7
The desert in late November had turned cold and the wind was mean. High desert was like that—hot as a bitch in the summer, cold and dismal in the winter. I left school at lunchtime to run down to the restaurant and get money from Betty for lunch. Her tip jar next to the bed was empty when I crept in to get a handful of coins before leaving for school.
The lunch crowd was slow and Betty was in a bad temper.
“The customer says the gravy’s too greasy,” she told the cook, sending back a plate of biscuits and gravy. The cook gave her a dirty look and Betty turned her back to him. “The bastard takes bacon left on breakfast plates and uses it for his gravy,” she whispered to me.
“There was no money in the jar.”
“Hop took it all for his beer. Now that he’s laid off at the mine, he has nothing to do but drink and eat, with me doing the buying.”
She gave me a dollar in change and grabbed the coffeepot to refill a customer’s cup. I left the café with an uneasy feeling. Betty was even tempered most of the time. When she started getting mad at people, things would go to hell pretty damn quick.
That night I sat on my couch and watched a fuzzy version of I Love Lucy on TV. Gibbs claimed there were places where people got a whole bunch of TV channels, but that didn’t happen in Mina. Hop sat on the other end of the couch drinking beer. Every once in a while he’d fart. That’s why Betty hated beer—it made men fart. His face was red and he didn’t look like a happy camper. Neither did Betty. She sat at the kitchen table doing her nails as she read True Romance magazine. She had come home from work early, saying she felt ill. Betty never got sick and would crawl to work if she had to carry her sickbed on her back. The only time she missed work was when she was down or mad.
The pan of water on the stove was boiling and I got up to get the Cream of Wheat out of the icebox.
“You eighty-sixed me at Emerson’s.” Hop spoke quietly but I felt the anger in his words.
“I didn’t do anything to you,” Betty said. “I told Emerson I wasn’t paying any more of your bills.”
“You’re a fucking bitch.”
“Don’t you talk that way in front of Zack! I don’t make enough money to keep you in beer.”
“You could join your friend Patty at the Pink Lady spreading your legs. That’s all a fucking cunt like you is good for.”
“Get out of my house, you bastard.” She grabbed the sugar bowl off the table and threw it at him. “Get out! Get out! Get out!” she screamed.
He came off the couch and started for her. I stepped in front of him.
“Keep away from my—”
He hit me hard, slamming me with his open hand across the side of the head. I saw stars and flew backward, slamming into the wall. Betty grabbed the pan of boiling water off of the stove and threw it in his face.
We ran next door to Patty and Joe’s with Hop screaming he was going to kill us.
The next morning we waited for the Greyhound in front of Emerson’s bar. We didn’t say much. We never do at these times. I had my small duffel bag and Betty had her hard-shell suitcase. Anything else we owned—plates, dishes, my bike, things like that—was left for the landlord. Betty hadn’t paid last month’s rent, so the landlord could have the stuff.
When the bus was getting ready to pull out, Gibbs and Gleason rode up on their bikes and scanned the windows, looking for me. In a town where a shout carries almost from one end to another, it didn’t take much time for everyone to know we were leaving. I crouched down so they couldn’t see me. I didn’t want to say anything to them. I liked Gibbs, and Gleason, too, though he was a little turd, and I even liked Mina. But I had to be tough and not care.
We were an hour down the road before I realized the bus was heading in the opposite direction from Reno. Reno had always been our hub, the center of a wheel with the little towns of northern Nevada spread out from it like spokes. This time we were heading south.
“Where we going?” I asked Betty.
She took a deep breath. “Vegas, baby, we’re going back to my old stomping grounds.”
Las Vegas. The name didn’t mean a whole lot to me. Reno was the biggest town I ever saw and I assumed Vegas was bigger than Mina and smaller than Reno, maybe something like Hawthorne.
“It’s been twelve years. They won’t remember me there.”
She leaned closer and showed me a story in a day-old Reno newspaper. “See this guy, that’s Howard Hughes, your father.”
Betty told me many times that my father was a big shot named Howard Hughes, but when your old man was someone you’d never seen or spoken to, it was like telling you about the tooth fairy. The article was about some big financial deal the Hughes guy was pulling off.
“How come he never comes around to see us?”
“Honey, he’s busy and important. And he really doesn’t know about you. He comes to Vegas sometimes. Maybe you’ll meet him there.”
Part 3
THE MAN WHO BOUGHT LAS VEGAS
8
In the wee hours of the morning, late in 1966, Thanksgiving weekend, a representative of the Desert Inn hotel-casino stood beside the tracks at the deserted North Las Vegas train station. In the distance, the rotating front light of a locomotive was visible coming down the track. A cold wind blew off the Spring Mountains. He shivered and pulled the parka that he wore over his business suit tighter. Behind him, two limos and a van were waiting.
His orders had been very specific: A man would be getting off the train. He was not to attempt to speak to the man or even make eye contact. He was to ask no questions. He was to obey all instructions from the man’s bodyguards and aides. All he had to do was simply stand by with the vehicles and guide the convoy to the hotel. Entrance at the hotel would be made through the back and up a service elevator. The entire top floor of the hotel, the penthouse wing, had been set aside for the unnamed visitor. The elevator had been programmed so a key was necessary before it would assent to the penthouse level. The doors to the two stairwells were locked from within, a violation of the fire code. Two armed guards were posted in the hallway. Two more guards were waiting at the rear of the hotel.
Even more bizarre requirements had been made. Workers from a medical supply company had sterilized the top floor, including all furnishings. Other workers had sealed holes and cracks that could let in any dust or pests. Heavy black curtains had been put up at all the windows.
Who the hell is on that train? he wondered. He had some ideas, guesses. He thought nowadays no one but the president had a private train. It wasn’t the president because the hotel would be swarming with Secret Service agents, but it had to be someone just as big. He had a name in mind, a guy who in his own way ran an organization that was not as big as the government, but was a government in and of itself. Vegas was a mob town: Most of the casinos were indirectly owned or controlled by the Syndicate, and the guy who pulled the financial strings of all the mob “families” was a Palm Beach Jew named Meyer Lansky.
He wondered if Lansky was on the train. A few years ago he would have guessed that it was Lansky’s boss, Lucky Luciano, the boss of bosses. But after a roller-coaster ride in which Luciano was sent to prison, released for putting a stop to enemy sabotage on the New York docks during World War II after the Normandie was blown up—he was that powerful, running the Syndicate from his prison cell—and deported to Italy, Luciano had died of a heart attack in ’62. Lansky and Luciano had been the financial spiders behind the Vegas casino boom, financing Bugsy Siegel and then having him murdered when his fingers got sticky after he had sent his girlfriend to Switzerland to stash Flamingo construction “overrun” money in a Swiss bank account.
Lansky was still pulling the mob purse strings, overseeing the finances of not just the usual mob rackets—extortion, dope, prostitution—but controlling a worldwide gambling network built by mob money that included “legal” venues like Vegas, London, and the Carribbean. With Luciano dead, the boss of bosses shifted to Vito Genovese, but he
was no more likely to be the man on the train than Luciano—Vito was serving a fifteen-year term in Leavenworth and ran the mob from there.
As the train’s light got brighter, he thought about the last time he had stood by these same train tracks. It had been about seven years ago, back when Jack Kennedy was on the campaign trail for the presidency. Kennedy rolled into Vegas on a train, made a short speech from the back of the caboose, then stepped down and worked the crowd, shaking hands and kissing babies. He shook hands with Kennedy, sort of, although it was more a brushing of hands than a real grip, but the story grew in the telling. Too bad about Jack, though. That prick Oswald killed him and Ruby gunned Oswald down. Christ, it was like a movie the way things went down. Later Vegas swarmed with feds checking out Ruby’s movements because he’d been in Vegas before the shooting and had a connection with Meyer Lansky and the whole fiasco over the Castro assassination that led to Kennedy getting knocked off.
They say Robert Kennedy was going to run for president in ’68, but he wouldn’t vote for him despite the fact the guy had balls. Robert Kennedy went after corruption like a retriever to a duck. He’d be bad for business, mob business, and he was too friendly with that Negro leader, Martin Luther King, who was causing so much turmoil in the country.
The train stopped and three well-dressed men stepped down. They were all clean shaven, clean cut, and the hotel representative suddenly realized they probably were Secret Service agents and that the train did carry the president.
One of the men approached him and the rep said, “I’m from the Desert Inn.”
“Fine. Just stay out of the way.”
The men fanned out, checking the perimeters. Once the “all clear” was yelled a van backed up near the Pullman train car. The back doors of the van opened and he saw oxygen tanks, medical apparatus, and a white uniformed attendant. A moment later a stretcher was carried down from the train. The stretcher had a back on it so the occupant could sit up and be carried like an Oriental potentate on a litter.
He had been told not to speak or even make eye contact with the man, but no one said he couldn’t stare. The man was fragile-looking, thin and gaunt, almost emaciated. His expression was self-possessed with an edge of grimness.
He was a living legend. If not the richest man in the world, probably the richest in America. He had been orphaned at seventeen and immediately took control of his deceased’s father’s tool company, which made a drill bit that the petroleum-hungry world lusted after. During his career of the past thirty years, he had started an airplane manufacturing company; set the coast-to-coast air speed record; had a ticker-tape parade down Broadway when he set an around-the-world record; built the world’s largest airplane (which flew only once and then for just a mile); founded TWA; owned two movie studios; launched the career of stars like Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, and Jean Harlow; had romantic interludes with Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn, and Yvonne De Carlo; married beautiful Jean Peters; and worked hand in glove with the CIA on international intrigue.
Now a month short of his sixty-first birthday, he was becoming a different kind of legend. His nervous system was polluted with codeine and Valium. His mind was torn by obsessive-compulsive fears and paranoia.
Over the next four years, he would set out to buy up the poorest state in the nation, owning seven casinos and vast land holdings, accounting for nearly one out of every five tax dollars collected by the state. He singlehandedly did what the federal and state government could not do: drive much of the mob from Vegas. He did it not with a stick, but a checkbook. He simply bought them out.
He did all of this while sitting in a leather chair in a black-curtained penthouse, naked, refusing to see anyone but a few Mormon aides, paranoid, drugged, sick, and wasted. He peed into bottles he stored in the closet, kept a diary of his bowel movements and enemas, and had such a morbid fear of germs that he would not touch anything without handling it with a piece of tissue paper.
Howard Hughes had arrived in Las Vegas.
Part 4
THE HUSTLER
9
LAS VEGAS, 1970
“Hey, Lucky, am I working today?”
The kid asking me the question was my age, sixteen, a kid from the same high school class I was in, but I didn’t know him well because I didn’t go to school much. I ran a rag delivery service, hiring kids to pass out advertisements on the Strip and in Glitter Gulch, the downtown gambling area. Everything from jewelry stores advertising wedding rings to escort services wanted handouts distributed to people on the streets, mostly to men. (“It’s legal in Nevada,” the escort service handout said, but didn’t define what was legal.)
Because I needed people over eighteen for the more racy stuff, I tried to use the winos who hung around the downtown soup kitchens, but they were unreliable, so I was always on the lookout for older-looking kids. Besides, even the massage parlors—aka whorehouses—didn’t like seedy-looking characters handing out their stuff.
The truant officer used to bug Betty about me hooking, but since I had turned sixteen, there was no more flack. I would just quit school and no one could make me go back. But I kept up my school contacts for my business. I came by the school to pick up my crew and drop them off in their designated territories.
“I can’t use you today, Frankie, hit me up on Friday. And, guy, my name is Zack.” I got real close to him and smiled when I said it. I’ve been told that when I’m annoyed I grin like a Doberman.
Kids who would come by the apartment picked up on Betty calling me “Lucky” and pretty soon they were doing it, but I didn’t like it. I was superstitious about luck. I figured you only get so much luck in a lifetime. Sometimes I wondered whether I had used up all of mine that day when Betty rubbed a coin in my palm. A lifetime of luck for a quarter jackpot. Since then, life had been an uphill battle, but things weren’t all that bad. Betty was working. She still changed jobs every six months, but Vegas was growing. I handled all of the bills and made her hand over her whole weekly paycheck. Her check was minimum wage with the usual deductions but the real money was in tips. She still flushed every loose dime she got down the toilet—slot machines weren’t called one-armed bandits for their generosity. But with what I earned and my handling her check, the rent and utilities got paid. Sometimes I even let her coach me out of a few bucks when she was out of money. “I’m a sucker for a good-looking dame,” I’d tell her.
Yeah, me and Betty were doing all right, and I had a couple hundred put away for a rainy day, but we still had our noses pressed up against that window.
I leaned against the fender of my ’57 Olds Rocket 98 and shot the shit with Frankie while I waited for my crew to arrive. It was Friday night and I had one kid for downtown and three for the Strip. On Saturday nights, the crew was doubled. They got paid one-third of what the businesses paid me to distribute the fliers, but I didn’t get to pocket the rest of it. I paid one-third of my cut to Tony Lardino, a dumb sonofabitch everyone called Tony the Bat—behind his back. Tony was eighteen, had hands the size of baseball gloves, a beer belly, and a big butt. He carried around a baseball bat as though always on his way to a game. His idea of fun was seeing who could fart the loudest and kicking ass on someone smaller than himself, maybe cracking one of the guy’s kneecaps with the bat just for the fun of it. I would’ve liked nothing better than to put some tire marks from my Olds across the bastard’s back, but his uncle was Morty Lardino. Morty controlled Vegas street crime, prostitution and drugs mostly, and reported to a guy in L.A. who reported to someone else, probably Giancana, in Chicago. There was always a pecking order. My scam was small-time stuff, but not too small for Tony to learn the ropes of the protection racket by shaking me down.
I couldn’t keep change in my pockets and my Olds in gas and tires with everyone getting a cut, so I skimmed a little here and there.
I loaded my crew into the Olds and headed out to make the Strip drop-offs first. The transmission on the Olds banged into gear as I pulled from the curb. I liked
the Olds because it was a lean, mean street machine and made me feel like I was one of the hardasses. I called it a salmon color, though Betty said it looked pink to her, not faggot-pink of course, but a masculine pink—like salmon. A two-door hardtop without the center post, it had chrome spinners, fender skirts, white leather seat covers, a three-carb V8 with a 371-cubic-inch Rocket engine, automatic transmission, power windows, power steering, a rear end lowered by heating the springs and letting them flatten, and a Smithy muffler that rattled windows for a block when you let up on the gas. A kid’s car, for sure, but that’s what I was.
The problem with it was the power steering made a loud whinny noise when you turned and the transmission slammed into gear and bled. The guy who sold it to me said it just needed adjustment, but it hemorrhaged red fluid and a friend’s old man told me I had gotten taken. I needed to figure out a way to dump the lemon on someone else before the transmission fell out. The problem with not having an old man and a mother who knew zilch about cars was that I didn’t know a straight eight from a four banger. This was my first car and I didn’t want to be taken on another one. I always figured I was entitled to one mistake. But just one.
I had made sure Naomi sat up front with me and put the three dudes in the backseat. She lived with her mother in the apartment below us. Naomi was Korean and Negro, her old man had knocked up her mother when he was stationed in Seoul and brought her home as a Korean War bride. She was the prettiest girl I ever saw, with curly black hair, golden tan skin, and big, dark, curious eyes. Her eyes reminded me of the pictures of European children after World War II, sad kids with big round eyes. You saw the pictures in department stores and casino gift shops. Naomi’s eyes looked like that, big and intense. I got an erection just looking at her. I don’t think God made any more beautiful creatures than the black-and-tans that came out of black GIs screwing Japanese and Korean girls.
Sin City Page 5