Transcript of interview with Count Guido Roberto Deiro by David G. Schwartz, January 30, 2002

Count Guido Roberto Deiro My Varied Careers and Rewarding Life in Las Vegas An Oral History Conducted by David G. Schwartz Transcribed and Edited by Joyce Marshall 2017 Edits by Guido Deiro and David G. Schwartz Oral History Program University of Nevada, Las Vegas 2002 Revised edition 2018 1 Preface Count Guido Roberto Deiro, born in Reno, Nevada, in 1938, has had several fascinating careers. The son of vaudeville performer and recording star Count Guido Pietro Deiro, who was the first major piano-accordionist to become popular in the United States, and his teenage wife Yvonne Teresa LeBaron De Forrest, Deiro grew up in and around Las Vegas and Southern California after his parents' 1941 divorce. After attending 13 grammar schools and five high schools, Deiro graduated from Las Vegas High School in 1955. During his youth, thanks to his stepfather Samuel "Baby Shoes" Prezant, Deiro had an early introduction to the Las Vegas gambling scene. Following a brief stint in the U.S. Army, Deiro worked a series of jobs, including parking cars, selling shoes, and driving an ambulance. He transitioned from working as a fitness instructor to being a lifeguard at the El Rancho Vegas hotel, all the while becoming interested in aviation. Deiro entered the gaming industry at the age of 19 and a half, when he began working as a dealer, having been taught by his stepfather. Breaking in at the Nevada Club, Deiro, who became known as "Bobby Blue Eyes," later worked at the New Frontier, Sands, El Cortez, and Holiday casinos. He provides a great deal of detail about the social world of Las Vegas casinos in the 1950s through the 1970s, with insight into many major personalities. While working in gaming, Deiro continued to pursue a career in aviation, acquiring in the early 1960s a commercial pilot license, instrument rating and instructor's certificate. He began working as a flight instructor and charter pilot at Thunderbird Field, now known as North Las Vegas Air Terminal. Deiro flew around the United States promoting Las Vegas and the airfield. After Howard Hughes purchased the airfield in 1967, Deiro stayed, ultimately becoming Director of Aviation Facilities for the Hughes Tool Company. Following his marriage to Joan Marlene Calhoun, Deiro moved to California, where he became Vice President and Director of Administration for Air California and Golden West Airlines, before serving with other companies owned by C. Arnholdt Smith. In 1971, Deiro returned to Las Vegas. Deiro then met artist Michael Heizer, who enlisted Deiro's help in scouting and securing locations for his Earth art installations. This led to Deiro's long involvement with that genre. In addition to these careers, Deiro was also influential in many key developments in Las Vegas, including the construction of the Las Vegas Motor Speedway and, with his wife Joan, several philanthropic endeavors. In this interview, Deiro shares his perspectives on his times and his impact on Las Vegas. Thisi s Dave Schwartz. I am at the home of Count Guido Roberto Deiro and we are going to be doing an oral history of him today for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. It is January30,2002. How are you doing today? I'm doing fine. How are you professor? I m doing great. Could you tell me a little bit about your father? My father was Count Guido Pietro Deiro. He was born in 1886 in Salto Canavese, Deiro Superiore, in the Northwest of Italy. It's (located in) the province of Piedmonte, and near Torino. He was musically gifted. His family wanted him to remain there and run the family businesses, which had to do with orchards and cattle. They were agricultural people that owned general stores in small communities throughout that area. That life didn t appeal to him and, also, they wanted to arrange a marriage for him and he didn t like that either. So, he went off to seek his fame and fortune as a musician. Served a stint in the Italian Army in the band and he played several instruments, but one instrument he was particularly good at was the chromatic accordion. The piano accordion had just recently been invented, but had not been popularized and was unknown in this country. He purchased one of those and he began to play professionally in Germany. The German economy, at that time, was fairly good in the early part of the 1900s. He played in a succession of saloons and dancehalls, which were the popular theater at that time prior, of course, to radio and TV. He had great success and was contacted by the manufacturers of the accordion that he was playing, Ronco-Vercelli, and was asked to represent that company at the Alaskan Exposition in Seattle, Washington, which was at the turn of the century, 4 1908 or 1909. He came to the United States through Seattle and was immediately, after arriving and demonstrating the accordion at the Exposition, hired by a man called Frank Butti to play in the jackson Saloon in Seattle which was the form of entertainment in the United States at that time. You know, they were still riding horses like cowboys and Indians. He made $40.00 a week, which was quite a sum of money at that time. He stayed there a few months, the accordion broke and nobody to repair it. Nobody had ever seen a piano accordion before, nor was it called a piano accordion. It had no English name yet. It was called a fizarmonica systema piano in Italian. So, he came down to San Francisco where there were some chromatic accordion repair people. He went to the Guerrini Accordion factory in San Francisco, they repaired his instrument and they asked him to conduct an outdoor concert in front of the factory. He did, to a crowd of several hundred people and one of the people in that crowd was the father of the man who later built Grauman's Chinese Theater 'm Hollywood, Sid Grauman, and he immediately booked Deiro, as he was known, popularized as Deiro, to the Vaudeville circuit. Dad had a huge Vaudeville career starting in 1910. He appeared all over the United States of America and was a headliner. He played the Palace and another thing that he did that made him very popular was that he was one of the early originators of ragtime music. His Deiro Rag was very popular. He was also a proponent of Middle Eastern music, the Oriental music that was just starting a craze at that time created by Princess Fatima who had appeared at the Chicago World's Fair. She was the first one to do a belly dance in this country. Dad liked that form of music and popularized it in a Broadway musical he composed which was a big hit called "Kismet "That made Otis Skinner's career in 5 the musical comedy theater and it made my father famous. That composition is popular to this day. I still receive checks from SESAC, the world copyright organization for that. That piece was written in 1911. Dad was a womanizer. He was a handsome fellow, very well spoken, very European, very much a nobleman, very talented. He was also kind of a Sean Penn of his day; quick with his fists. His first marriage was to an entertainer and pianist, Julia Tatro; the second marriage was to Mae West. Mae West claimed that he was the love of her live and she was the love of his life. There are a number of books in which he is very prominently mentioned, all biographies and autobiographies concerning Mae West. He was well known for that. (Access illustrated website guidodeiro.org for history.) So, father discovered Mae West when she was in the burlesque theater, which was sort of the illegitimate theater, Vaudeville being the family entertainment. Mae was precocious and a little risque at that time, very appealing to my father and they ended up married in 1913. She got pregnant. They either aborted the child or the child was lost because this led to the break-up of their four-year relationship. They were divorced years later in New York (1920) when Dad wanted to marry again. Both of them could have been bigamists as several of her books point out, she was married to a Vaudeville entertainer stage named Wallace, but had never lived with him as man and wife at the time she married my father. My father was previously married to a Spokane pianist, Jewel Pearl Tatro. We know that he was charged with non-support and arrested on the stage in Detroit. It cost him $4,000.00 to settle the matter. In other words, he had a very interesting career with women. After they broke up, Mae had 6 to work in small time in Chicago's Loop and popularized the Shimmy Shawobble, the dance; she became even more notorious for sexual innuendo. In the early 20s, she reached her first stardom when she wrote a play called "Sex", for which she and the cast were arrested. She served a few days on Rikers Island in New York because of its blue nature and this really started her famous career as a dramatist and comedienne. When she went to Hollywood, she was already 40 years old. So, most people's impression of Mae as a character is a 40-year-old woman. That's why she looks a little plump in those pictures that Americans can see today on Turner Classic Movies. Vaudeville went in the tank about 1930 because of the Depression and even though my father was a Columbia Recording star and had royalties coming in from his musical compositions and his personal appearances, he suffered financially. Motion pictures finally forced him out of live entertainment. It was an interesting thing. First you had a movie showing with the vaudeville acts headlining and then the movie was more important than the vaudeville act, but dad was still able to headline alongside films at that time all the way into the early 30s. He took a second world tour in 1928, played the London Hippodrome and the Palladium and went around the world and that really marked the conclusion of his career as a stage performer. My dad's career was over with so he decided to open musical conservatories and studios across the Western United States. He really liked the American Northwest and he liked to hunt and fish and he particularly enjoyed coming to Northern California, Oregon and Washington. So, he based himself in San Francisco and he married one of the leading soubrettes, a star of burlesque theatre. 7 Her name was Ruby Lang. They had a short marriage and were divorced in the early 30s. He continued his promotion of his accordion studios, musical conservatories, lived off his record income and whatever personal appearances. Approaching 50 in 1936, he was dating a beautiful French chanteuse, who was my grandmother and her stage name was Helen Cole. She was a popular singer in San Francisco. She sang at the which is a popular restaurant to this day. She had an even more beautiful daughter that was only 16 years old. This was to be my mother. Her name was Yvonne Teresa LeBaron De Forrest. My maternal grandfather's family had come from an aristocratic French family that escaped the French Revolution and came to the United States in the late 1700s. My father hired Yvonne to work for him in his main studio and conservatory in San Francisco. It was on the 500 block of Columbus Avenue in the Italian section of North Beach and one thing led to another. She became pregnant. Her sister, my aunt Helene, happened to be a nurse. She suggested they go to Reno where my father had a summer home and conservatories in Reno, Yerington, Dayton and in other small towns in Northern Nevada. The piano-accordion, of course, was a very popular instrument by that time. Incidentally, my father named the piano accordion and was the first to appear on stage with it in motion pictures and to make recordings and on radio. So, he introduced, named and popularized of the piano accordion. They went to Reno and drove down to Yerington where you could get married at her early age, he being 51 and she being 17 at that time. I was actually born when she was just short of 18 years old. So, my birth certificate is from Reno, Nevada. 1 was born at St. Mary's Hospital on February 18,1938. When I was old * 8 enough to travel they returned to their digs in San Francisco and lived there in questionable harmony for about a year and a half. My mother was very vivacious, beautiful woman. She also craved excitement. She liked the nightlife. She liked to dance. She had come from that. My parents had entertainment backgrounds, both of them aristocratic, quite arrogant, quite prima donna like. My mother liked to go out on the town and had friends who were into the seedier side of life. They were into gambling and minor racketeering. My father objected to that, of course, and one thing led to another. She went to Hollywood to get into the movies and she obtained a "quickie" divorce in Las Vegas. To get a divorce, she had to come to Las Vegas to establish residency because in those days, divorces weren't granted like they are now. Sometimes it took years to get a divorce. She wanted out now. She stayed for six weeks at Tommy Hull's new hotel on Highway 91 called the El Rancho Vegas. My father and mother were divorced; my father didn't appear here, in 1941. But at the time she established residency, her gambling boyfriends had introduced her to a gentleman named Sam "Baby Shoes" Prezant and Sam was a big Hollywood bookmaker and one of the original percentage owners in what would become the Flamingo Hotel. He was also involved in the Las Vegas Club and The Westerner downtown. He also had a piece of the El Cortez. In fact we lived at one time, in the El Cortez Hotel Townhouse. The El Cortez, at that time, was at its location now, but was a two-story structure with the main building on Fremont Street, but it had an alley to the North and there was a separate two-story townhouse which had rooms in it for rent. My mother and soon to be stepfather and I, whenever 1 was in town, lived in that townhouse. "Baby Shoes" supervised games as a pit boss and percentage 9 owner at the Las Vegas Club, The Westerner, and the El Cortez, and the soon to be built Flamingo. I, still in short pants, was going to private schools in Southern California. My real father who was ill had followed my mother to Hollywood to try and i econcile but she was through. They decided it was best for me to go to boarding schools. There were no private academies or schools of higher learning in Las Vegas at that time. So, I went to such schools as Paramount Studio, Page Military and Elsinore Naval & Military Academy where I found other children from Las Vegas notables going to school there. Tiny Biggs' son went there along with several other kids from Vegas. I went to school with Bela Lugosi's, the famous Count Dracula's son who became the District Attorney of L.A. County. I used to have a lot of fun in later years when I met his dad because they were both Counts, {laughs) I didn't know it at the time I was in school, as my father sort of glossed over it, didn't much mentioned it. My father passed away in August 1950.1 wasn't yet 13. He passed away at Loma Linda Sanitarium in Riverside, California. He died of congestive heart failure. He looked like he was 80 years old, but he was only 63. So, I had very little time with my father after the divorce, most of it being spent in these private schools in California with visits to Las Vegas. Visits to Las Vegas were always an adventure to me. I would be put on a Greyhound Bus, which was the principal form of transportation to Las Vegas, or the train. The train took seven hours to get here and so did the bus in those days. The bus stopped at interesting places like El Cajon and Victorville and Barstow and Baker. Like a stagecoach, actually they called it a stage line. I looked forward to the stop in Baker because it was in the middle of nowhere, the foot of Death Valley, two-lane asphalt road all the way to Las Vegas and in the desert, but I 10 could buy a cold drink. It was quite a long trip for a kid eight or nine years old to travel alone and I did it for a couple of years. Running back and forth to Southern California with little contact with my father, or my mother. Finally, my mother took me out of private schools. I like to say that 1 was thrown out of some of the best schools in California. I also went to St. John Bosco Catholic Academy. It's a boarding school for young boys with disciplinary problems in Bellflower, California. Run by priests and nuns. My mother and stepfather lived at 116 Garces Street which was near downtown Las Vegas. It's between Bonneville and Clark. It was a little yellow duplex and everybody that lived around us in those duplexes were either involved in the gambling business or some service trade. The beautiful Johnson girls, Evelyn and her sisters, lived across the street from me. Evelyn later worked for me as a real estate agent. I'm trying to remember people that were in the early gambling business that lived around us. I used to walk downtown in the morning when I got up, when I was just a small boy, probably nine years old and I would walk down to The Westerner where my stepfather worked at that time. He worked in all these gambling joints. He seemed to have an interest, a little piece of everything. The Westerner had big glass doors; some of the first plate glass, swinging doors, in Las Vegas. Years later, I remember when the atomic bomb went off there was a lot of comment in town about how the glass doors wiggled back and forth seven minutes after the white flash of the explosion. Well, I'd go and push my nose up against those doors and wait till my stepfather saw me. When he saw me he would come over and push open the door and give me a silver quarter which was my allowance quite a bit of money for a child in those days. Twenty-five cents, the movie was 14 cents, a bag 11 of popcorn was a nickel and Cokes were a nickel even out of the machine. So, a quarter a day, I had money to eat lunch and buy things with. 1 had plenty of money. One morning I came up to those doors and I arrived at the same time that a player, drunken player, had just finished and as he went out the door he knocked me down. Here I was in my little leather jacket on a cold winter morning and he'd knocked me into the gutter and he picked me up and brushed me off and he's stuffing $5 chips in my pockets and, of course, I helped him. After he reeled off down the street, my stepfather came out and rolled me and took all the $5 chips and gave me my quarter and sent me to school. Everybody knew everybody on Fremont Street. The casinos on Fremont Street were called sawdust joints and they smelled of cigars and whiskey and the stuff you clean floors with. At Farmer Page's Boulder Club, you could bet a quarter on 21, the wheel, or Faro Bank. Ten cent craps. There were no women dealers. In fact, the only women in these casinos were either cocktail waitresses or professional entertainers. Women didn't frequent these places. So, it was a very masculine oriented society and downtown Las Vegas extended from the train depot which had a big lawn in front of it and a circular tree lined driveway and for about five blocks down to what we called 5th Street which is now Las Vegas Boulevard it had casinos on both sides of the street for about the first three blocks. The only bank in Las Vegas at that time was at the northeast corner of 1 think 3rd and Fremont Street. Houses of ill repute were just a block and a half off Fremont at that time. Block 16. The Army had ordered them closed but they still operated off the street. There were other whore houses way out east Fremont Street 12 at Four Mile and Roxie's. The two story wooden barracks building for Roxy's, the madam s name was Roxie Clippinger, is still standing out there in a grove of cottonwood trees. It was one of my great, 1 knew about these places, of course, hopes that I would get to be age 16 and be able to go to one of these places to see what the mystery was all about. You couldn't drink or gamble at 16 but you could go in the side door of these houses and they had a special living room area for young guys under 21with no liquor. You were supposed to be 18 but they never checked. Unfortunately, they closed them just about the time 1 made 16 in a huge scandal which Ovid Demaris wrote about in a book called The Green Felt Jungle. He described how Sheriff Glen Jones at that time was being bribed to keep them open and he was exposed by the Las the city fathers cloVseedg atsh Seu bno ardriedl los. I could have killed the editor of the Las Vegas Sun. Hank Greenspun. 1 think about 100 other 16-year-old kids would have killed him too. So, Las Vegas to me epitomized a lifestyle that 1 really liked. I thought, gee, this is great. Wine, women and song...and gambling, how lucky can a young Italian kid get. There was so much money running around and somewhere inside of me, I had the idea that this might be something that I wanted to do. For a while in the fifth grade I went to 5th Street Grammar School which was the only grammar school at that time. It's a county office now. Mrs. Barstow was my teacher. Unfortunately, my mother and my stepfather had a tumultuous relationship and I was constantly moving around, Not only moving around from place to place in the city, but also in and out of the state. I was sent to Southern California to go to school continually. 1 went to 13 different grammar schools and five high schools in twelve years! So, I had a very chaotic 13 childhood. I never got to know anybody really well. 1 didn't have personal contact with anyone in my family other than my mother. My father hadn't done well in movies and was broke and had heart disease. I think he had a broken heart. He had been veiy popular and that was all gone. 1 saw him rarely. After my father's death, 1 no longer heai d of my only aunt and had never seen my grandparents. Had no contact with anyone named Deiro. My mother developed a drinking problem and the relationship between her and "Baby Shoes" was not good. So, it was disruptive and emotionally difficult for me in my younger years. 1 have a half-brother who was born in 1947 to her and Baby Shoes" who is an accomplished attorney in Reno, Nevada of all places. His name is William Allan Prezant. He is a very successful man. He is nine years my junior and he went to USC, graduated cum laude, and went to Georgetown, so he's a pretty good lawyer. But, unfortunately, we are not close because we are of different backgrounds, different everything. The upset we had in our families between his father and my mother, this was very divisive. He was also sent away to boarding schools at a young age. We never bonded. Back to early 40s Las Vegas, some of the things 1 remember were the great Helldorado Days celebrations and, in those times, that was a big deal. It was our major community promotion. Started in the 1930s. Sort of like the National Finals Rodeo week on steroids. We had three huge parades that would rival the Rose Parade in Pasadena. Go all the way down Fremont Street from the train depot. There was the Old Timer's parade with silver mounted horses and twenty mule team borax wagon trains, all the buckboards and prairie schooners and Mormon pushcarts and cowboys and Indians, then the Children's parade, with all the schools 14 represented and finally on a Sunday the Beauty parade with flowered floats and showgirls and big name entertainers. The casinos would sponsor the floats and really try to outdo each other. We had a whiskerino contest for the best beards. Everybody wore western garb and the men all carried six shooters. Because 1 was one of the privileged I got to stand on the balcony of the El Cortez overlooking Fremont Street, and that balcony still exists, with the people who owned the hotel at that time which I believe may have included the j. K. Houssels family and Davy Berman's young daughter, Susan. But, 1 don't believe that Jackie Gaughan owned the property at that time. 1 remember men like Irish Green, Jake Friedman, Joe "Bowser" Rosenberg, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, the Berman brothers, Gus Greenbaum, Isadore "Ice Pick Willie" Alderman, and my stepfather Sam " Baby Shoes" Prezant, mostly members of the Jewish outfit as they were called at that time. I remember Milton Prell, Beldon Katleman and Jake Kozloff. These early pioneers, including some Italians, Pietro "P.O." Silvagni, who I drove for later in my teens, Tony Carnero, "Gamba" Georgetti who either had the casino boats off of Long Beach or gambling dens in Hollywood and San Francisco. Anyway, I went back and forth between Hollywood and Las Vegas during the 1940s and into the early 1950s, between my mother and my retired and ill father. On weekends, before my mother and Sam had permanently moved to Las Vegas, I went to the horse racing tracks with my mom and whoever in the outfit she was dating at the time, I would sit with them in a box at Santa Anita and be asked by the bookmakers what horses I liked. You know some guy would say "Who do you like in the Fifth, Pudge?" My nickname when I was young. Sometimes they gave me serious money which was always taken away by my 15 mother later. One night 1 was asleep in my mother's bed in her apartment in Hollywood and Mickey Cohen, Hy Goldbaum, "Baby Shoes" and Benny Siegel woke me up to shoot a hand of dice on the hardwood floor as they didn't trust each other. Back here in Las Vegas, it was a very western atmosphere. I had a cowboy outfit that I would wear. I had an Indian outfit that 1 would wear. My mother at one time boarded me at a ranch at 15th and Stewart which was in the country and is now under the freeway and we had chickens, horses, cows and rabbits and we're talking about 15 blocks from downtown Las Vegas. The roads were gravel. I remember that I used to go crawdad hunting at the Old Ranch where 1 learned to swim in the Old Ranch swimming pool which was on North 5th Street which would be Las Vegas Boulevard North where the Mormon Fort is now. That was in the country. There was a flowing stream and big trees, Las Vegas Creek, that came all the way out of where the Water District property is now. The "Meadows." It's where Las Vegas got its name and start, the creek went all the way downhill into North Las Vegas, past the Mormon Fort and out into what we called the Tule Forest which would be North Las Vegas and East Las Vegas. There were no homes out there, just desert. All the way to Frenchman and Sunrise Mountains. North Las Vegas was an entirely separate and distinct community. There was desert between Las Vegas and North Las Vegas. North Las Vegas was known as cowboy town. The gambling in North Las Vegas was interesting. You could have your own gambling game in a bar. So, if you had a bankroll, there was no gaming commission and no control board, you paid a license fee to the city and you could set your own game in one of these bars and deal it yourself. Buy playing chips in and out with the barkeep. Unheard of today. I was 16 aware of this. I remember all kinds of exciting things happening, shootouts and police chases and 1 remember I aspired to get old enough to join the Sheriffs Mounted Posse which they had at that time. It later became the Sheriff s jeep Posse. There was a city police department and a county sheriff s office. Some early pi omoters of the town were the Junior Chamber of Commerce, the JCs and, boy, did they cut loose. They all wore cowboy duds and big Stetsons and carried Colt 45s and fired them off in casinos and in the street. Shot mostly blanks off. Liability at that time didn t mean anything. They would ride their horses into the downtown sawdust joints and arrest people who hadn't bought a badge. Throw them into a metal hoosegow in the middle of Fremont Street till some friend bailed them out with a silver dollar. To sneak downtown during one of these celebrations was something for a young kid to see. There was a dog that used to walk downtown Las Vegas streets with a bag of cigarette tobacco around its neck. Its name was "Pard." It liked to chew on the bags. He had a nicotine habit. Gamblers every once in a while would stop him and he looked like Spot from the Our Gang comedies and they would untie the old bag and give him a new one. The downtown jail was called the Blue Room and it was block off Fremont in the alley between 1s t and 2nd behind the Apache hotel and the S.S. Rex where the Horseshoe Casino is now and when I was a young kid I knew that I could score some change if I would go into the alley because they had a high barred window off the drunk tank and if 1 said, "O.K. I'm out here and I can get you cigarettes or whatever you need," the guys in jail would throw money out the high barred opening because there was no air-conditioning. I'd run off and get them their Lucky Strikes or Pall Malls or Camels and 17 a book of matches or whatever it was. If they wanted something like a candy bar, you know I'd bring it back and chuck it up there and they could catch it. So, we kids would score some change off whoever was unlucky to be incarcerated in there. The first Chinese restaurant in Las Vegas was Wing Fong's, right near the jail on 2nd Street. He was a very intelligent guy, spoke English but with a really heavy accent and became very wealthy. He really liked my stepfather "Baby Shoes," who would take book from Fong. My stepfather, who was a great horseman, not riding horses but betting on them, used to be a bookmaker in Hollywood when my mother met him and at that time he knew a bunch of the Italian Mafiosi in California. I think the capo di capi re was Lou Dragna and his Jewish counterpart, Mickey Cohen. 1 met Cohen often, he used to slip me a quarter and pinch my cheeks real hard. Sam took book with, I can't think of his name. He ran the card room at the Stardust for years later on. In the sixties. He lived to be 100 years old. I'll think of it in a minute. Yeah! It was "Hy" Goldbaum. He and my stepfather were bookmakers in Hollywood during World War Two when my mother first met them. I remember being in Hy's big black Cadillac sedan in the back seat, with my mother and him in the front seat when some stick up man who was in the dark corner of the back seat. It was in an underground garage. I didn't see him until he put a revolver up to Hy's head and took his bankroll and robbed us. If you ever see a man with his roll of bills held with a rubber band you know he's a gambler. The mug took off with Hy's bankroll. My single mother lived on Gramercy Place right off Hollywood Boulevard for a while. Anyway, that group, that Hollywood group that was involved with the gaming boats and bookmaking along with the East Coast money guys were the people who 18 founded some of the earliest gambling joints and casino hotels in Las Vegas. They had to find somewhere to operate as the war shut down the ships that anchored three miles off the coast and you took speedboats out to them. They had everything a land casino had. One was called the SS Rex and the other one, the Lux. Then there was a political shutdown as the administration in Los Angeles got religion. So these wise guys had to go somewhere and found out about this hick town in the desert having legal gaming. The five families in New York had a sit down and agreed everybody, Italians and Jews, had a shot in Las Vegas and it would be an open city. My stepfather Sam " Baby Shoes" Prezant came out of Golden, Colorado, and Casper, Wyoming. His father had been a horse trader, one of the earliest Jews to emigrate from Kiev, Russia in the late 1800s. In fact, that's why they named it Golden, Colorado. My stepfather ran away to join the circus in Denver in the early 1900s, went into gambling, went were the money was, and in the 1930s had a small card room in Casper, Wyoming where they were having an oil boom. He ran a card game called Russian barbout, on the sandbar as they called it in Casper. One night he got into a fight with a drunken Greek who stabbed him in the belly. Sam kicked him to death with his size 13 loafers, earning the street name "Baby Shoes" and had to get out of town. He had a substantial bankroll, over $150,000.00, he went to Hollywood because of the horse tracks in California and Tijuana and then came to Las Vegas with the rest of the mob. So, that was his background. These men from these illegal backgrounds came flocking to Las Vegas because of its legality. They were the real early gaming pioneers. All my life I'