The Men Who Made Las Vegas

I just finished reading The Players - The Men Who Made Las Vegas. It's a book of thumbnail biographies edited by Jack Sheehan for the University of Nevada Press. To say the least, the book has a lot going for it.

After Sam Boyd (ever heard of Sam's Town casino?) passed away, his son, Bill, suggested to Sheehan that it would be nice if more of the early Vegas pioneers were interviewed before it was too late. Sheehan agreed - and the book is a nice mix of early (Moe Dalitz, Benny Binion, Sam Boyd, etc.) and later (Kirk Kerkorian, Steve Wynn) casino moguls.

In addition to the life sketches, Sergio Lalli starts the book with a look at early Las Vegas, the Mob, and the Gaming Control Board. If you ever wanted a concise and accurate account of what went right, and what went wrong with the start of Vegas, Lalli provides it in 21 well-written pages.

As for later entries to Las Vegas like Wynn, I always heard his father set him up with a piece of the Golden Nugget, but author Mark Seal's chapter cleared up that misunderstanding of mine. It seems the Wynn's were in Las Vegas for six weeks, until their bingo parlor over the Silver Slipper tanked and dad and seventeen-year-old son returned to the east coast.

Steve's father passed away at the age of forty-six, just three weeks before the younger Wynn was to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania. However, by the age of twenty-five, Steve had invested $45,000 of bingo profits into the newly opened Frontier casino in Las Vegas in 1967 and it has been a wild ride ever since.

If you want to know more, read the full review on The Players!