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R 3 Sin City Inc. By Marc Cooper Sharks in the Desert The Founding Fathers and Current Kings of Las Vegas John L. Smith Barricade Books: 400 pp., $24.95 In the Desert o f Desire Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle William L. Fox University of Nevada Press: 186 pp., $24.95 ? NY doubt that Las Vegas has becom e America’s mainstream cultural capi­tal — the city that best em bodies the nation’s corporate ethos — evapo­rated this year when the town was neatly chopped (as they say at the poker tables) between two behemoth corporations: Kirk Kerkorian’s MGM Mirage acquired the Mandalay Resort Group and Harrah’s Entertain­ment bought out Caesars Entertainment, thus becom ing the largest casino com pany in the world. The two gam­bling titans now own almost every major property on the fabled Strip, the main attraction in a city that draws nearly 40 million tourists a year. The notable exceptions, Steve Wynn’s Wynn Las Vegas and Sheldon Adelson’s Ve­netian, are themselves part of multibillion-dollar publicly traded corporations. Tax receipts from the newly aggre­gated MGM Mirage and Harrah’s alone now account for almost a third of Nevada’s general fund revenue. As the desert metropolis celebrates its centennial this year, it has com pleted its transition from a Sin City run by gun-toting mobsters to a New Las Vegas run by risk-averse Bluetooth-equipped MBAs. “Consolidation was the way of capitalism, and the gaming industry practiced that philosophy at hyperspeed,” writes John L. Smith in “Sharks in the Desert: The Founding Fathers and Cur­rent Kings of Las Vkgas.” A respected columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Jour­nal and author of several books on his hometown (includ­ing an acclaimed biography of Wynn), Smith has com ­piled an entertaining series of meticulously researched sketches on just about everyone who has ever owned a casino there. What makes his juicy, almost surreal tales of Vegas’ founding fathers (roll over, Tom Jefferson!) so en­grossing is that for decades, as Smith reminds us, this neon island in the desert was the only place in America where it was legal to be illegal. Indeed, Benny Binion, the founder of Fremont Street’s legendary Horseshoe casino, must be the only multiple killer in U.S. history memorial­ized by a bronze statue of himself on a horse. “Men con­sidered not only notorious but deadly in other communi­ties had evolved into colorful characters in Las Vegas,” Smith writes. “Binion admitted killing three men, was suspected o f ordering several other murders, and had maintained a decades-long relationship with organized crime, but on Fremont Street, he was a gregarious cow­boy gambler who allowed customers to play with as much cash as they could carry into the Horseshoe.” Countless other reprobates laundered themselves in the desert sun, m ost famously Bugsy Siegel. There was Marc Cooper is a contributing editor to the Nation and a colum nist fo r L. A. Weekly. His latest book is “The Last Honest Place in Am erica: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas. ” also Moe Dalitz, who came to Las Vegas from the Cleve­land mob, partnered with the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund, created the lavish Desert Inn, backed a couple o f other such “carpet joints” on the Strip and then went on to build the city’s first full-service hospital and becom e a venerated philanthropist and B’nai B’rith man of the year. The m ost richly detailed portraits in “Sharks in the Desert” are o f the city’s two contemporary mega-players, Kerkorian and Wynn — the men m ost responsible for the accelerated modernization and corporatization of America’s gambling mecca. Kerkorian, a reclusive but driven tennis-playing octogenarian, has on three occa­sions in Vegas history built the largest hotel in the world. He now controls a dozen casinos on or near the Strip and heads a $9-billion empire. Wynn, for his part, revolutionized the casino industry in 1989, when, financed by Michael Milken’s junk bonds, he opened the spectacular Mirage and proved that gam­bling resorts could make as much money, or more, from the shows, shops, restaurants and meeting room s as from the slots and the card tables. Five years ago, Wynn suffered a humiliating blow when he was forced to sell his Strip holdings to Kerkorian. Now he’s back, with the Wynn Las Vegas. Only in the corporate-bloated America of 2005 could his $2.7-billion property be seen as David to Kerkorian’s Goliath. Smith clearly delineates the supine posture assumed by Nevada authorities and regulators, who tolerated not only the unsavory casino operators of the Siegel-Dalitz era but also some o f the slippery corporate shenanigans of the present. It’s no accident that Vegas today enjoys what the pols like to call “broad bipartisan support”: Lo­cal county commissioners and city council members ac­cept paid consultancies from the casinos, while in Wash­ington the industry is aggressively represented by Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader. The head of the casino trade association, mean­while, is Frank Fahrenkopf Jr., an influential former chairman of the Republican National Committee. ? HERE are two key contextual issues that Smith’s book overlooks: Just what were the powerful eco­nomic currents that made the corporate transfor­mation of Las Vegas inevitable? And what is the magic mass intoxicant that has made [See Vegas, Page 4] Gary Friedm an Los Angeles Times B R IG H T L IG H T S , B IG C IT Y : Change is com ing fa st to Las Vegas, a city once run by mobsters and outlaws and now dom inated by corporate titans.