Titans of the Desert: Twenty Legends That Shaped Vegas

In 1930, Las Vegas was a dusty railroad stop of six thousand people with no water, no industry, and no reason to exist. Today it's one of the most visited cities on Earth. What happened in between is one of the great untold stories of American ambition - and it wasn't an accident. It was built, deal by deal, by twenty men and women who saw opportunity where everyone else saw empty desert.Titans of the Desert tells their story. Meet the gangster who built a pink stucco hotel that got him killed - and made the Strip. The senator who shielded a criminal industry from Washington for three decades. The showman who turned a casino into ancient Rome. The reclusive billionaire who broke the mob's grip on the city without ever leaving his hotel room. The union organizer who made sure the wealth reached the people who built the beds. And the tech mogul who bet his fortune that downtown could be reinvented one more time.Spanning nearly a century - from Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo to Steve Wynn's glass towers, from smoke-filled backroom deals to a Formula 1 race down the Strip - Titans of the Desert is a vivid, unflinching history of power, reinvention, and the peculiar American genius for turning nothing into everything.