L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

Things were going so well that Cohen took a step that only the most well organized criminals could pull off: He turned his Burbank bookie joint into a casino. At first, it was a dingy place, with “an old broken-down” craps table in a room so small “that when someone wanted to go to the bathroom, the dealer had to leave the end of the table.” However, it did have the advantage of a friendly police chief and a prime location—just a block or two from the Warner Bros. lot. In short order, cowboys, Indians, grass-skirted Polynesian maidens, and other extras were cramming into the former stockyard, which soon began a process of rapid expansion. Occasionally, Burbank police chief Elmer Adams (a sometime dinner guest at the Cohen household and the happy owner of a suspiciously large yacht) would bestir himself to shut down Cohen’s operations, but never for long. Mickey also began to dream of opening a high-end haberdashery shop.

For Cohen, it was a golden period. But Bugsy Siegel was discontented. Despite his considerable successes, Bugsy found Los Angeles to be a frustrating place to do business. To the low-or midlevel hoodlum, the pell-mell of government jurisdictions and municipalities in the Los Angeles basin—forty-six in Los Angeles County alone—was a godsend. But for Siegel, who wanted to organize the entire area, it was a frustrating inconvenience. Even organizing the city of Los Angeles presented nearly insurmountable hurdles. According to Cohen, Siegel never succeeded in establishing a numbers game in Los Angeles not because the police force was honest but rather because he had to negotiate deals on a division-by-division basis. Siegel wanted to find a better way. So did his old partner Meyer Lansky.

Meyer and Bugsy had grown up together on the streets of New York, but after Prohibition ended, the two men had gone in different directions. Siegel had tried to set himself up as a wealthy sportsman in the movie colony; Lansky had tried to establish himself as a businessman in the molasses business. Both failed in these endeavors—Siegel due to bad luck in the stock market, Lansky after federal agents connected his molasses business to illicit distilleries in Ohio and New Jersey that were trying to dodge excise taxes. As a result, both returned to the underworld. But where Siegel delighted in strongarm stuff (leaning on bookies, union extortion, etc.), Lansky concentrated on casinos. Still, the two men stayed in touch. In the early 1940s, Siegel and Lansky invested together in the Colonial Inn, a lavish casino in Hallandale, Florida. Although the Colonial Inn was a remarkable success, it still ran the risks that came with all illegal activities. As a result, both Lansky and Siegel began to explore alternatives. Lansky looked across the Florida Straits to Cuba. Siegel looked across the Nevada desert to Las Vegas.

In 1931, the state of Nevada, desperate to raise revenues, had legalized gambling. The most immediate beneficiary of this move was Reno, which was situated on the busy Union Pacific Line between Sacramento and Salt Lake City. However, gambling entrepreneurs also noticed the sleepy town of Las Vegas, some 250 miles east of Los Angeles. By the late 1930s, former Los Angeles crime bosses such as Tony Cornero and former Combination boss Guy McAfee had opened operations there in an attempt to capitalize on a minor boom brought about by the construction of the Hoover Dam southeast of the city. Siegel noticed it too after he started persuading Las Vegas bookmakers to sign up for a Syndicate-controlled racing wire. Siegel and his Phoenix-based associate Moe Sedway could hardly miss the fact that Las Vegas users of the wire alone were soon providing Siegel with about $25,000 a month in revenue. No wonder he and Sedway dubbed their Vegas service “the Golden Nugget Wire service.”

Still, Las Vegas was slow to establish itself as a gambling destination. It was hot. It was inaccessible. Compared to the classy “carpet joints” of, say, Saratoga Springs, the casinos of downtown Las Vegas, with their sawdust floors and hokey western themes, weren’t much to look at. That began to change in 1941, when hotelier Tommy Hull opened El Rancho Vegas. Instead of being located downtown, El Rancho Vegas was outside the city, on the highway to Los Angeles. With its flamboyant Mission styling, manicured sixty-acre spread, steakhouse, night-club-style entertainment, and comfortable accommodations, El Rancho Vegas wasn’t just a casino, it was a destination. (Today, this once forlorn part of Clark County is the Las Vegas Strip.)