Transcript of interview with Jerry Engel by Barbara Tabach, March 1, 2016

i AN INTERVIEW WITH JERRY ENGEL An Oral History Conducted by Barbara Tabach Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ?Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2014 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV ? University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Project Manager: Barbara Tabach Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers: Barbara Tabach, Claytee D. White Editors and Project Assistants: Maggie Lopes, Amanda Hammar iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) Grant. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank University of Nevada Las Vegas for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader?s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews with permission of the narrator. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas iv PREFACE Jerry Engel was born in 1930 in New Jersey and spent most of his early life in Long Beach, New York until the family moved westward to Las Angeles. Jerry is a retired Certified Public Accountant and loves to talk about the history of Las Vegas that he observed since arriving in 1953. That was the year that he moved to Las Vegas to join his older brothers, Morris and Phil, in their accounting firm. Their major client at the time was Desert Inn. Another personal connection with local history: the Engel brothers? mother, Esther Katz Engel, was among the early investors in the Moulin Rouge hotel/casino enterprise. Jerry graduated with honors from University of California, Los Angeles in 1951. His accounting career in Las Vegas is highly regarded and he continues to maintain a consulting practice. He remains active within the community and enjoys doing presentations based on his memories of Las Vegas history. Within this interview, Jerry highlights people, casinos and other observations of local history that he came into contact with over the decades. He provides insights about the role of an accountant in the gaming industry. He also discusses the influence of Jewish business leaders in and array of local gaming and non-gaming issues, including the retail world, Jim Crow era segregation, and the astonishing growth of the valley over six decades. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Jerry Engel March 1, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Barbara Tabach Preface??????????????????????????????????..iv Jerry shares his time California where he received his CPA certificate at UCLA; his move to Las Vegas in 1953 to join his brothers in Engel accounting firm; evolution of Las Vegas; insight into the organization of Las Vegas in 1953; his recollections of segregation in Las Vegas during the 50?s; his mother?s investment in the Moulin Rouge hotel; consequences when casino stealing occurs; details about the mob influence and control of casinos; impact Bugsy Siegel?s death had on tourism for Las Vegas in 1948 and ?high rise hotel trend????.????????.?1-5 Jerry talks about the ending of segregation; Moulin Rouge casino; Hank Greenspun?s role in ending segregation in 1964; other prominent Jews that influenced the creation of Las Vegas; impact of mob, Nevada?s legalization of gambling; requirements for obtaining a gambling license; creation of the ?Black Book??????????...????????????6-9 Provided insight into how the casinos geared you to gamble; Caesars Palace opening as the first themed hotel in 1966; taxation of tips and lavish lifestyles of servers; embezzling money and dealing with IRS; shares his parents courtship, marriage and immigration; Jewish traditions growing up; marriage to Sharlene and raising kids in Las Vegas in the 50?s and 60?s??.10-14 Shares interesting story about Pat McCarran and Hank Greespun feud; Names power players in the developing Las Vegas; Teamsters giving loans to Las Vegas hotels; Talks about being a CPA; Filing taxes; Shares his personal accomplishments in the community; Temple Beth Sholom; Jewish entertainers that sang in the temple???????????????..15-20 Talks about Oscar and Carolyn Goodman; meeting his wife; opening of Foxy?s; fun story about 24-hour dress shop Maryanne?s; Marshall Rousso clothing stores? road to success; anti-Semitism in Las Vegas; story of Elvis Presley shopping at 2am inside Wonder World??????21-25 Jim Crowe laws in Las Vegas; Merv Adelson and Irwin Molasky; Moe Dalitz; his friends experiences running the Howard Hughes empire; Shecky Greene crashing car into Caesars Palace water fountain; Jerry?s past favorite restaurant on the Strip; people scamming the casinos; 1953?s ?saturation point? of land; Nevada Test site and tourists visiting to watch the explosions????????????????????????????????26-33 Index?????????????????????????????????....34-35 vi vii 1 This is Barbara Tabach. Today is March first, 2016. It's the beginning of a month. I'm sitting with Jerry Engel. Jerry, your last name is spelled E-N-G-E-L. It shows here you came to Nevada in 1953. Yes. That's right. What did it look like to you then? Small town. If you went west on Charleston Boulevard, the city ended at Decatur. After that you were in sheer desert going all the way to Red Rock. Now, of course, development goes way beyond where 215 is and it's almost to Red Rock. So the town has really filled in. Yes, it's pretty amazing how it's grown so quickly. But let me add that in 1953, the town itself had about thirty-thousand people and Clark County had about seventy-thousand people; that included Searchlight and North Las Vegas. Reno was the political center of the state and the political powerhouse of the state, although Carson City was its capital, but Reno was really where all the power was. So you've seen the evolution of the city. Tell me about where you grew up. I grew up in Long Beach, Long Island. Moved there in 1935 with my parents and lived there until '45. Then in 1945, my parents sold their laundry in Long Beach and took a trip to Los Angeles; loved it and decided to move out west. In October 1945, we moved to LA. I was fifteen years old and in the tenth grade. I finished high school at Dorsey High and went on to UCLA in 1947, where I majored in accounting. I got my CPA certificate in California and graduated in '51. I worked for a CPA firm in LA with my two older brothers, Morrie and Phil, who were also CPAs. Morrie flew to Las Vegas to do the monthly audit of the Desert Inn. In 1953, Las Vegas was booming and Morrie and Phil left the firm in Los Angeles, formed a partnership and 2 opened an office in Las Vegas. I joined them in 1953 and became a partner in '54. The name of the firm was Engel & Engel. Morrie is deceased and Phil is still alive. So you all arrived around the same time in the '50s? Las Vegas had a real housing shortage in the 1950s. This was because after the Second World War ended in 1945, financial institutions in the East?even those in Nevada?still considered gambling a very risky business, and the state was, of course, built on gambling, so money was not forthcoming to build houses. In 1953, my brother Morrie rented a home with a converted garage, which I moved into with my first wife and son. You could drive from one end of town to the other in ten minutes, as Las Vegas was a small town. The city didn't even have any light signals. It was very provincial, and you knew everybody. For example, the whole bar association of Clark County?forty of them?fit in one picture. The town was a very strong Mormon controlled town and they really ran the town in those days. In 1953, North Las Vegas, which is contiguous to Las Vegas, was a working man's town. The Westside was part of Las Vegas, but was a segregated part of Las Vegas where the black community lived. Las Vegas was considered the ?Mississippi of the West? because it was a segregated town. The blacks were not allowed to go into the hotels unless they were working there as an entertainer, or had a maintenance or janitor uniform. There were no black dealers and even though they had good paying jobs working in restaurants, et cetera, they still had to live on the Westside. Even a person as well-known as Sammy Davis, Jr., had to house his band on the Westside, as the hotel wouldn't give them rooms. Headliners like Sammy Davis and Nat King Cole could stay in the hotels where they performed, but their black band members had to stay on the Westside. 3 Nat King Cole was playing and staying at the Sands Hotel. The story goes that he went into the Sands swimming pool, and the big Texan gamblers were so mad, they made the Sands Hotel drain the pool and refill it; they said, "Don't do that again, if you want to ever see us back." I never heard the story about Nat King Cole. He actually had to stay at the Harrison House at first. The [black entertainers] couldn't stay in the hotels. They had to stay at a house over on the Westside when they first would come. How would you say that compared from coming from L.A.? In L.A., I went to Dorsey High, which had a big black community in that part of town. The L.A. schools were all integrated and there was no segregation. In Las Vegas, it was just the black band members that had to stay on the Westside. That's why in 1955, the Moulin Rouge was built on the Westside; it was the first inter-racial hotel in Las Vegas. Did you ever go there? Well, yes. My mother was one of the investors and we were the accountants for the hotel. Phil, Morrie and I each took a shift in the counting room because every eight hours you had to count the money taken in by the casino. We watched them count the money and we made sure the reports were properly prepared, so there was no cheating in the back room. But where they stole the place blind was in the front where they had the gambling. The casino executives could give out all kinds of credit and there were many ways you could steal from the house if you were in collusion with a casino executive. Today it's a pretty tough thing to do in a hotel because they have so many safeguards. But old Las Vegas was a little different then, more of the old western way of running a business. If somebody was caught cheating, a lot of times there was western style justice. Binion's was known to have broken the fingers of quite a few cheaters. 4 It was a different way of managing all of that. Well, remember in the late 40s and 50s, most of the hotels were owned by the mob?okay. You want to talk a little bit about the mob? Sure. The mob influence and control of Las Vegas casinos started when Bugsy Siegel built the Flamingo, which opened in 1946. In 1947, he was killed in Beverly Hills and that's when Las Vegas really took off, according to Nevada?s outstanding historian Senator Richard Bryan. When Bugsy Siegel was killed mob-style, millions of people around the country read about Bugsy Siegel and the Flamingo Hotel he built in Las Vegas some three hundred miles north of Los Angeles. So what happened? The public said, "Let's take a trip to Las Vegas to see the Flamingo hotel." That's when Las Vegas really started to boom. Californians came here by the thousands; there was gambling?which you didn't have in Los Angeles or in California unless it was on offshore ships?great entertainment, good food and cheap rooms. Bugsy Siegel did not live to see it, because his hotel lost a lot of money when he opened in 1946. He spent a lot of money to bring Hollywood celebrities, but they'd come up for a few days and then they'd go back to L.A. There was nothing much more in Las Vegas to do except gamble at the Flamingo, the El Cortez downtown, or the El Rancho and the Last Frontier hotels on the Strip. The old Strip is still the same Strip of today, only much smaller. Las Vegas Boulevard was a two-lane road from Los Angeles all the way through downtown, and then continued on to Salt Lake City. However, only the road south of Sahara Avenue was called the ?Strip.? None of the buildings in Las Vegas were more than three stories high, because if you built a fourth floor, rather than use steel and concrete, to use wood and stucco was cheaper. 5 When I came up here in '51, the Strip consisted of the Desert Inn, the Sahara, the Thunderbird, the El Rancho, the Sands, the Frontier, and the Flamingo. Then in '54 and '55, the boom really took off; the Dunes, the Moulin Rouge, and Riviera were built. The Riviera was the first high-rise hotel?nine stories high?and it broke the height barrier, starting a high-rise hotel trend. In 1955, the Dunes, the Riviera, the Moulin Rouge and a little later the Tropicana all got into trouble and went into bankruptcy, and I brilliantly forecast that ?Las Vegas had reached its saturation point.? When those hotels did close; so you weren't assured that no matter what you did in Las Vegas it would turn to gold. The Moulin Rouge, built on the Westside, was the only hotel that would cater to blacks. Wealthy blacks would make a reservation to come to Las Vegas for a week and stay at the Moulin Rouge. They'd see a magnificent stage show?which was so well received it made the cover of Life magazine. The magazine showed the chorus line of the Moulin Rouge saying, "Las Vegas first interracial hotel," because the Strip was known for its segregation. Downtown Las Vegas wasn't segregated and blacks also had their own gambling on the Westside. So wealthy black vacationers would come to the Moulin Rouge. The first night they'd see a great show, eat a very good dinner, gamble and go to sleep. The next day, since they couldn't go to the Strip, they would see the same show and have another wonderful dinner at the same restaurant. By the third day they would go home. You just couldn't hold them another day. Segregation continued in Las Vegas until 1964 when the blacks started to really make noise. They were going to demonstrate on the Strip, which would have made national news. Remember, the whole West wasn't segregated; just the South and parts of Texas and the Strip. So the blacks were going to demonstrate, and Hank Greenspun, who was the editor of the Sun, got the hotel owners together and said, "Boys, we don't need this kind of publicity." So they all 6 backed off and opened the doors to all. Since 1964 Las Vegas was no longer the ?Mississippi of the West.? Hank Greenspun?being Jewish?how did the Jewish community relate to that racism do you think at that time? You said your mother was part of the Moulin Rouge investors? I mean as far as Moulin Rouge, wasn't it open originally by a group of Jewish investors? Yes that is true, but it is also true that most of the Strip was built by Jews. The Mormons ran the city and county governments, but the makers and shakers who built the Strip were Jewish. Flamingo?Bugsy Siegel; Last Frontier??Jake Kozloff; El Rancho?Beldon Kattleman; Sahara?Milton Prell and Ed Moss; Dunes?Jake Gottlieb and Morris Shenker; Caesars Palace?Jay Sarno and Nate Jacobson; Circus Circus?Jay Sarno and Stan Mallin; New Frontier?Maury Friedman; Tropicana?Sam Jaffe; Riviera?Gus Greenbaum; Sands?Jake Friedman and Jack Entratter; Desert Inn and Stardust?Moe Dalitz. Jews also helped build downtown. Las Vegas Club?Mel Exber; El Cortez?Mike Epstein; Golden Nugget?taken over by Steve Wynn around 1970. Both Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson helped re-invent Las Vegas, and their success is legendary. Both are late-comers. Wynn?s rise since 1970 is meteoric. He became president of the Golden Nugget, and turned an old downtown gambling casino into a Strip-quality resort. In 1989, he opened the Mirage, then Treasure Island, then Bellagio, then the Wynn and finally the Encore. Adelson bought the Sands Hotel and in 1996 imploded it to replace it the magnificent Venetian Hotel, followed by the Palazzo. Bugsy Siegel was killed in 1947 in Beverly Hills. Gus Greenbaum and his wife were killed in 1956 or 1957 in Phoenix. The mob eliminated who they wanted to, but didn't want bad publicity in Las Vegas; so they did their assassinations out of town. 7 Were you aware that that was happening when you're living there or is it with the ability to look back and see what was happening to actually say that? Were people aware or thinking that when it was happening? Whether we were aware or not did not matter to the mob. They were worried about Washington saying the mob had taken over gambling in Nevada. There was always that concern because Nevada was the only state in the union that had legalized gambling. Illegal bookmakers and the illegal crap games were?and still are?going on around the country, and people were breaking the law, but that was all small stuff. Nevada really thrived in those years: Reno in the north and Las Vegas in the south. I don't know of the mob ever being up north, but I know they were well represented here. Of course, there was the Italian connection, who avoided the limelight. Proof of their involvement was when the mobster Anastasia was killed in a barber chair in New York City and had the win of the Tropicana Hotel the day before in his pocket. Now, why would a mobster in New York have such information on him? Subsequently, the mafia in Kansas City was connected to the Tropicana and Carl Thomas, a local casino owner, ultimately went to jail for fronting for the mob. You could get a gambling license in Nevada if your record was clean. If your only blemish was that you were convicted of illegal gambling elsewhere, that wasn't considered a violation of the law in Nevada. For example, Moe Dalitz, ran an illegal gambling business in Newport, KY, called the Beverly Hills Club?across the river from Cincinnati, OH. Since Moe came from that area they connected him to the Cleveland mob. In 1954, Senator Estes Kefauver subpoenaed Moe Dalitz and had him as a witness before his crime committee. The investigation never went anywhere, but Dalitz never lost the reputation of being connected with the Cleveland 8 mob. So you could still get licensed, if your only conviction was illegal gambling. After 1960 the population really grew in Las Vegas and eventually surpassed Reno. As a result, many more Las Vegans went to the legislature, and Las Vegas is now the big gorilla in Nevada. How did this growth impact your career as a CPA? To me it seemed so normal. When Grant Sawyer was the governor [1960-1968], Washington was putting a lot of heat on Las Vegas because of its rumored connection to the mob, which was supposedly thriving in Nevada and making all kinds of money. Senator Kefauver came here with his committee and held his hearings. He also went around the country trying to expose the mob and organized crime. In Nevada, we were concerned that Washington could have easily legislated that gambling in Nevada be illegal because it was illegal everywhere else, but it wasn't a federal law. It was just a state law in all the other states. Washington was aware of the mob?s influence?Bugsy's death, definitely mob connected, Gus Greenbaum, the Italian mobs out of Kansas City, and so on. Governor Sawyer felt we better do something about it. So they came up with the idea of a Black Book. Basically, Nevada said to Washington, D.C., ?Don't worry about it; we know how to police our own." The State Gaming Commission created a ?Black Book? and put the names of all known mobsters in the book. Any person named in the Black Book cannot even walk into a hotel. Any hotel breaking these rules could lose their gambling license. I'm very close to a friend I play tennis with and he's listed in the Black Book. He cannot go into a hotel and he has never tried. Can't step into the hotel. 9 If you're in the Black Book and you walk through the front door, someone will come up to you and say, "I'm sorry, you can't come in." So Nevada was saying to Washington, "See, the mobsters can't even come into our hotel. We don't want anything to do with them. We're so clean." It must have worked because Washington never threatened legislation. Of course, the mob is smart enough to find somebody who didn't have a bad reputation and they had them get licensed. You remember the movie "Casino?" Yes. Well, Lefty [Frank] Rosenthal of the Stardust hotel was supposedly fronting for the mob, so they never licensed him. Oscar Goodman represented Lefty and tried to get him licensed, but he never succeeded. As shown in the movie, Rosenthal had a bomb go off in his auto, but he survived. That's was in the '70s. The mob would put up the money and find a front man to get licensed, because Nevada didn't have the investigative body that we now have. Now if you file for a gambling license, you pay a lot of money to be investigated by the State Gaming Control Board. A friend of mine who was just a captain at the Sands Hotel wanted to set up a little gambling bar in Henderson. It was only thirteen or fifteen slots in a little store in Henderson and his license cost him $250,000. The Gaming control Board was very tough on him because he grew up with the Marcello Family and the New Orleans Mob. Were all of your clients in your firm gaming related? No. Las Vegas has many other types of businesses. But remember, the key in those days was gambling. The hub of the hotel was the casino and everything was geared to get you to gamble. They gave away the food you could eat beautifully for a dollar at a buffet, and shows were five 10 dollars for a dinner show which included terrific entertainment. The rooms were practically given away because the hotels weren't interested in making money from those departments. It's like a loss leader in a market where they put an ad that such-and-such is going at a certain price, and people go there even though they may pay more for everything else. Everything in a hotel was to lure you into the hotel to gamble. Today every department in a hotel is priced to make a profit?even buffets. Las Vegas continued to grow because you could have such a cheap vacation if you didn't gamble. If you gamble that's another story. But the gambling was the hub of the wheel and everything was geared to get people to gamble. In the 1950?s and 1960?s the typical hotels consisted of: a swimming pool, a nice swim area, a showroom, nice rooms and great food and of course, a casino. It wasn't until 1966 when Caesars Palace opened that the first themed hotel was built. It had the Roman theme and everything reminded you of Rome. When you see it today, it's certainly Romanesque in every way. Now, did you have any relationship with the ownership of every? Yes, our clientele included hotel presidents, casino bosses, and captains in the showrooms. Of course, in those days, tips weren't taxed and most people who worked at a job that had tips didn't report too much, but they lived pretty well. The clients we had who earned tips were told, "You have to report more because you've got a beautiful home and a lifestyle that says you are making at least $50,000 a year. So we got our clients to ?up? their tips reporting, which kept the IRS away. But we did have our mix of clients. I had one fellow with a mob background (as I found out later) he told me his name was Johnny Marshall, but his real name was Marshall Caifano. I 11 found out later that he was a hit man for the Chicago mob and was later listed in the Black Book. It's like my talking to you. They're not dangerous to sit with. It's just they have their way of doing business if you rub them wrong. You saw the movie Godfather, where they ?make an offer you can't refuse.? So they had their way of twisting arms. Other than that, they were like anyone else, and they preferred paying more tax and report more income than they probably had to in order to keep the government from knocking on their doors. Remember, Al Capone went to jail for tax fraud. There are a lot of people in business today who don't ring up all their sales; that's the way the old gambling was run. When the mob ran the hotels there was lots of unreported income and a lot of the money would go back East in little satchels. I had a client whose wife was reputed to be a bag lady for the mob (per a Life magazine article). So how did the rules and regulations governing the financial part of this change in Las Vegas for you to be advising people to report all their money? Well, that never changed. The law is pretty specific. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) does not care if you embezzle money as long as you report it on your tax return, which most people don't do. Not reporting it on your tax return is a felony, so reporting tips, or money counted under the table, or reporting funds you have embezzled not breaking the law as far as the IRS is concerned. You may end up in jail for embezzling, but that is another matter. During the Second World War, many people made a lot of black market money. Right after the war they'd come to Las Vegas with satchels full of cash, which they never reported, because the money was from illegal activities. For example, during WWII we were given ration stamps. If you made counterfeit ration stamps and sold them, you would not report it to the government. So Las Vegas really thrived in those years; say from '49 to ?55. 12 Well, that black market cash ultimately got used up and disappeared. But then Las Vegas continued to grow grew; new hotels were built, rooms grew, the number of people grew. Las Vegas kept reinventing itself, building more beautiful, themed hotels. Last year we had over 44 million visitors. Clark County had 70,000 population in 1953; today it?s over 2 million. Well, that's thirty times growth in 63 years. I'm going to switch gears. Take me back in your family history, your ancestry. Were you parents born in America? No. Tell me about them. My father came from Romania. My mother came from Hungary. They got here in the early '20s, maybe 1922, '23. They didn't know each other. They just had aunts or uncles that brought them over from Europe. They met in the US and got married. My oldest brother, Morrie, (now deceased) was born in 1926. Phil was in about 1927, and I was born in 1930. My parents were hard-working immigrants, and didn't have any education. They didn't speak English, so my mother went to school to learn, and my father learned English the old fashion way. They assimilated the way immigrants do. As first generation Americans, we knew we had to finish school and go on to college, et cetera; that's how we were brought up. With being Jewish, isn't that pretty much traditional? Right. We are people of the book. What kind of work did they do? Well, my dad was in the laundry business. He came to the U.S. in the 1920?s with his brother, 13 and two sisters. The four families all lived in the same area in Orange, New Jersey. In 1935, they bought a laundry in Long Beach, Long Island, and were partners. Then they sold the laundry in '45 and moved to Los Angeles. From 1935 to 1945, the four families lived in Long Beach and all the first cousins were in each other's houses all the time. We're still very close as first cousins because we grew up knowing each other. Today, it is different; this one lives out west, another in Florida and so on. It's a whole different way of life. Living in Long Beach close to each other was like living in a little shtetl. So how did you maintain religious traditions growing up? We all had to go to Hebrew school, and three of us got bar mitzvah-ed. I have always been proud of my Jewish heritage, although I do not observe the kosher dietary laws. I'm not Orthodox. I accept life, assimilated into my surroundings and feel very Jewish. And then did you raise your?you've got four kids, I see here. Well, Bob, my youngest, is Sharlene?s son. I divorced in '75, married Sharlene and adopted her Bob. So were all four kid raised here in Las Vegas? Yes, all four were raised here in Las Vegas. What was it like to raise kids in Las Vegas in the '50s and '60s? I always felt Las Vegas is like any other city, except its got tremendous bonus features like ?The Strip??where you can see great entertainment which people from all over the world come to see. Las Vegas is also a great convention town, with fascinating exhibitions which you can see if you want to. We have our temple and our local organizations and you are always meeting interesting 14 business people. Las Vegas, as a destination resort has many extra exciting things going on that you would not find in most cities; there?s no other town like it. How long have you lived in Las Vegas now? Twenty years. How often do you go to the Strip? Not regularly anymore. We used to go more when I was younger. Well, the Strip may be for tourists, but it is also available to us. Is it so different than it would be in Iowa? No, you're absolutely right. Well, it's a little more fun. That's right, I said it's a bonus. All that stuff is out there if you want it; there?s still a lot of giveaways. You probably go to a buffet once in a while, so you're taking advantage of the things that's attractive for locals. But how many times can you see the same show? I used to go to many shows when I first moved here, and I would get phone calls from friends I hardly knew. I used to meet them and I'd go to a show but after a while I said, "You just go to the show; I'll meet you in between shows." So who are some of the leading members of the Jewish community? Now, let me ask you this. Are you leading? Is this for UNLV? This is for UNLV. But it's where the Jewish community contributed to the growth of Las Vegas. It's the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage project. Well, then you would want to know who were the makers, shakers, and power brokers? There was Hank Greenspun, who was the fiery editor of the Las Vegas Sun who always fought with the competing Review-Journal. Whatever the Review-Journal wanted to do, Hank would be against 15 or vice versa. Al Cahlan was the editor of the R-J and he and Hank would go at it. Hank usually won between the two of them. But, remember, we had anti-Semitism in this town, too. Talk about that. Pat McCarran was our senator and the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act was a very, very bigoted piece of legislation. It's still there; it set a quota on Jews in the country. McCarran was a very powerful man. Hank Greenspun took him on once; attacked McCarren in his newspaper. McCarran wanted to teach Hank a lesson, so he called all the big hotel owners and said, "Stop advertising in the Sun." Hank got wind of it and all of a sudden people who advertised in The Sun stopped advertising. Hank sued McCarran and they made a settlement, because McCarran had broken a lot of antitrust laws and was very vulnerable. That was Hank. He was a fighter, a real leader in the community who was not afraid to take on the most powerful people in Nevada. Hank was also looked up to by the Jewish community for helping smuggle arms to Israel in 1998. (For which he was arrested and found guilty of) Then there was Moe Dalitz, who was very well respected, even with his connection to the Cleveland mob. Did you know him personally? I met him on many occasions and Moe was like anybody else. It isn't like they got bent noses and talk like prize fighters. They were respected, and had a lot of power. Moe gave back much to the community. For example, he could have made a two-million dollar profit as owner of the Las Vegas Country Club, but chose to sell it to locals at his cost and keep the club for local members of the community. Moe Dalitz, Jay Sarno, Nate Jacobsen, Jack Entratter, Steve Wynn, Morrie Shenker, Maury Friedman, the Mack family, Jake Kozloff, Jakey Friedman, Gus Greenbaum. Billy 16 Weinberger. All were Jews that had much to do with developing Las Vegas. And then you had the mix of Gentiles who were also real powers. Take Jerry Mack, a Jew, and Parry Thomas, a Mormon. Parry Thomas wasn't Jewish but he could have been because he and Jerry Mack were like brothers. In fact, the families, they called each other uncles and aunts. They grew up like they were family and the families stil