Who Really Invented Las Vegas?

The true story of how Las Vegas was really built, and why the man who supposedly invented it did not. Ask most people who invented Las Vegas and you will hear one name: Bugsy Siegel, the mobster who supposedly looked at the empty Nevada desert and dreamed the Las Vegas Strip into existence. It is a great story. It is also false. Las Vegas had no single founder. It was assembled over more than eighty years by railroads, laws, money, and accident, and this book names every piece. Everett Sowards traces the real history of Las Vegas from the beginning. The town was founded in 1905 by a railroad that needed a water stop and a division point. Nevada legalized gambling in 1931 because a bankrupt state needed the revenue. The Hoover Dam brought thousands of workers and the first waves of tourists. Thomas Hull opened El Rancho Vegas, the first resort on what became the Las Vegas Strip, in 1941, years before Siegel arrived. The Flamingo was conceived and designed not by Bugsy Siegel but by the Hollywood publisher Billy Wilkerson, who lost it to Siegel under pressure. The Flamingo then failed, and Siegel was murdered before it ever succeeded. From there the book follows the forces that built modern Las Vegas: the Teamsters pension fund that became the mob's bank and financed Caesars Palace, the Stardust, and Circus Circus; the skim that moved millions in untaxed casino cash to organized crime; the unincorporated townships of Paradise and Winchester created so the casinos could dodge city taxes; the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes and the Nevada Corporate Gaming Acts that opened the casinos to public corporations; and Steve Wynn, Michael Milken, and the junk bonds that built the Mirage in 1989 and launched the age of the Las Vegas mega-resort. This is a history of Las Vegas and the mob, the Flamingo, the Las Vegas Strip, and the Nevada gambling and casino business, but it is also the story of a myth: how the legend of Bugsy Siegel the visionary gangster was manufactured by newspapers, pulp magazines, the Kefauver hearings, and the 1991 film Bugsy, and why that legend has outlived the documented truth. It is a book about how cities really come to exist, and about why we so badly want a single hero to credit. If you are interested in true crime, organized crime, mafia and mob history, American history, or the real history of Las Vegas and the casinos that made it, this book answers a simple question that almost everyone gets wrong: who really invented Las Vegas? The short answer is that nobody did, and the long answer is one of the great untold stories of the American West. Clear, factual, and thoroughly researched, with no romance and no invented dialogue, just the documented record of how a great city rose from the desert without a single founder.