. The strip   became something new. A theme park for   adults, a destination for families, a   brandmanaged experience completely   incompatible with the shadow economy   that had run beneath it for 40 years.

 

  The mob did not disappear from Las Vegas   entirely. Elements of organized crime   continued to operate in the city as they   do in any major American city. But the   systematic, structured, hierarchical   control that the Chicago outfit had   exercised over the casinos, the counting   rooms, the money, the appointments, the   decisions that was finished.

 

 It had   taken the FBI 30 years to dismantle it.   And in the end, it was not just law   enforcement that ended it. It was the   arrival of something the mob could not   fight. legitimate money on a scale so   large it simply absorbed everything   else.   Here is what people do not fully   appreciate about the Chicago outfits   control of Las Vegas.

 

  It was not a side operation.  It   was not a skimming scheme tacked onto an   otherwise legitimate industry.   For roughly three decades, from the late   1940s to the early 1980s,   the mob was the Las Vegas casino    industry, or a significant enough   portion of it that the distinction   barely mattered.

 

 The money that flowed   through those counting  rooms,   the money that was skimmed before the   count, the money that was loaned from   Teamsters’s pension funds and never   fully accounted for. That money built   the city literally. The hotels, the   infrastructure, the roads, the    expansions, the entertainment   infrastructure that drew the tourists   who created the legitimate industry that   eventually replaced the mob operation.

 

  All of it was capitalized, at least in   part, with organized crime money.   Chicago didn’t just profit from Las   Vegas.    Chicago built Las Vegas into the thing   it had to become before the corporations   could take it over. Tony Aardo died in   1992 at the age of 86  of natural   causes in a hospital in California.

 

 He   had been investigated by the FBI for   decades. He had been indicted. He had   never been convicted of anything   serious. He died a free man. The FBI   agents who  had spent their   careers trying to put him away described   his death with a mixture of frustration   and something that sounded reluctantly   like respect. He was good.

 

 One    agent said he was very, very good. Joey   Ayupa died in federal prison in 1997.   Jackie Cerrone died in prison in 1996.   Nick Sevela died in 1983 before    his case even went to trial. Frank   Bistrieri died in 1993. The bosses who   built the system died one by one. Most   of them in custody. A few of them free.

 

  All of them outlived  by the   institutions they had corrupted.   The Stardust is rubble. The Sands is a   convention center. The dunes is a   parking lot. The frontier is gone. The   physical infrastructure of Mob Las Vegas   has been  demolished and replaced   so thoroughly that you can stand on the   strip today and have no idea what used   to exist beneath your feet.

 

  But the World Series of Poker    still happens every year. Benny   Bignyan’s creation, nurtured in the era   when the mob ran everything, is now a   televised global phenomenon.   The concept of the high limit room,   Benny’s innovation, is standard in every   major casino on Earth. The hospitality    model, the comps, the hosts, the   idea that you treat the gambler like a   king so he keeps coming back.

 

 That was   the mob’s invention.    Born in a world where keeping the right   people happy  was a matter of   survival.   The corporations took the form and left   the origin story behind.   They took the machine and replaced the   machinists.   What the Chicago outfit understood.   What Tony Aardo understood and Joey Aupa   understood and even Tony Spilotro in his   reckless way understood was that Las   Vegas was not really about gambling.

 

 It   was about control. Control of the money.   Control of the information. Control of   who got access and who did not. Control   of the room where the counting happened.      When the FBI finally cracked that   control, when the cooperating witnesses    started talking and the wiretap   recording started playing in federal   courtrooms and the sentences started   coming down, it was not just a criminal   case.

 

  >>    >> It was the end of a particular American   story. The story of what happens when   you put an enormous amount of cash in   the desert and tell people to figure out   how to count it. Chicago figured it out   first. And they collected for 30    years before anyone could prove it. The   neon is different now.

 

 The names on the   buildings are different. The men who own   the casinos wear suits that fit better   and went to better schools and have   never in their lives needed to worry   about a grand jury.   But the machines keep spinning.    The money keeps moving. And somewhere in   the structure of how modern Las Vegas   operates, in the high roller suites and   the backroom arrangements and the   decisions made away from the public   count, you can still find the   architecture of something that was built   a long time ago by men who were very   good at making money disappear. The   desert does not forget. It just gets   covered over and built on top of. And   the new building gets a different name,   but the foundation is still there.