Vegas and the Mob - Paperback

by Al W. Moe (Author)

Las Vegas was built on money, murder, and the Mob - long before the corporations took over.

From Bugsy Siegel to Meyer Lansky, the real bosses carved up the Strip and skimmed millions off the top.
This is the true story of the gangsters who ran the casinos, the bodies they left behind, and the empire they almost kept.
Las Vegas wasn't built on neon and luck - it was built on fear, money, and the Mob.
Before the corporations, before the mega-resorts, the city belonged to gangsters who skimmed millions off the top and buried their problems in the desert.

This is the real story of how the Mob muscled into Las Vegas - and how they nearly lost it all.
Inside these pages, you'll walk into the back rooms where the real decisions were made:

Bugsy Siegel stole a property and forced the Flamingo into existence with other people's money
Meyer Lansky engineered the skim that fed crime families from coast to coast
Frank Costello, Moe Dalitz, Lucky Luciano, and Tony Accardo carving up the casinos

Hidden ownerships, silent partners, and the "legitimate" fronts fooled the Fed, while the FBI chased the murders, betrayals, and finally cracked the empire.

Vegas and the Mob pulls back the curtain on the casinos everyone thinks they know - the Sands, the Flamingo, the Sahara, the Stardust - and reveals the violent, chaotic, and often unbelievable truth behind their rise.

This is the documented history of how organized crime built Las Vegas, skimmed it dry, and fought to keep control as Nevada regulators and federal agents closed in. If you want the real story - the money, the murders, the bosses, the skim, and the city that became the Mob's greatest gamble - this book delivers.

Author Biography

Al W Moe attended the University of Nevada at Reno before moving to Las Vegas. He is a casino historian and the author of three other books about Nevada casinos, "The Roots of Reno," "Mob City: Reno," and "Nevada's Golden Age of Gambling." Moe's fiction includes "Stealing from Bandits" and "Getting Thin is Murder."