The Las Vegas Union that endorsed Obama has a history of Mob ties.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9800E1DE1531F930A35755C0A9629C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/lasvegas/peopleevents/p_unions.html

With friends like this...

:rofl:

What casino doesn't?

who knew?

Guess we'll have to shut the Democratic Party down, too, while we're at it.

Are you alluding because they endorsed Obama that Obama may have mob ties also?

That's like saying that the sky is blue! The mob MADE that place, after all.

that statement is soooo not true. The mob had influence, certainly, but they didn't "make" Nevada or even Las Vegas or Reno.

It's one of those "everybody knows" things that just isn't true.

I provided chapter, verse, and cites (from Univ. of Las Vegas to PBS) to back up what I said in post 71. The mob MADE Vegas, and if it weren't for the mob, Vegas wouldn't be what it is today.

Vegas would NEVER be what it is today, revisionist history notwithstanding. Intially, they thought the idea was half-baked.

As air conditioning improved, the idea became more and more viable.

And I rather doubt Paul Laxalt (Reagan's good buddy) would have become a senator if he didn't have a certain kind of help, either.

The 'gambling in a big way' market would have stayed in Atlantic City.

I'm not saying the mob didn't have an influence, or that the Flamingo didn't bring a more "east coast" sensibility to the what would become the Strip - but let's cut the "revisionist history" crap. ALL history is revisionist; hauling the phrase out to use as a bludgeon on people who disagree with you is foolish.

Please clarify who "they" were, and how you can justify the "NEVER" comment. Never is a very strong word. Bugsy's Flamingo was hardly a rousing success - there are those who believe that his assassination was a direct result of his cost-overruns and poor management decisions about the casino. I don't know the answer to that, but it is not "revisionist" (using your meaning) to say he wasn't very good at the job he took on.

More importantly, it is specious reasoning to state that ONE hotel made the city. Today's Las Vegas owes far more to Steve Wynn - why not give him the credit for it all? Or no, let's pick Howard Hughes. Or perhaps we could move away from the hotels and give credit to the railroad - or the Boulder Dam project - or the Arrowhead Highway project - or BMI. My point is that Las Vegas' history shouldn't be reduced to such simplistic terms.

I have no idea why you brought Paul Laxalt into the discussion; were you trying to make the mob connection to Las Vegas stronger? Laxalt was from Northern Nevada. I could come up with a few southern Nevada pols who had similar shady dealings if you like, but I still don't understand your point.

As for the "gambling in a big way" remark - Nevada legalized gambling in 1931; New Jersey gave Atlantic City the nod in 1974. Do you honestly believe that the ONLY reason Las Vegas is "what it is today" is because of a single hotel and without the Flamingo the city would have simply blown away in a desert wind? There were casino hotels before Bugsy came to town and there were more successful casino hotels that opened within two years of the Flamingo. I'll give Bugsy credit for picking a good location on the road to LA, but he didn't single-handedly make Las Vegas.

wow.

"They" were Bugsy's associates, and the 'half baked' idea was his hotel.

And I justify my "never" comment by the following:

Howard Hughes didn't build shit in LV, he BOUGHT stuff that the MOB had already built. It wasn't "ONE" hotel--it was damned near EVERY hotel in town that the mob either built or had their paws in up to their elbows.

Subsequently, the politicians passed legislation which enabled corporations, rather than individuals, to be the named entities that ran these enterprises. This enabled the mob to fade into the background, creating an "aura" of respectability, but they didn't leave LV until they milked it dry and had their own organizational issues. But they had a strong run that lasted for many, many decades, and to pretend that they didn't or that their influence didn't define the city is just not valid.

Howard Hughes did not build a thing in Las Vegas; in fact he was spooked by the city. His idea of Las Vegas was the movie set for his 1952 production of The Las Vegas Story with Jane Russell, Victor Mature, and Vincent Price. He had used the Flamingo, as Alan Hess recounts, "to represent all that was glamorous and exciting about Las Vegas . . . as the example of grandeur and the luxury of plush gambling on the Las Vegas Strip." That was the Las Vegas that the delusional Howard Hughes returned to in 1966, to hide from subpoenas and the media, and to build an empire in the desert. But by 1966 the glamour world of the Flamingo was a delusion from the past. Hughes was living another reality in 1966 controlled by a cohort of Mormon advisors, communicating with his lieutenants, even the chief of his Nevada Operations, via memo. Hughes was horrified by what he would have glimpsed from his penthouse windows had they not been permanently covered to shield him from the dangerous sunlight and germs. Circus Circus was bringing Coney Island next door, and his nemesis, the federal government, was shaking his penthouse by testing nuclear devices just down the highway. To the paranoid Hughes, Las Vegas had become a place of Fear and Loathing.

Hughes had purchased the Desert Inn, as the story goes, because he couldn't get a room there, and took over the top floor. He then proceeded to purchase the Sands, the Frontier, the Silver Slipper, and that monument to failed dreams, the Landmark, with its space-needle saucer-on-a-stick. Hughes is credited with bringing corporate legitimacy to Las Vegas, and running out the Mafia. The State of Nevada did oblige Hughes by changing its gaming licensing laws for him, thereby ushering into Las Vegas publicly traded hotel corporation like Hilton and Marriott, who changed the face of Las Vegas and whose hotels looked like hotels and corporate towers, not like roadside motels with big signs.

Under Hughes, or Hughes's people, his hotels continued business as usual, and for all intents and purposes under their previous management. Moe Dalitz still ran the Desert Inn, Jack Entratter and Carl Cohen, the Sands. The story was that people like Dalitz and Entratter were tired of Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department's relentless investigations of their business associates and decided to sell out to Hughes. But the economic changes that were affecting Las Vegas hotels and driving the expansion of convention centers and room additions would have occurred without Hughes. How Hughes's people marketed their hotels as tourist, convention and entertainment centers was no different than what other hotels were doing, or from what Hughes properties had been doing before he took them over.

http://www.library.unlv.edu/hughes/pages/vegas.html

Now, those guys that are underlined, Moe Dalitz, Jack Entratter, Carl Cohen--they were mobbed up. You can google them and see, if you'd like. Here's a start: http://www.1st100.com/part2/dalitz.html

They weren't choirboys or Mormon businessmen.

Even PBS 'makes the connection.' It is what it is. To pretend that the place wasn't launched by mafiosi, shaped by mafiosi, and has a modern-day persona that has been built on the foundations of what the mafia created IS revising history.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/lasvegas/peopleevents/p_syndicate.html

In Las Vegas
After Siegel, who had once famously noted of Syndicate members, "We only kill each other," was murdered in 1947, Gus Greenbaum, Davey Berman, and Morris Rosen, three of the Syndicate's chief authorities, took over the Flamingo. The hotel's success prompted the Syndicate to pour more money into building Strip resorts, and by the 1950s, the Strip was lined with hotel-casinos, many, if not all, funded by Syndicate money. From the 1940s through the 1970s, Las Vegas and its lavish resorts were made possible in large part by the mob, who not only funded resort development, but offered indispensable knowledge in casino management. Men who had little-to-no criminal records fronted the resorts. Behind the scenes, so-called "Miami hotel men" took undeclared, thus untaxed, money from the establishment's profits. As the Syndicate's "chairman," Lansky was the Syndicate's accountant. He was responsible for collecting, and then dividing, the skim.

As for Laxalt, he was bankrolled by those guys. He ushered in a law that he knew would help the individuals affiliated with the mob to conceal their ties and put a patina of respectability over the the entire enterprise. And he quid-pro-quo'ed, too:

By the mid-1960s, organized crime figures were growing old–many had come of age during Prohibition in the 1920s–and they were tired of fighting the authorities. State officials wanted to attract more legitimate investors. Federal officials were cracking down on them. Howard Hughes's buying spree ended alleged mob ownership of several resorts, but with the same employees in the casinos and the counting rooms, the skimming continued.

Nevada governor Paul Laxalt along with other officials and businessmen such as Thomas and Bill Harrah hoped to bring the state new respectability with the Corporate Gaming Act of 1969. The measure enabled the state to license key investors and executives rather than every stockholder, and thus publicly traded corporations to own casinos. Laxalt's predecessor, Governor Grant Sawyer, expected the mob to find ways around the Corporate Gaming Act, and events proved him right.

Allen R. Glick formed Argent Corporation, for his initials (Allen R. Glick ENTerprises or the French word for money). He obtained a $62.7 million loan from the Teamsters to buy the Stardust and Fremont and later claimed not to know that he answered to the Chicago, Kansas City, and Milwaukee mobs. If he didn't know, he soon found out when mob bosses installed Frank Rosenthal as their top executive at the two hotels. Rosenthal and his friends apparently devised a successful skimming operation that continued even after state gaming regulators forced them out and new owners took over. Finally, in 1983, Nevada officials revoked the licenses of top executives Al Sachs and Herb Tobman (they also preceded Glick at the Stardust) and brought in Boyd Gaming to run the Stardust and Fremont. Boyd eventually bought the two hotels, effectively ending mob control.

But other mob operations flourished–and ended similarly. Kansas City interests ran the Tropicana behind the back of supposed owners Mitzi Stauffer Briggs, a chemical heiress, and Ramada Inns by installing Joe Agosto as producer of the Folies Bergere production show. FBI wiretaps revealed that Agosto and prominent casino executive Carl Thomas, long considered free of mob taint, were in charge of skimming from the casino. Detroit's Lebanese mob and St. Louis interests represented by attorney Sorkis Webbe controlled the Aladdin until its forced sale to entertainer Wayne Newton. Longtime Teamsters attorney Morris Shenker ran the Dunes. All suffered under the federal and state microscope–and local critics such as Ned Day, a respected print and broadcast journalist whose reporting revealed many mob connections.

Not until the 1970s and 1980s did the mob extend its power and profits beyond the Strip. Anthony Spilotro, nicknamed Tony the Ant, came to Las Vegas in 1971 to run a gift shop at Circus Circus. State regulators soon listed him in the Black Book, thanks to allegations that he had been involved in perhaps twenty murders. Thus, Spilotro concentrated on the streets, forming the "Hole in the Wall" burglary gang, which earned its name by blowing a hole in the side of Bertha's jewelry store during a robbery. Federal prosecutors obtained several convictions, and induced one of Spilotro's hit men, Frank Cullotta, to testify and enter witness protection. Spilotro faced numerous indictments by 1986, when he and his brother Michael traveled to Chicago in hopes of taking over the Chicago mob after the conviction of several of the old dons. Instead, their campaign failed, they disappeared, and they turned up dead nine days later in an Indiana cornfield, near a farm owned by one of the convicted Chicago leaders.

While friends and allies of Rosenthal and Spilotro remain in Las Vegas, mob rule on the Strip and the streets was effectively over. Obviously, wherever crime is organized, organized crime exists, including ethnically oriented gangs involving Latinos and Russians. Allegations have persisted that topless and nude dancing clubs have replaced casinos as mob hangouts and money-laundering enterprises.....

Saying that the mob had nothing or little to do with Vegas is like pretending the French had nothing to do with the American Revolution. They played a key and vital role in the establishment of that place.

Does that mean "the Jews" are involved in the conspiracy as well? :eyes:

and now that Obama got it, the Clintons are trying to disenfranchise them. :eyes:

Las Vegas was built on mob ties. Are you honestly naive enough to believe that anything could happen in Las Vegas, even today, without the Mob having a hand in it?

"Are you honestly naive enough to believe that anything could happen in Las Vegas, even today, without the Mob having a hand in it?"

That's one reason voter intimidation by a Union in Las Vegas shouldn't be snickered at.

You're pathetic in the dictionary sense of the word.

These folks need those jobs.

You don't understand the concept of unions and you are so obtuse you never will.

But I will continue to laught at your public, pathetic display of utter ignorance. I have no candidate yet--but you sure as hell aren't helping yours.

After 20+ years in the CWA, 10 as a steward, I "don't understand the concept of unions"?
I find you amusing. Please, keep posting.

And, yes, dumbass, I will keep posting.

Get a union job someday. You'll learn.

Please. We're all waiting to be fuckin' ILLUMINATED here, and you seem to think you're just the one to do the job, so shit or quit squatting over our chests already.

Do you have any verifiable stories regarding Nevada Union workers who have been fired for voting in accordance to their own conscious rather than voting as the Union Boss wanted them to... or is this mere speculation and conjecture on your part...?

nor the Las Vegas chapter. He was endorsed by the NATIONAL union.

From BO's own website:
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has won the endorsement of Nevada's largest labor union, giving the underdog candidate a significant boost against frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the Nevada contest.

The Culinary Workers Union Local 226 joined with parent organization UNITE-HERE to endorse Obama, union officials announced this morning.

"Barack Obama has shown us that he understands our members' struggles and dreams," said Local 226 boss D. Taylor in a written release. "He stood with our union in every step of our recent contract negotiations and showed us that he too understands that organizing and bringing people together is how we move forward.
"We want to make the American dream we have established in Las Vegas a reality for the entire country and we think that Senator Obama will take us there."

The union represents 60,000 workers, mostly in Las Vegas, and is considered to be a major force in the Jan. 19 contest. It has a Northern Nevada membership of about 1,500.

who could have expected it? The mob actually has a presence in Vegas, I'm shocked beyond belief. Find me an entity in Vegas that doesn't have historical ties to the mob, my guess is the police department had it's share of mob intimidation as well.

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My what an astute observation, have you always been this quick.

:D

I'm sure they've taught more than a few of the Gotti and Gambino progeny and been the beneficiary of state college incentives heavily financed by--THE SHOCK--the casinos. Jay Bus on a roulette wheel, this is hysterical.

FWIW, I'm an uncommitted leaning to Edwards.

:rofl:

Obama supports strippers! Pass the news to the Hillaryworld Asshat Patrol!

On edit: slightly changed... :hi:

Tell the truth: You never read the posts you respond to, do you? :rofl:
Let us know how that personal ad of yours works out for you.

...how is Richardson doing in the race?

:rofl:

Up about 30 last I looked!

(I like Richardson by the way) I just want to point out how crazy it is to still be rooting so hard for someone AFTER they have already left the race.

damn your arguments get weaker by the day

:rofl: You're funny.

In 1996, the teamsters sent almost a million dollars from their general fund to the Clinton campaign. The Clinton campaign donated to teamster president Ron Carey's re-election. Carey won the election by a slim margin in a vote monitored by the Clinton Justice department. The results of that election were thrown out as a result and Carey was barred from running again in 1999. Carey was acquitted but the teamster political director was convicted of embezzlement for the transfer. This is all without even mentioning the Teamsters mob ties.

But yes, that Las Vegas union does have mob ties in it's history, and they endorsed Obama (although Hillary did try very hard and fail to get this same endorsement), so clearly we can't trust him or the process. :sarcasm:

On edit (I've said this on other threads, but I'll repeat my position on this whole line of attack):
This whole guilt by association thing is crap. You can't blame Obama any more for the history of a union that endorses him than you can Hillary for the history or tactics of groups that have endorsed her or her husband. It's interesting to see a Clinton supporter bring this up, only because they've been involved in national and international politics for 16 years now, they've met, dealt with, and worked with FAR more people than the Obama campaign has. I'm sure that for every friend of an associate Obama is unfairly asked to account for, many more can be dug up for Clinton. This might be the sort of tactic I would expect in support of someone with a short track record who's reaching desperation status, but not for someone as well organized, well funded and established as Hillary.

It's an important endorsement.

Even Bill Clinton knows that, he told a crowd that while Obama has the establishments support, Hillary has support among the union members.

Even the rocks in the pavement in Las Vegas have a history of mob ties.

:shrug:

Haven't seen that line of attack in a while.

There'd be an earth shakin' muliple O-gasm from DU's ObamaNation.
But it's Obama getting the endorsement. so it's O-key Dokey.

Obama supporters consider it just another handful of mud de jour around this place, nothing more, nothing less.

They probably made it up. :eyes:

Well done.

What was Las Vegas before Bugsy Siegel built a casino there (and other similar money started coming in). "Bugsy" (starring Warren Beatty) is a good movie to watch, more historical than, eg, "The Life of Emile Zola" (a classic)

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Who knew?

THE
HORROR

The thought of it just makes me ..... uh shiver .. yeah shiver.

And if you can't believe Martin Scorcese, let's face it, what can you believe in?

:crazy:

A Feisty Bill Clinton Defends Nevada Lawsuit:

Not being a very bright person, I'm afraid I don't understand the relevance of this. Maybe you could, with precision (and possibly some verifiable links) explain exactly why this should or should not be of interest?

We certainly don't know where she stood on the negative aspects of the Clinton administration, such as the pardon of Marc Rich after, among other things, Rich donated $70,000 to Hillary Clinton's New York Senate campaign.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-kaus/hillary-clinton-bucks-the_b_78375.html

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0108/UniteHERE_ad_Hillary_Clinton_does_not_respect_our_people.html

Nice people.