 A Flawed Masterpiece, But Still a Masterpiece
Sally Denton and her husband Roger Morris took five years to write this highly researched tour-de-force, which details the mob involvement in Las Vegas and the corridors of power throughout the U.S. This book is weighty, exhaustive, and at times exhausting. This is the seminal tome when it comes to Syndicate involvement in the business and politics of gambling in Las Vegas. It grabs readers, hurtling them on a turbulent, exciting ride through fifty years of the biggest boomtown in the history of civilization, fueled by organized crime, corruption, insane gambles and political influence.
The authors love Vegas and they hate what Vegas represents. They truly love to city to spend five long years researching and writing this book. However, their hatred for the city grates at times. In the opening chapter they write of the Vegas Strip: "Seen from behind, the palatial replicas and resorts are a kind of Potemkin village, screening from view an inner squalor of local politics where wealth and power are in the hands of only a few, a parody of rich and poor. Compared to what it takes, the ruling industry gives back crumbs." They go on: "...it plunders the city, state and nation, poisoning air, disfiguring land, stealing water, ransoming the future for ravenous gain seized by fix and favor."
They lay out their thesis of the entire book just as directly by writing: "Not surprisingly, in a city that exists to take money, the utter force of profit is the commanding, ultimately coercive order of business and society, and of politics and government, where the corruption of institutions at every level is all but functionally complete." And more: "...the corruption is so profound, so inherent in the social and economic order, that most citizens are cynically accepting of it or simply oblivious."
The authors even paint the picture in further dark tones, implying that Vegas itself is a monster whose tentacles extend throughout the United States, to the highest reaches of power and money - Washington, D.C. and Wall Street. Perhaps their massive research of the early syndicate involvement wore them down, but they find a gangster behind every bush. Even the modern "corporate Vegas" is suspect for them, and the Syndicate runs even that. This is hardly a conventional view, and most historians believe most mob influence was flushed from Vegas by the 1980s. For example, they quote only one widely discredited book, to make the case that Steve Wynn, of the new "junk-bond funded Vegas" was under the influence of mobsters.
The writers are brilliant at places in the book when they reflect on how and why Vegas developed the way it did. Given the fact that lawless gamblers themselves drove early development of Nevada, what does this say about the character of Nevadans and Americans in general? This is where this book really breaks ground, as they describe the American Psyche best here: "a people of chance, the irrepressible American penchant to bet, to take a risk, to believe in winning."
This is keen insight; a breakthrough in thinking. Many people emphasize the Asian propensity to gamble, but to them it is only a game, with money. Only Americans, made up of immigrants from all over the world, have the irrational optimism to "put it all on the line." Surely, early settlers to barren Nevada, decades before the Strip existed were degenerate gamblers by the sheer risks they took trying to survive the desert.
In fact, perhaps the eternally optimistic, unrealistic dreamers of Nevada (and America as a whole) were tolerant of the mob figures that took a chance and built the great gambling halls because they admired their pluck. Sure, they bent the rules a bit, but they were the ones that had the guts to shove all their chips in the middle and let it ride. Nevadans love to see someone "beat the house" and the early gangsters did it- they beat the odds. Just like the American political process itself, the result beautiful, as long as we do not have to see the ugly underbelly.
The authors illustrate the tension with the following exchange: "'What's so bad about gambling?' (gangster) Lansky had asked the senator. `You like it yourself. I know you've gambled a lot.' `That's right,' (senator) Kefauver had replied. `But I don't want you people to control it.'" The authors mistakenly believe that Vegas would have still grown just as much, yet been a better place without the random, wild, risk-taking American nature, which flouted the very laws of our society. They write: "If another direction had been taken at any of these turning points, the city might not have continued in the unbroken grip of a criminal and then corporate tyranny, might not have become the staging ground and financial fount of the same forces as they came to dominate national politics."
"The Money & the Power" is a flawed masterpiece. By driving their point home so hard, the authors only sharpen the skepticism of their readers. By siding with the JFK assassination conspiracy theorists, the anti-CIA kooks and those that see the mob behind every dry cleaner, they cast a shred of doubt on their extensive research. However, they never conceal their bias - instead they state: "What a sad, grim reflection Las Vegas gives back to us. America has yet to come to terms with its own hidden history, let alone the city's - a trap from which there was, and has been, no escape."
The authors soar to great heights when they explore Vegas as a touchstone to the American experience: "The city was not only a reflection of culture and values and the near-complete rule of money in American life. From the beginning with the Flamingo in 1947, Las Vegas was the more open reflection of an economic and political corruption that was still furtive though already pervasive in the rest of the nation." In this regard, their work stands alone as the single most comprehensive volume explaining the correlation between the growth of Vegas and the rest of the United States.
 Facinating Topic Presented in a Unreadable Manner
I love the idea of Vegas. I like reading about the involvement of the criminal enterprise getting involved, helping Vegas become what it is. I love reading about the larger than life characters that have helped steer Vegas along its journey, Howard Hughes, Kirk Kerkorkian, Steve Wynn. I love it all. This book has all of that information and so much more, which makes it all the more maddening that this book was so poorly pieced together.
The book is fantastically researched and notated, but that is the problem. Nicholas Pillegis "Casino" tackles some of the same subject matter as this book, but the end result is far more satisfying. Pillegi uses facts and documentation to create a narrative, a story of the events. Easy to read and enjoyable.
"Money and the Power" is put together as if it were to be used in a court of law, to attempt to convict Vegas for being a cesspool of crime, corruption, violence, greed, politics and moral ambiguity. Which, by the way, it is. But it staggers the mind that this fascinating topic has been turned into such an awful read.
Here is a sample to explain why it is so awful:
... "We were at the edge of unraveling in Las Vegas." a customs agent in Nevada would say ...
The whole work is like that. Every fact, figure, and quotation is immediately attributed to its source. It destroys the flow of the book. While this is a great way to credit your source, it makes the final work unreadable.
T
An excellent book
I have been gambling off and on for 40 years in Vegas and elsewhere, and I knew for certain what kind of scumbags run the casinos, so wasn't surprised about that. I did not always know the details though, and the book provided lots of those. However, the biggest shock was the absolute sleaziness going on almost continually in our federal government. If you are still somehow under the impression that our government has the best interests of its citizens at heart, this book should straighten you out. The people running the country and the people running the casinos are entirely too much the same. This is an excellent book, well written and documented, but be prepared for lots of nausea while reading it. The details are sickening.
Very Revealing, Excellent Book!!!
This book was fascinating and I couldn't put it down until I finished the last page.
The reviewer who mentioned the author's lack of sourcing is correct and I wish they'd provided more.
I did, however, check out most of the information in this book (I did exhaustive, in-depth research) and found their information to be accurate.
So-so popular history
I don't doubt that much of the reporting in this book is accurate. Even so, though the writing in TMATP is decent -- evocative and well-paced -- its reporting leaves much to be desired. TMATP has more than the whiff of conspiracy theory about it, and its authors are, at times, more breathless than dispassionate in their commentary. What is lacking most, in this book, is depth. Denton and Morris draw on numerous sources, to be sure, yet they bring little insight to their task. For a general, and colorful, introduction to Las Vegas and its problematic history, TMATP seems decent enough. For a sophisticated account, one must look eslewhere.
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