The Secret Money Pipeline That Built Las Vegas ht
June 2nd, 1978, approximately 9:15 in the evening. The Villa Capri Pizzeria sits at 2609 Independence Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri. A narrow storefront with red vinyl boos in a jukebox near the back wall. Two FBI agents from the Kansas City Organized Crime Squad are monitoring a wire tap planted inside the restaurant 3 weeks earlier.
[music] The bug wasn’t meant for this. Supervisor William’s team had installed it to pick up conversations about a string of murders connected [music] to the River Key Entertainment District, a local gang war that had already produced car bombings and at least three bodies. The agents are listening for names of shooters.
Instead, Carl Cork Sevela and Carl Angelo Duna slide into a booth near the back. The beeges staying alive is playing on the jukebox. The two men begin talking and what comes through the headphones isn’t about Kansas City at all. It’s about Las Vegas casino revenues. [music] A problem with a manager at the Tropicana, a ski that isn’t producing what it should distribution shares that need adjusting.
[music] The agents look at each other. As Uli later recalled, Las Vegas was the last thing on their minds. That accidental intercept would launch a 5-year federal investigation called Operation Strawman, the most extensive use of court authorized electronic surveillance in the history of the Omnibus Crime Control Act.
It would produce over 170 tape recordings, two landmark federal trials, and the conviction of 19 senior organized crime figures from four cities. It would dismantle permanently the mafia’s 30-year financial grip on Las Vegas. But none of that was the plan. The plan was to solve a murder. [music] The rest happened because two men sat down in a pizza restaurant and talked about a money pipeline [music] that almost nobody outside their world understood existed that almost nobody inside it could have explained from end to end. Everyone knows the mob built Vegas. It’s a line in every documentary, every casino tour, every film that’s ever been set on the strip. What almost nobody knows is the machinery. [music] How a Teamster trucker’s $2 weekly paycheck deduction became a $62 million
casino loan. [music] How rigged coin scales and phantom chip deliveries extracted hundreds of thousands of dollars a month from four casinos simultaneously. [music] How couriers in business suits carried cash in pockets sewn into their sport coats through Los Angeles International Airport.
and how a meticulous Kansas City underboss divided the proceeds with handwritten ledgers that would in the end [music] destroy everyone whose name appeared in them. The famous version of this story has names and outcomes. The version that matters has [music] mechanics. The pipeline began 1,200 miles from the strip [music] in the office of a pension fund that had no business lending money to casinos.
The central states southeast and southwest areas pension fund was created in 1955 by teamster’s vice President Jimmy Hafa. Its structure was straightforward. A multi-mp employer defined benefit pension plan governed by an eight member board of trustees, four from the union side, four from management headquartered in Chicago. Employers [snorts] paid $2 per employee per week under collective bargaining agreements.
In its first year, that generated roughly 10 million. By the early 1970s, assets had reached 1.5 billion. By the early8s, 2.2 billion. 400,000 truckers, warehouse workers, and freight handlers contributed to it. [music] The money was supposed to fund their retirements. Hawa had a different understanding. [music] As former federal prosecutor Edwin Steer put it, Hawa viewed the fund not as a fiduciary responsibility, but as a means of winning friends and influencing people.
Instead of investing in conventional securities, the fund poured money into real estate loans, hotels, shopping centers, casinos at below market interest rates of roughly 6% extended to borrowers whose primary qualification was their relationship to organized crime. By 1963, nearly 2thirds of fund assets sat in real estate loans.
By 1974, the fund had approved $1 billion in such lending. By 1977, $240 million had gone to Las Vegas hotels alone, and the fund held 56% of all outstanding [music] loans in Clark County, Nevada. A pension plan for truck drivers had become the single largest creditor in the American casino [music] industry.
The Department of Labor, which was supposed to oversee this, [music] didn’t file its first lawsuit against the fund trustees until October of 1978, [music] 23 years after the fund’s creation. By then, the money had already built or financed the Dunes, the Stardust, Caesar’s Palace, the Fremont, the Aladdin, Circus Circus, and a half dozen.
Other properties that would define the Las Vegas skyline for the next 30 years. The pipeline from Union dues to mobcontrolled casinos ran through one man. Alan Dorfman’s connection to the Teamsters began in 1949 [music] through his stepfather Paul Red Dorfman who ran the Chicago Waste Handlers Union and maintained [music] deep ties to the Chicago Outfit.
At Paul’s request, Hafa steered the Michigan Conference of Teamsters welfare funds insurance business to Allen’s company, Amalgamated Insurance Agency, despite Allen [music] having zero experience in the insurance industry. Those two fund [music] accounts comprised 90% of the AY’s revenue, generating over $3 million in commissions within 8 years.
When Hawa went to prison in March of 1967, [music] he secretly assigned control of pension fund lending to Dorfman. 3 weeks later, fund trustees passed a resolution making Dorfman a special consultant. His [music] formal title was deliberately vague. His actual power wasn’t.
No major loan moved without Dorfman’s endorsement. He coordinated with mob bosses from multiple cities who each controlled specific [music] trustees and under his stewardship the fund grew from 400 million to 1.5 billion much of it flowing into organized crime ventures. [music] He was convicted in 1972 of accepting a $55,000 kickback [music] on a $15 million pension loan and served 9 months.
>> [music] >> He came back and resumed the same role. The FBI’s Operation [music] Pendorf, short for penetration of Dorfman, launched in 1979, placed hidden microphones in his insurance offices, and captured extensive evidence of his continued criminal activity. But the arrangement had worked for years because Dorfman didn’t act alone.
Each major crime family controlled at least one fund trustee. And since any single trustee could effectively block a loan, cooperation between families was essential. Roy Lee Williams, a Kansas City [music] Teamsters official and fund trustee, who later became president of the entire international brotherhood, admitted under oath to receiving $1,500 a month from Kansas City boss Nick Sevela for 7 years in exchange for his vote on mob connected loans.
[music] Cleveland’s William Presser received the same monthly payment. The fund’s own assets manager, Alvin Baron, was later jailed for accepting kickbacks. [music] The interdependence was the system’s structural strength and eventually [music] its fatal vulnerability because it meant every family had witnesses who could describe what every other family was doing.
into this machinery. In late 1973 walked a man who had no idea what he was entering. Alan Glick was 31 years old, a San Diego land developer, a Vietnam helicopter pilot who’d earned a bronze star and three combat air medals. He had no criminal record and no casino experience.
Precisely the qualities that made him useful. he could [music] pass a Nevada Gaming Control Board background check where actual mobsters couldn’t. [music] Glick had already acquired two small Las Vegas properties, the Hosienda and the Marina, when the Stardust and Fremont came up for sale. He needed financing. What happened next, reconstructed from Glick’s own trial testimony, reveals how the machine processed a new acquisition.
Glick contacted Alvin Baron, the fund’s assets manager, who arranged a meeting at Teamsters’s [music] headquarters in Chicago. Baron introduced him to Frank Renie, a Milwaukee Teamsters trustee. Renie told Glick to contact Frank Balistrieri, [music] the boss of the Milwaukee crime family, though Glick would later claim he didn’t know that.
Glick [music] called Baron back. Baron reaffirmed Bistriary’s influence with the pension fund. [music] Bistriieri then contacted Nick Sevela in Kansas City and Ma Rockman in Cleveland. Each man activated his respective trustee. Dorfman endorsed the loan. On August 23rd, 1974, the Central Aawi State’s pension fund approved 62.
75 million to the newly formed Argent Corporation [music] incororated just 4 months earlier. Additional loans followed, including 25 million for casino remodeling, bringing total teamsters financing to approximately 146 million. The kickbacks were immediate. Ballistrieri received 75,000. Cella received 75,000.
Fitz Simmons and Presser split 600,000. According to Cleveland under boss Angelo Lonardo’s later Senate testimony. Balistrieri’s sons were installed as Argent’s legal counsel and the critical condition. Frank Lefty Rosenthal was installed [music] as de facto manager of all four Argent casinos on direct orders from Chicago bosses Tony Aardo and Joey Iayupa.
Glick’s name was on the gaming license. Rosenthal’s hands were on the operation. At its [music] peak, Arjun controlled the Stardust, Fremont, Hosienda, and Marina, the second largest casino operation in Nevada behind only Howard Hughes. Rosenthal revolutionized the properties.
He created the first race and sports book operated inside a casino at the Stardust, [music] introduced female blackjack dealers, who reportedly doubled the casino’s table income within a year, and [music] hosted his own television show on Kshot TV, featuring Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope. His official titles, executive consultant, [music] food and beverage director, entertainment director, were deliberately vague to avoid gaming license requirements.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board [music] voted 3 to zero against his license application in January of 1976 in a hearing chaired by a young state official named Harry Reid. The gaming commission voted 5 to0 [music] to reject. Rosenthal stayed anyway under different titles for three more years. Glick believed or said he believed he was running a legitimate business.
Every person around him had been placed [music] there by a different crime family for a single purpose he wouldn’t fully grasp until March of 1975 when Nick Sevela summoned him to a Kansas City hotel room, [music] refused to shake his hand, placed a gun on the table, and demanded $1.2 million. [music] When Glick hesitated, Sevela named each of his children and their ages.
According to Glick’s testimony, Cala told him that [music] since perhaps he found his own life expendable. He was certain Glick wouldn’t find his children’s lives expendable. Glick paid. The loan bought the casinos. What happened inside them was the entire point. The skim, the systematic removal of casino cash before it was entered into the books as revenue, operated through two distinct methods running simultaneously.
And understanding how each one worked at the mechanical level is understanding why this operation [music] produced money for nearly a decade before anyone could prove it. The primary stardust skim targeted the hard count room where coins from slot machines were weighed and tallied. [music] After midnight, security guards opened every slot machine on the floor and emptied the coins into buckets.
Coins from all four Argent properties were transported by armored car to the Stardust and pulled for counting. The counting relied on ultra sensitive scales calibrated to weigh coins and calculate totals automatically. Arjun hired a scale mechanic who rec-alibrated those scales to read approximately 10% light.
4,000 [music] quarters, $1,000, registered as $900. The surplus never appeared on any revenue report. No taxes were paid on it. It simply ceased to exist on paper. Jay Vandermark, the slot department manager who oversaw the rigged scales, was reportedly extracting $300,000 a week from Argent. [music] He disappeared in 1976.
His body turned up in Mazatlan, Mexico. His head bashed in while sunbathing. The surplus coins needed to become portable cash. Instead of sending change girls to the [music] cashier’s cage, standard casino practice, the Stardust placed locked coin cabinets around the casino floor stocked with unweighed surplus coins.
Change girls deposited customer bills into the cabinets and took coin rolls. The bills, untraceable paper currency, were collected nightly. Each cabinet held up [music] to $10,000 in bills when emptied. An additional change booth was set up on the Stardust floor, completely unregistered with any government authority.
100% of money flowing through that booth went directly to the mob. It operated undetected for years. Senior casino executives with countroom access, Bobby Stella, the casino manager, [music] and Phil Panto, a maid member of the Chicago outfit embedded as a Stardust employee, physically removed the converted cash.
Carl Thomas, who would later testify for the prosecution, [music] described occasions when he simply stuffed $100 bills into his trouser and coat pockets. Nobody stopped him. [music] He was away. casino executive walking out of his own building. The table game skim ran a different mechanism entirely.
[music] In normal casino operations, when a blackjack or craps table runs low on chips, a fill slip is generated. A document authorizing the transfer of chips from the cashier’s cage to the table. One copy goes into the table’s locked dropbox. [music] In the skim, bogus fill slips were generated for chip deliveries that never occurred.
Complicit cage personnel issued chips against these phantom slips. The chips were passed to Confederate players who cash them at the cage. Since the fill slip accounted for the chips leaving the cage, the cage [music] balanced, but the money was gone. Nevada Gaming Control Board agents later conducted covert surveillance and confirmed it.
On many occasions, there was no [music] match between the chip fills delivered to tables and the fill slips in the drop [music] boxes, but the cage was always in balance. The board concluded that money in the amount of the bogus fill slips was being removed from the cage. The system exploited a basic truth about casinos.
They are the most cashintensive legal businesses in America, handling millions of dollars in currency daily, and a small percentage diverted before counting is nearly invisible. The Tropicana ran a parallel but independent operation. Nick Sevela had gained control of the Tropicana without [music] a Teamsters’s loan, which meant he had no obligation to share proceeds with other families, though he voluntarily cut Chicago in as a show of respect.
The man Sevela placed inside was Joe Austoto, born Vincenzo Pianetti in Agriento, Sicily, an illegal alien who had assumed the identity of a deceased Ohio businessman. Austoto purchased the Foley’s Beer production show and became its executive producer, a position that didn’t require a gaming license. From that perch, he gained enormous influence over casino management, guided by a single operational insight, he later articulated to investigators.
If you control the cage, you control the entire operation. And if you’re going to steal, [music] you have to control the cage. On Austo’s orders, Carl Wesley Thomas was installed as casino manager, a man who by his own testimony had been skimming from casinos for over 20 years, beginning at Circus Circus in 1969.
The Tropicana skim used exclusively the bogus fill slip method and operated from April 1978 through February 1979. The target was $50,000 a month. Actual documented yield ran between 40 [music] and 80,000 monthly. The court documented total was $280,000, though actual amounts were certainly higher.
The entire purpose of the skim was to leave no paper trail. If you’re still with me on this one, a subscribe would mean a lot because the money didn’t stay in Nevada. Every Tuesday afternoon, Bobby Stella left the Stardust carrying a brown paper bag. FBI agent EMTT Michaels testified to the full sequence based on direct surveillance.
[music] Stella drove to a hardware store parking lot on Maryland Parkway and met Phil Panto. Panto took the bag and drove to his home off Paradise Road near the Las Vegas Hilton. On Sundays, Panto placed the bag in his car trunk, drove to church, then spent 2 hours driving through shopping mall parking lots, standard counter surveillance.
He drove to a second hardware store on Tropicana Avenue and met Joseph Torico, [music] a Teamster official from Chicago, who arrived in a rental car wearing a business suit. Terico took the bag, drove west on Interstate 15 toward California, and at the second rest area outside Las Vegas, transferred cash bundles into special pockets sewn inside his sport coat.
He drove to LAX, flew to Chicago, and visited outfit boss Joe Aupa to deliver the money. The sequence repeated weekly. Both Panto and Telerico were later hauled before a grand jury. Even when granted immunity, both refused to testify [music] and accepted jail for contempt. They never answered a single question. The Tropicana money moved on a separate track.
Complicit employees collected the skimmed cash and delivered it to Agusto. Austo passed it to courier Carl Caruso for transport to Kansas City. Caruso made at least 18 trips, paid $1,000 per delivery. The very first skim delivery, $1,500 in April of 1978, was handcarried by Carl Duna himself. Chicago’s share traveled from Kansas City via Anthony Chiavala Senior, Nick Sevela’s nephew, and in a detail that captures something about how deeply the organization penetrated legitimate institutions, a retired Chicago police officer in Kansas City. Duna managed the distribution with a bookkeeper’s precision. [music] He maintained handwritten ledgers documenting every skim payment amounts, dates, recipients,
phone numbers, travel records. He used a bank of pay phones to maintain contact with Austoana rotating locations to avoid detection, though the FBI had tapped those phones, too. >> [music] >> The physical location where much of the distribution business was conducted was the home of Josephine Marlo, a Sevela relative in the Filumina Acres neighborhood north of downtown.
[music] On November 26th, 1978, Carl Thomas and Joe Austo flew in from Las Vegas and sat down with Nick Sevela, Corka, and Duna. Thomas delivered a recorded 6-hour explanation of exactly how casino skimming works, [music] boasting about two decades of experience in detail the FBI couldn’t have manufactured.
[music] Every word was captured on the hidden microphone. Those became [music] the Marlo tapes, a 112page transcript that would form a centerpiece of the prosecution’s case. The numbers on both sides of the comparison reveal the scale. The [music] five families of New York each maintain between 100 and 250 made members.
Kansas City had perhaps 30. Yet this smaller [music] family operating through institutional leverage rather than street muscle had engineered a financial pipeline that rivaled anything the New York families had ever built. The Argent split initially among three families, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Cleveland, the three that controlled the Teamsters trustees who’d approved the loan.
When a dispute erupted between Kansas City and Milwaukee over shares, [music] Chicago was called in to arbitrate. According to Angelo Lonardo’s sworn Senate testimony, Chicago settled the dispute and began receiving 25% of the skim. At peak, each of the four families received between $40,000 and $100,000 a month from the Stardust alone.
Valistrieri, captured on wire taps, [music] called his share a transfusion. Roy Williams and William Presser [music] each received approximately $1,500 a month. Their ongoing fee for keeping their votes aligned. The court proven total from both strawman cases exceeded $2 million. The Nevada Gaming Control Board documented 7 million skimmed from slot machines alone between 1974 and 76.
Broader estimates cited by the mob museum in published histories range between 7 and 15 million total from the Argent casinos. The gap between what prosecutors proved and what actually moved is the gap between what leaves a paper trail and what was designed never to.
The pipeline required silence from dozens of participants across four [music] states. The only tool available to enforce that silence was violence. And violence by its nature generated the very law enforcement attention that silence was supposed to prevent. [music] That contradiction consumed the operation from the inside. January 20th, 1983, approximately 10:07 in the afternoon, Alan Dorfman and associate Irwin Winer [music] walked through the parking lot of the Hyatt Lincolnwood Hotel, 4500 West Tuhi Avenue in Lincolnwood, Illinois after completing a bank transaction. Two men in ski masks approached from behind. One shouted, “This is a stickup.” but opened fire immediately. Dorfman was shot seven times in the head
with a 222 caliber handgun, the signature weapon of mob assassinations. Eight cartridges were recovered at the scene. Winer wasn’t touched. He’s widely believed to have set Dorfman up. The timing was devastating for the [music] defense. Dorfman had been convicted a month earlier in the Senator Cannon bribery case [music] and faced up to 55 years at sentencing scheduled for February 10th.
One week before his murder, he’d been indicted in San Francisco on additional charges. As CBS reporter John Drummond summarized the mob’s calculus, [music] Allan at 60 years of age can’t take hard time anymore. He’s going to [music] talk. Patrick Healey of the Chicago Crime Commission said it plainly.
[music] A lot of people in the criminal world would sleep better that night knowing Dorfman was silenced. The murder, the 1,081st Gangland style killing the commission had recorded since 1919 was never solved. Investigators focused on suspected outfit enforcers [music] Frank Schweis and Anthony Panzika, but never filed charges.
Tony [snorts] Spelotro’s arc traced the same contradiction at a larger scale. [music] Sent to Las Vegas in 1971 by IUPA and Aardo to protect [music] the scheme and serve as Chicago’s eyes and ears, Spyotro was granted what amounted to a franchise to steal. permission to run his own criminal enterprises [music] in exchange for safeguarding the operation.
[music] He formed the Hole in the Wall gang, operating out of the Gold [music] Rush Pawn Shop one block off the strip, targeting casinos, luxury homes, and jewelry stores. On July 4th, [music] 1981, police surrounded Bertha’s Gifts and Home Furnishings during a burglary and arrested six gang members tipped off by informant [music] Sal Romano.
Spelatro’s violence, his affair with Rosenthal’s wife, Gary McGee, and the relentless law enforcement attention he attracted enraged the outfit leadership. After the straw man convictions, [music] the heat Spelatro had generated was blamed with considerable justification for accelerating the investigation that destroyed the entire operation.
The man sent to protect the scheme had become the single greatest threat to it. In January of 1986 at the Czech Lodge in North Riverside, Illinois, Tony Aardo authorized the hit. On June 14th, 1986, Tony and his brother Michael were lured to a meeting. [music] Told, according to later testimony, that Tony was being promoted to Capo.
[music] They were beaten to death in the basement of a house in Bensonville, Illinois. Their bodies were driven south and buried in a cornfield near Enos, Indiana, approximately 5 miles from IUPA’s property. A farmer named Mike Kint discovered them 9 days later, 5 ft deep. Nobody was charged until the 2005 family secrets case.
James Marcelo was convicted in September 2007 and sentenced [music] to life. The system needed every one of these people alive and silent to function. It killed them to keep them [music] silent and the killing made the silence impossible. Here’s the question that sits at the center of all of it. [music] Was this operation ever structurally sustainable? Or was its destruction built into its own design the moment it required human beings to move the money? Was there any version of this pipeline that doesn’t end with the people who ran it [music] either dead or testifying against each other? Tell me what you think in the comments. [music] The investigation that grew from the Villa Capri intercept expanded [music] into the most comprehensive electronic surveillance operation the FBI had ever conducted against organized crime. [music]
Starting May 5th, 1978, Kansas City agents obtained progressive court orders authorizing wire taps and bugs across four states. Residences of Duna, Carl Sevela and Chiavala, business offices of Dorfman, Joey Lombardo, Maish Rockman and Angelo Laietra, Balistr’s office and restaurant in Milwaukee and a bank of payoneses Deluna used to maintain contact with Austo [music] at the Tropicana.
Those pay phone wire taps proved, in Oley’s words, extraordinarily productive. On February 14th, 1979, Valentine’s [music] Day, Ulley’s team intercepted Carl Caruso at the Kansas City airport and seized $8,000 in skim funds. It was the first time skim money had ever been physically caught in transit.
[music] Duna’s handwritten ledgers were seized in the same series of raids, and those records, meticulous [music] as an accountant, would become the prosecution’s most devastating exhibit. [music] Strawman one, targeted the Tropicana operation. [music] Indicted November 5th, 1981, 17 counts against 11 defendants.
Nick Sevela’s case was severed due to terminal cancer. He was released March 1st, 1983 and died [music] 11 days later at Manura Medical Center in Kansas City, age 71. [music] Joe Agusto plead guilty and became the government’s [music] principal witness. He died August 29th, 1983 of an apparent heart attack while in federal [music] custody, age 61, the second key prosecution witnessed [music] to die before the proceedings concluded.
The trial of the remaining defendants [music] produced convictions across the board. Duna received 30 years. Carl Sevela received 30 to 35 years. Charles Moritina received 20 years. Carl Thomas received 15, [music] later reduced to two for his cooperation. Anthony Chiavalis, Senior received 15.
The [music] eighth circuit affirmed every conviction in May of 1985. Strawman II was the larger case, the Argent operation. Indicted September 30th, 1983. 15 defendants charged with conspiring to steal more than $2 million from the Stardust in [music] Fremont between January 1974 and September 1983. The prosecution’s witness list reads like [music] a directory of the systems own components turned against it.
Alan Glick described the frontman scheme. How he’d been [music] steered from Baron to Renie to Bistriary. How each contact activated the next, how the loan approval was guaranteed before the application was even filed. Angelo Lonardo, Cleveland’s under boss, serving [music] life plus 103 years, the highest ranking mob figure to cooperate with [music] the government up to that point, explained how skim shares were distributed among four families and who received what percentage.
[music] Roy Williams, the former Teamsters president, convicted separately of attempting to bribe Senator Howard Cannon, detailed [music] how corrupt trustees approved the loans and how much they were paid to do it. Carl Thomas walked the jury through the mechanical process of extracting money from account room step by step with the specificity of someone who’d done it for 20 years.
and Aluna’s seized [music] ledgers, the handwritten records of every distribution, every payment, every phone call sat in evidence page after page of meticulous bookkeeping [music] that documented a criminal enterprise with the precision of an accounting firm. A juror later said everything was right there in front of them so they could see it.
The man whose organizational discipline made the distribution system work had created the single most damaging piece of evidence against it. [music] That’s the structural paradox embedded in every operation that requires human intermediaries. The chain of hands that makes the pipeline function is also the chain of witnesses that can describe it under oath.
The more efficient the system, the more people can explain it. The more meticulous the records, the more thoroughly the records prove the crime. On January 21st, 1986, after 30 and 1/2 hours of deliberation, the jury convicted all five remaining defendants on all counts. Joey Aayupa, 28 1/2 years and $80,000 in fines.
Jackie Cerrone 28 years and 80,000 in fines. Joey Lombardo 16 years. Angelo Lapietra 16 years. Milton Rockman 24 years. Balistrieri had already plead guilty and received 10 years concurrent with an existing 13-year sentence. His sons John and Joseph were acquitted. Across both Strawman cases, 19 mob leaders were convicted.
The leadership of four organized crime [music] families, Kansas City, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, was effectively dismantled in a single prosecutorial [music] campaign that had begun with a microphone in a pizzeria [music] and a conversation nobody was supposed to hear. If understanding exactly how the money moved from a trucker’s paycheck to a mob boss’s pocket, [music] every hand, every handoff, every rigged scale and phantom fill slip is the kind of thing you came here for.
The like tells me to keep going. The Stardust [music] closed November 1st, 2006, and was imploded on March 13th, 2007. Its 32story tower, the tallest building [music] ever brought down on the strip. Resorts World Las Vegas occupies the site. The Hienda was imploded on New Year’s Eve 1996 as the centerpiece of a Fox television special. Mandalay Bay replaced it.
The dunes came down in October of 1993. Steve Wyn built the Bellagio on its footprint. The dancing fountains perform exactly where the money once disappeared. The marina wasn’t demolished at all. Its original tower was absorbed into the MGM Grand [music] when it opened in 1993, still standing inside a larger structure, invisible.
And the Tropicana imploded October 9th, 2024, [music] the last true mob building on the Las Vegas strip. A baseball stadium for the relocated Oakland Athletics is under construction where Joe Agusto once ran the Foley’s Burge and Carl Wesley Thomas stuffed $100 bills into his trouser pockets. The central state’s pension fund, the instrument that made all of it possible, [music] received $35.
8 8 billion in federal rescue money in December of 2021. The largest pension bailout in American history to cover the hole left by decades of mismanagement that began with Hawa and continued long after the mob was gone. The consent decree that stripped trustees of investment authority lasted 40 years. [music] It was finally dissolved in June of 2023.
During those 40 years, not a single iris violation was found. Only the Fremont still operates on the old downtown street under different ownership with a different [music] count room and scales that read true. The pipeline that ran through all of these places moved tens of millions of dollars through four states for the better part of a decade.
It was built by men who understood institutions, pension funds, corporate structures, [music] gaming commissions, interstate commerce better than the institutions [music] understood themselves. And it was destroyed by a single microphone hidden in a Kansas City pizza restaurant planted by agents who were looking for something else entirely on a night when the jukebox was playing Staying Alive.
[music]