The History of Las Vegas

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SPEAKER_12: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. SPEAKER_17: Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And we're just a trio of rootin tootin bandits on Stuff You Should Know. SPEAKER_16: Let's just get better and better. SPEAKER_17: Well, I wanted to nod to Las Vegas's Old West, I guess, history. So, you know, there were bandits there. They used words like rootin tootin, I presume. Of course they did. So, it was apropos in my take. I agree. SPEAKER_17: Thanks, man. I appreciate the support. SPEAKER_16: So, early history of Las Vegas. The earliest. SPEAKER_17: We're starting out with indigenous tribes and we're going to work our way forward to, what, like the 80s? SPEAKER_16: Sure. 70s? No, maybe even the early 90s. SPEAKER_17: Oh. Late 80s, early 90s. The 1990s even. Oh, wow. All right. So, we are going to start at the beginning. There seems to have been evidence of habitation. I saw, according to PBS, that dates to 15,000 years ago. Not too shabby. That's even pre-Clovis. There's, I've also seen like about 10,000 years. And then the thing that drew people to Las Vegas, a spring, if you can believe it, that actually turned the area around Las Vegas as we know it now into kind of a relatively verdant area in the desert. That didn't erupt until 8,000 years ago. So, there might have been people hanging out in like rock dwellings and caves around there, here, there. But it wasn't like a place you wanted to stay until that spring came up. Yeah. Like Tuk Tuk was wandering around saying, does anyone know where Garrett Top is playing? SPEAKER_16: That's right. Man, that guy has had a residency for 10 years now. SPEAKER_16: Is he in Vegas? I was kind of kidding. Oh, no. He's had a residency for 10 years now. SPEAKER_17: Oh, wow. Good for him. As a matter of fact, it might be more than that. It might be 8,000 years that he's been there. SPEAKER_16: So, we did promise talk of, and I guess that's about where we're going to pick up then with our story, yeah? Sure. With the Nuiwuvii people, which are part of the Southern Paiute Native American tribe who were kind of all over the place down there. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. SPEAKER_16: Southern California, Southern Nevada, Southern Utah, Northern Arizona, kind of in that little strip. Yes. SPEAKER_16: And they were there in Las Vegas, like you said, largely because there was a spring there. Right. And they were hunters and gatherers, and they were known for their really well-crafted dice. SPEAKER_16: We're just going to have those all over the place, aren't we? For sure. For sure. So, they lived there among other peoples, too. SPEAKER_17: And again, they were hunter-gatherers, so I don't believe they were considered permanent inhabitants of the area, but they definitely lived around there. Yeah. So, I guess it wasn't until the 1820s, no, even after that, it wasn't until the 1850s that the area we know of as Las Vegas was actually first permanently settled. And even then, it was temporary, if that's not enough of a mind-boggler for you. Well, are we going to spoil who that is by two minutes? SPEAKER_16: Yes, I think we should, because I don't want people to have to wait for that. SPEAKER_17: All right. Well, who is it? SPEAKER_16: The Mormons. That's right. But pre-Mormon, when it was just a little spring, it did become known. It was part of Mexico at the time, of course, and it became known as Las Vegas de Quintana, the Meadows in Spanish. SPEAKER_04: And in 1829 is when it first sort of started just being a thing at all, because it was a stop on what was called the Old Spanish Trail, which was a trade route between, well, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, with a stop in Utah on the way. SPEAKER_16: Yeah. And again, the reason why you would stop there is because there's running water there. That's a rarity in the area. SPEAKER_17: So that alone drew people from time immemorial. And I think around the 1840s, a guy named John C. Fremont showed up, or Fremont. And he was a surveyor, but he was like a shade-ster surveyor. He was sent by the United States to go see what the land looked like out there and maybe survey it for the United States, but do it surreptitiously. Because again, all of this area belongs to Mexico. We've just been thinking about maybe taking it over. Yeah. And I want to correct myself real quick. The Old Spanish Trail did connect Vegas to L.A., but it started in Santa Fe, so we didn't want to sell them short. SPEAKER_16: Oh, no, not at all. SPEAKER_17: We love our Santafayans. SPEAKER_16: Santafayanianites. SPEAKER_17: Santafayanianite ganders. SPEAKER_16: Right. SPEAKER_16: So the U.S. and Mexico went to war. This is something that I think we should cover at some point on an episode. From 1846 to 1848, Mexico lost. And under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, everything north of the Rio Grande, basically about half of its territory at the time, was given up. And Las Vegas de Quintana was in there. So now the U.S. government officially is controlling of what would end up being the Las Vegas we know. SPEAKER_16: And some of us love, some of us maybe don't so much. And this was the year 1848, so that was right before the gold rush of 49. SPEAKER_16: So it was already a stopover because of that Old Spanish Trail, and it was just more firmly entrenched as these 49ers would head west looking to catch a show and play a little blackjack, I guess, and spend the night. SPEAKER_16: For sure. And that gold rush of 49 is what really disrupted the Paiute's kind of generally peaceful occupation of the area. SPEAKER_17: Because a lot of people came westward and passed through Vegas, and some even stayed and decided to stake a claim there. And in 1855, like I said, the Mormons showed up. Brigham Young said to William Bringhurst, get thee with 30 of thou'st people to thine Las Vegas area and set up a mission, basically. He's like, don't kid yourself. Let's build a fort because we're not exactly sure how this is going to be received. But once you've built a fort, maybe make friendly contact with the Paiute people, teach them how to farm, and then baptize them when they're not paying attention. That's right. He kind of buried the lead, didn't he? SPEAKER_16: Yeah. SPEAKER_16: So while they were there, they did put up a fort. They did baptize, I think the number was 59 people, Paiute people. And then they did something, or they found something that ended up being really kind of key to why Las Vegas continued to be a thing, which was ore. SPEAKER_16: They found lead ore and set up a mine nearby. And as you will see, mining and finding deposits of all kinds of valuable things ended up being a very key reason Vegas became Vegas. SPEAKER_17: For sure. And let's imagine having the knowledge of just how to set up a mine. Could you start a mine today out of scratch? I couldn't. SPEAKER_16: Me? No. I'd be like, I don't know what I'm doing. But that's what they did. And like you said, it kind of created this legacy of discovery. SPEAKER_17: But they ran into a problem that would be a problem for a while longer. And that was that the intensive agriculture they were trying to create was not sustainable by the spring that had burst forth 8000 years before. Yeah. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, it was good. You could raise a little bit of crops. You could definitely do some hunter gathering. You could get a nice cool drink and bathe in it. But you really couldn't do anything major with it. And so Brigham Young said, get this back to thine Salt Lake area and just bring it in. But they left that fort. And that fort actually is still there today in part because a succession of people kind of came along and said, this is a really handy thing to have. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, there was some other stuff there. There were some cabins and remnants of life. SPEAKER_16: So like you said, when people would pass through there because it was still a stop on that trade trail, people would be like, oh, great, we can kind of use this stuff. And that happened with a gentleman named Octavius Decatur Gass, who was from, that's two S's by the way, and he was from Ohio and went to California in 1850 selling prefab homes, which was great timing. SPEAKER_16: Yeah. Because, you know, that 49er gold rush boom, it was just on the heels of that and people needed places to live. They were kind of getting tired of those canvas tents, I guess. SPEAKER_16: So he had these little prefab kit houses he was selling and I think was doing pretty well for himself doing that. SPEAKER_16: But then he kind of noticed everything that was going on around him as far as people getting rich staking claims and mining. And he was like, I want to get in on that. And he staked a claim, well, several even, but one at El Dorado Canyon about 50 miles away from that original Mormon fort. SPEAKER_17: Yeah. So I saw the Las Vegas Review Journal described O.D. Gass as the kind of guy where opportunity frequently knocked, but he was always in the bathtub. And I think that really kind of gets it across. This guy tried a lot of stuff, but it was, I mean, he was modestly successful, but his ambitions were never reached. But he kind of found his way into, you know, just enough success, but it would always be relatively short lived. And that came, as far as Las Vegas is concerned, when he happened upon that old Mormon fort with a couple of buddies that he'd made in the mining trade. And they decided to give up mining for a little while and take that fort and convert it into a ranch to make a rest stop for travelers on their way west. And this was actually a pretty smart move because, again, there's water there, but more to the point, they used some of that water to grow grapevines, which they turned into wine, which is even harder to find in the desert than water at this time. And that made that place a must stop pit stop on the way out to Los Angeles. Yeah. I mean, you could stop there and get a drink. It was like the seeds of early Las Vegas are already planted. SPEAKER_17: Yeah. The thing is, is it was probably red wine and red wine and like the hot, dry desert is not a good mix. SPEAKER_16: No, it certainly, as we know, you know, how American wine is grown now, it's not an ideal place to grow wine. But back then, I think it was like, OK, we can grow some grapes that will get you drunk. Right. I think that was the point, which is very Vegas-y. SPEAKER_17: It's very Vegas-y. SPEAKER_16: So things start to accumulate there as in people and just, you know, miners, people kind of growing the town around him. He obviously is the, I guess, sort of founder. Sorry, Brigham Young was enjoying power. SPEAKER_16: You know, he was the first guy there to set up stakes for real. And so he ended up having like influence and power. SPEAKER_04: And when the U.S. government said, you know, what we want to do here is we want to actually redraw these lines and these territory lines, SPEAKER_16: and we want to actually scooch Nevada over to where this weird Vegas ranch is encompassed within Nevada. Right. He was like, no, like, this is Arizona. Right. I'm really upset by this to the point where he even tried to like clip off the point of Lincoln County to make a Las Vegas county. And he wasn't able to because he had all of a sudden a bunch of Nevadans, well, they weren't state Nevadans yet, but Nevada territory-ans removed from his constituency. So he was sort of left with no sway. No. I mean, it's tough to be a politician when you're not actually representing anybody because they all move because they didn't want to pay the new Nevada taxes. SPEAKER_04: SPEAKER_17: So his political life kind of petered out. Apparently he was slapped with a two-year tax bill, too. And I couldn't find whether he actually paid it or not. From what I can tell about him, he probably didn't. But he set about reinvesting himself into the ranch. He got married, had a couple of kids, raised them on the ranch, too. And his wife, Mary, by the way, the Paiute people who worked for them called her Long Eye because apparently she was a crack rifle shot. So they're kind of farming, doing the ranch thing, making their way. And I guess he had borrowed about $5,000 from a guy named Archibald Stewart. He basically mortgaged his ranch for five grand. And he's planning on paying it back with a bumper crop that he was expecting of pink beans, which are a delicacy in the area. I can't remember what else he grew, making wine, all that stuff. And apparently there was a freak weather. There was just terrible weather that year, and his crop got wiped out. And so he was forced to basically hand over the ranch to Archibald Stewart. And he and his wife and kids moved to Pomona. Yeah, what a great place to end up. SPEAKER_16: Sure. I love Pomona. I've never been. I've just been once. Someone saw The Shins play a show in Pomona. Oh, wow. SPEAKER_17: What a story. SPEAKER_16: Yeah. The only thing I remember about that show is Emily and I were really bugged because the crowd was young and they weren't getting into it. We were like, what's going on here? SPEAKER_17: This is a great show. Yeah, how would you end up at that show if you weren't into The Shins? I don't know. SPEAKER_16: Or maybe they were just trying to play it cool. They were like, play that song from Garden State. SPEAKER_17: Oh, God. SPEAKER_16: So in the meantime, things are really booming just in that area of El Dorado Canyon as far as mining goes, like copper and lead and gold and silver and everything. Like, people are getting rich out there. SPEAKER_04: It gets a little rowdy, of course, whenever, you know, miners are staking claims and making a whole lot of money. SPEAKER_16: There's going to be some lawlessness. But it was a good, like, place to be if you wanted to mine. If you didn't mine the heat so much, the one problem was they didn't have a railroad. Yeah. SPEAKER_16: To get that stuff places. So their only really route was to use these armed freight wagons, which were slow and expensive. And they were like, we need a railroad. Yeah. SPEAKER_17: And the railroad had already been established by 1869. It just wasn't in Las Vegas because it was still just kind of a dusty wagon trail town. But now it was rich and it needed help getting those riches out of Las Vegas. So the railroads were like, oh, okay, we'll come over there. And so they started building a railroad. There was a reason why Las Vegas got a railroad and it was actually two dudes, two very wealthy dudes, butting heads trying to get control over the railroad in that area. And I say we tell their story when we come back from a break. Let's do it. SPEAKER_16: Hi, I'm Suze Essman. SPEAKER_07: And I am Jeff Garlin. SPEAKER_05: Yes, you are. And we are the hosts of the History of Curb Your Enthusiasm podcast. SPEAKER_07: We're going to watch every single episode. It's 122, including the pilot, and we're going to break them down. And by the way, most of these episodes I have not seen for 20 years. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, me too. SPEAKER_07: We're going to have guest stars and people that are very important to the show, like Larry David. I did once try and stop a woman who was about to get hit by a car. SPEAKER_08: I screamed out, watch out. And she said, don't you tell me what to do. SPEAKER_06: And Cheryl Hines. Why can't you just lighten up and have a good time? And Richard Lewis. SPEAKER_09: How am I going to tell him I'm going to leave now? Can you do it on the phone? Do you have to do it in person? What's the deal? I'm not canceling cable. You have to go in and he's a human being. He's helped you. SPEAKER_07: And then we're going to have behind the scenes information. Tidbits. Yes, tidbits is a great word. SPEAKER_07: Anyway, we're both a wealth of knowledge about this show because we've been doing it for 23 years. So subscribe now and you could listen to the history of Curb Your Enthusiasm on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you happen to get your podcasts. SPEAKER_10: One week we'll be on the case with special agents from NASA as they crack down on black market moon rocks. SPEAKER_15: H. Ross Pro's on the other side and he goes, hello, Joe, how can I help you? I said, Mr. Pro, what we need is $5 million to get back a moon rock. SPEAKER_14: Another week, we'll unravel a 90s Hollywood mystery. SPEAKER_01: It sounds like it should be the next season of True Detective or something. These Canadian cops trying to solve this 25 year old mystery of who spiked the chowder on the Titanic set. SPEAKER_11: A very special episode is stranger than fiction. It's normal people plopped down in extraordinary circumstances. It's a story where you say this should be a movie. Listen to very special episodes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What up, guys? SPEAKER_13: Hola, que tal. It's your girl, Cheeky's from the Cheeky's and Chill and Dear Cheeky's podcasts. You've been with me for season one and two, and now I'm back with season three. I am so excited, you guys. Get ready for all new episodes where I'll be dishing out honest advice and discussing important topics like relationships, women's health, and spirituality. For a long time, I was afraid of falling in love. So I had to, and this is a mantra of mine or an affirmation every morning where I tell myself it is safe for me to love and to be loved. I've heard this a lot that people think that I'm conceited, that I'm a mamona. And a mamona means that you just think you're better than everyone else. I don't know if it's because of how I act in my videos sometimes. I'm like, I'm a baddie. I don't know what it is, but I'm chill. It's Cheeky's and Chill. Hello. Listen to Cheeky's and Chill and Dear Cheeky's as part of the My Cool Tura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_00: All right. SPEAKER_16: So this is the story of a sort of a brief little railroad war that's hard to say, so I'm not going to say it again. One guy was William Clark. He was a copper tycoon from Montana, was also involved in politics. And the other guy was a guy named E.H. Harriman, and he was the head of the Union Pacific Railroad. He was looking for a connection to California. He was shut out of San Francisco, so he looked south toward Los Angeles. SPEAKER_16: Clark wanted to get in on this mining boom, and he said, well, I think we should have a train there as well so we can connect this Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. It can go sort of that old Spanish trade route, actually. And it can go right here through Las Vegas, and I can use it, and it'll be great. He bought a small railroad that ended in L.A. and started to build a connection when he and Harriman started butting heads. Right. So it turned out they finally managed to come to terms with one another SPEAKER_17: because William Clark was really interested in Vegas, in building a town out of Vegas, whereas Harriman was more interested in the actual railroad. So I guess Clark sold his interest to Harriman and started focusing on building a town around this new railroad line through Vegas. And what's interesting is William Clark, he was extraordinarily rich, but his competition in staking and laying out a town in Las Vegas was an African American land surveyor named J.T. McWilliams, who had heard that William Clark was going to build this railroad through Las Vegas and started buying up land around, I think, the west side of the railroad. And he started building a town there, and there were two towns on Vegas, on the west side of the tracks and the east side of the tracks. The east side was Clark's, and the west side was McWilliams, and those were the rival towns when Vegas was first established, I believe starting around 1905. Yeah, super interesting little side story there. I love it. SPEAKER_16: Thanks. Much forgotten to history, I think. So in 1903, Clark, that is, purchased that ranch, Las Vegas Rancho, in that spring from Helen Stewart, who was the widow of the gentleman who had foreclosed on, what's his name? Bass? Gas. SPEAKER_17: Or goss. Gas. SPEAKER_16: Mm-hmm. SPEAKER_16: So he owned all this land now. He subdivided it up into about 1,200 lots, started auctioning them off in May 19 – or sort of late 1904, and then in spring 1905, people started building there. SPEAKER_16: And it was like people were paying pretty good money for these lots back then, considering, you know, where it was. SPEAKER_16: And because all of this, Clark County is named after William Clark, please stay. Oh, that's really funny because Mark Twain called William Clark, like, basically the worst human being alive. SPEAKER_17: He had bribed the Montana legislature to make him a senator, and we actually have the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which says that senators are directly elected rather than appointed by state legislators like they used to because of William Clark. And I didn't realize that they named the county after him. That's interesting. That's right. SPEAKER_16: So I'm sure everyone's like, when are you guys going to start talking about gambling and casinos? Just give us like 20 minutes. SPEAKER_16: No, we're there. So gambling in Vegas, just like much of the United States, was a thing. Like, people have gambled off and on in the United States since there's been a thing. They weren't necessarily casinos, but people would play cards, they would play dice, they would play poker. Mm-hmm. All the kind of like good old-fashioned, you know, person-to-person gambling games. In 1861, this is a few years before statehood, so this is 1861, the governor said, gambling is a felony, you can't do it here, you can't do it. SPEAKER_16: Apparently there was what they called a progressive movement at the time that wanted to get rid of all kinds of vices like that. SPEAKER_16: And then 1869, after they got their statehood, about five years later, they legalized it for, geez, about 40 years, but then reversed that, made it illegal again in 1909. Sure. But in that time, after 1909, that it was illegal, they said like, hey, listen, you can have your poker games, you can have your dice games, you can gamble against other people and stuff like that. But what you can't do is what's called wide open gambling, which is gambling against the house as the bank. Right. SPEAKER_17: And then they reversed that too in 1931, thanks to the Depression and the local mines kind of falling on hard times. They, Las Vegas, or I guess Nevada, passed what's called the wide open gambling bill. That's what they called it. And they said, yeah, you can have a, you can become a licensed gambling establishment and we're going to regulate you and tax the heck out of you, but you can gamble now. What's funny is that Nevada still doesn't have a lottery. Like they said, yes, you can gamble, no, you can't have a lottery. And I think at first it was to protect locals. They started, they legalized gambling to pull tourists in, even from the outset. And then now I think that the gaming companies that run the casinos in Vegas, they just oppose a lottery anytime it comes up because they don't want to even have that as competition. Like that $5 that you spend on a scratch off, we want you to put that into our slot machine. SPEAKER_16: Yeah, you could be doing that. SPEAKER_17: You could put it on roulette, whatever you want to do, as long as you're betting it with us. Yeah, I could totally see that. SPEAKER_16: So they're fighting the depression in 1931 by legalizing gambling. Construction on the Hoover Dam started that same year. And all of a sudden you had people nearby that had a little money in their pocket. Going jingling-ling. SPEAKER_17: Which was, they were, I guess, happy to go over to what was sort of the first area of Vegas to feature casinos was Fremont Street. SPEAKER_16: And things started happening. There's actually one of those casinos that opened in 1906 called the Golden Gate. It's still in Las Vegas. SPEAKER_16: I looked up pictures, I've never been inside it, but I'm going to check it out next time I'm in Vegas. It looks super cool and old school. It's on the Fremont Street experience, right? SPEAKER_16: I have no idea. I think it is. SPEAKER_17: It is. So I don't know if anyone has been to Vegas recently, but in the 90s they closed off a six block stretch of Fremont Street that has a lot of these original casinos and hotels on them. And made it just pedestrian only. And then they covered it with a light show roof that has 49 million LED lights across it. Wow. And so it's, whatever that weird non-time of day is that always is indoors in Vegas, they managed to do that on a six block stretch of street. So it's really something. That's called the Fremont Street experience. And these first casinos and resorts, that was them. And some of them are still there, like you said, the Golden Gate. Yeah, the Golden Gate. SPEAKER_16: Is it awesome to walk under that thing? SPEAKER_17: It's pretty cool. It's cool. It's got a lot of street performers, like Man's Chinese Theatre or Times Square. But then it has a lot of history. The neon museums there, the mob museums there. SPEAKER_17: It's pretty well done to tell you the truth. Vegas Vic, that 50 foot tall cowboy that is so iconic from Vegas from the Pioneer Club. Oh, sure. He's there. Yeah, it's pretty neat. All right, I'll check it out next time. Just be aware, you could kind of make a case it's a bit of a tourist trap. SPEAKER_16: So we recommend, are we recommending it officially? Yes. SPEAKER_16: All right, go to Mialwolf first and then go to that. Okay. SPEAKER_16: All right, so this was, again, the 1930s. So there was illegal gambling going on all over Los Angeles at the time. And they were like, hey, Vegas is not that far. Pretty soon there'll be a very cheap and quick Southwest Airlines flight that goes there 400 times a day. But now we can make that drive at least through the desert, just like Vince Vaughn did in Swingers. And gamble our little hearts away. And one of those guys was, well, he was a guy. His name was Guy. His name was Guy McAfee and he was the commander of the LAPD Vice Squad. Which is to say at the time he was probably dirty and crooked because he was swept out along with a lot of the corruption in the city. A lot of the corruption in the early 1930s in the LAPD. One of the first runs at making the LAPD straight and narrow, I guess. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. SPEAKER_16: Like I'm not banging on them. I think they have a rich history of corruption. Right. I just didn't want to sound too harsh, but we all know that. We've seen the movies. Sure. So he was known as the captain and he was at the time in L.A. married to a madam, a Hollywood madam, who ran a string of gambling houses. They were all connected to the mob, of course. And the writing was on the wall that he needed to get the heck out of Dodge, which was L.A. And he said Vegas seems like kind of the perfect landing spot for me. SPEAKER_16: Yeah. SPEAKER_17: And so he showed up and bought the Golden Nugget. He bought another place called the Pear O' Dice Club. Which I read that five times before I got it. The Pear O' Dice Club. Oh, oh, oh. I got it. You got it now? I didn't get it the first time. Okay, good. I'm glad it wasn't just me. I thought you were just confused by Pear O' Dice. SPEAKER_16: No, no, no. It was the pun I didn't get. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it now. It's good pun. SPEAKER_16: And the reason why I finally got it is because he set up an area outside of Las Vegas city limits that he named Pear O' Dice. SPEAKER_17: Pear O' Dice, Nevada. Pear O' Dice, Nevada. It's technically not a town. It's unincorporated Clark County. But he named it after his club, Pear O' Dice. But he called this area Paradise. And this is the strip. This is the Las Vegas strip. Still today, everything from the Bellagio, the Venetian, the Wynn, the Cosmopolitan, the Staybridge Suites. All of them are actually outside of Las Vegas city limits in this unincorporated part of Clark County called Paradise. Paradise that was set up in the 1930s by a corrupt LAPD vice squad commander named Guy McAfee. SPEAKER_16: Nice summation. Thanks. So this is where, I mean, they called it the strip then, and this is where things really started to boom. All this development began. Mind you, this was still in the 1940s. So they were still sort of the ranch style, low lying, not, you know, these big high rises that would come later on. We'll get to that. They were like S-Kicker casino resorts. SPEAKER_16: Oh, totally. I think everyone knows what you mean, right? Yeah, I think so. SPEAKER_17: You know, kickin' what? SPEAKER_16: SPEAKER_17: I said what I was going to say. I'm just kidding. SPEAKER_16: So there was a hotel here from California named Thomas Hull. He opened the first sort of all self-contained in and of itself luxury casino resort in 1941 called El Rancho Vegas. SPEAKER_16: Named after he had other properties named Rancho. The story goes his car broke down outside of Vegas and he was out there burning up in the heat and he had like a vision for to just be in a swimming pool. SPEAKER_16: And so he was like, that needs to happen out here. So that's what he did. He opened up the first big place that had swimming pools and restaurants. Movie stars. Movie stars and opera house. Had places where you could shop. It had the casino, of course. Like the first what we think of as a casino was that one. And he did pretty well with it. They had showgirls. They had the whole nine yards. Yeah, they were the first one to have Vegas showgirls. SPEAKER_17: And I wasn't joking when I said movie stars. Clark Gable was very famously stationed at El Rancho Vegas when Carole Lombard, his wife, died in a plane crash nearby I think on Table Mountain on the way to Las Vegas. And he wasn't the only one. Like this was a place where stars from LA came. And as people from people in Vegas started building places that like the cream of the crop of Hollywood stars wanted to hang out, it gave Vegas like the veneer of glamour that it originally had. This is when it started, the early 40s. Yeah. SPEAKER_16: And you know, things were booming throughout the 40s. And then into the 50s is when things even kicked into a higher gear. Vegas is just ramping up more and more through the decades. That's when the Desert Inn was built, the Eldorado Club downtown, which would become Benny Binion's Horseshoe Club. I think it's now just Binion's. Or actually, I think for a few years now it hasn't been there at all, but it became Binion's. It was famous because the World Series of Poker was there every year. SPEAKER_04: In 1955, the first High Rise opened, which was the Riviera. SPEAKER_16: It was nine stories. SPEAKER_04: And get this, they paid Liberace $50,000 per week in 1955 to play there. SPEAKER_16: In 1955 money? That's $631,000 a week. Oh, West Egg. SPEAKER_16: Totally, as is our tradition. SPEAKER_16: 58, Stardust opened, and we saw the debuts of a couple of gentlemen who would be Vegas legends. Wayne Newton and Frank Sinatra debuted there. And then also in the 50s is when the first sort of boom in the wedding chapel business started. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, and then I saw somewhere, I cannot remember where, that no less than 10 major casino resorts were built in the 50s. That is an amazing building boom. Like, this is when Las Vegas became Vegas as we know it, like, nostalgically, right? I also saw somewhere that I think 11 were built, and of those 11, 10 of them were either financed by or outright owned by the Mafia. That was when the Mafia really got its grip on Las Vegas in the early 50s and throughout, actually even in the 40s, the mid to late 40s, thanks to a guy named Bugsy Siegel. SPEAKER_17: But by the 50s, when the 50s rolled around, it seemed like it was irreversible, the grip that the mob had on Las Vegas. Yeah, totally. And you said the words Bugsy Siegel, and that feels like a great place for a break. SPEAKER_05: Hi, I'm Suzi Essman. SPEAKER_07: And I am Jeff Garlin. SPEAKER_05: Yes, you are. And we are the hosts of the History of Curb Your Enthusiasm podcast. SPEAKER_07: We're going to watch every single episode. It's 122, including the pilot, and we're going to break them down. And by the way, most of these episodes I have not seen for 20 years. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, me too. We're going to have guest stars and people that are very important to the show, like Larry David. SPEAKER_07: I did once try and stop a woman who was about to get hit by a car. I screamed out, watch out! SPEAKER_08: And she said, don't you tell me what to do! SPEAKER_06: And Cheryl Hines. Why can't you just lighten up and have a good time? And Richard Lewis. SPEAKER_09: How am I going to tell him I'm going to leave now? Can you do it on the phone? Do you have to do it in person? What's the deal? Not canceling cable. You have to go in there. He's a human being. He's helped you. SPEAKER_07: And then we're going to have behind the scenes information. Tidbits. Yes, tidbits is a great word. SPEAKER_07: Anyway, we're both a wealth of knowledge about this show because we've been doing it for 23 years. So subscribe now and you could listen to The History of Curb Your Enthusiasm on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you happen to get your podcasts. SPEAKER_15: And then he goes, hello, Joe, how can I help you? I said, Mr. Perot, what we need is $5 million to get back to Moon Rock. SPEAKER_14: Another week, we'll unravel a 90s Hollywood mystery. SPEAKER_01: It sounds like it should be the next season of True Detective or something. These Canadian cops trying to solve this 25-year-old mystery of who spiked the chowder on the Titanic set. SPEAKER_11: A very special episode is stranger than fiction. It's normal people plopped down in extraordinary circumstances. It's a story where you say this should be a movie. Listen to very special episodes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_13: What up, guys? Hola, catal. It's your girl, Cheekyz, from the Cheekyz and Chill and Dear Cheekyz podcasts. You've been with me for season one and two, and now I'm back with season three. I am so excited, you guys. Get ready for all new episodes where I'll be dishing out honest advice and discussing important topics like relationships, women's health, and spirituality. For a long time, I was afraid of falling in love. So I had to, and this is a mantra of mine or an affirmation every morning where I tell myself, it is safe for me to love and to be loved. I've heard this a lot, that people think that I'm conceited, that I'm a mamona. And a mamona means that you just think you're better than everyone else. I don't know if it's because of how I act in my videos sometimes. I'm like, I'm a baddie. I don't know what it is, but I'm chill. It's Cheekyz and Chill. Hello. Listen to Cheekyz and Chill and Dear Cheekyz as part of the My Cultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_00: We're in love with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. SPEAKER_17: Okay, so Chuck, I said Bugsy Siegel. I'm actually talking about one Benjamin Siegelbaum who was born in 1906. And by the time he reached his teenage years, he was already running protection rackets on poor street pushcart peddlers. Because, you know, protection racket means like I'm going to protect you from me if you don't give me, if you give me money. If you don't, then I'm going to come after you, right? This guy was doing this as a teenager. He became friends with a guy named Meyer Lansky, and the two of them together started bootlegging during prohibition, right? SPEAKER_17: Yeah, and this was in New York. They eventually merged with what was called the syndicate, which was a nationwide criminal enterprise. SPEAKER_16: You know, it was the mob. And Siegel then formed a spinoff organization called Murder Inc. I totally think we should do a whole episode on Murder Inc. at some point. Sure. SPEAKER_16: So we're not going to get too into it, but Murder Inc. was exactly like it sounds. It was an organization that did contract killings. Apparently between 400 and 1,000 contract killings took place at the hand of Murder Inc., including, supposedly, about 30 individuals personally killed by Bugsy Siegel. Yeah. If you have a criminal gang called Murder Inc., that's going to draw the attention of the authorities. SPEAKER_17: And that happened very much in New York. And all of a sudden, they tried to crack down on the Murder Inc. gang members. So Bugsy Siegel said, so long, New York. I'm heading out west. And he landed in Los Angeles. He was staying at the mansion of his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, who herself was a mafioso. I guess mafiosa. She was from Alabama, but had somehow fallen into the mob. She was a mafiosa as well. She wasn't just like a mall. She was a gangster herself. SPEAKER_16: Yeah. And she was played by Annette Bening to her Warren Beatty, to her Warren Beatty, her husband. And it's a great movie. SPEAKER_16: I've never seen it. Ooh, man. Bugsy was awesome. Really? SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was really, really. I mean, Warren Beatty didn't make a bad movie that he directed. SPEAKER_16: Oh, he directed it? Didn't he direct Ishtar? SPEAKER_16: Uh-uh. I don't think so. Oh, okay. SPEAKER_16: I've never seen Ishtar. I haven't either, but I was alive at the time enough that I know it was just a punch line, even still in 2024. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, I'm pretty sure he directed Bugsy, but I'll have to check that. At any rate, really, really good movie. SPEAKER_16: Right. Okay, so that's about those two. And really, it's about Bugsy Siegel. And really, it's about Bugsy Siegel building Las Vegas. SPEAKER_17: That is true to an extent in that he really was the one who brought the mob to Vegas. And apparently, it was through some sort of happenstance. He was living out in Hollywood, and he met a guy named Billy Wilkerson, who was a gambler at Hotelier, who was trying to build a really class joint out in Vegas. And he said, Bugsy, why don't you come in on this? Let me borrow some money from you. You can have a stake in this hotel we're going to build. And Bugsy said, as long as it's not one of those S-kicker, you know, old Western hayseed themed resorts, I'm in. And he said, no, no, no. This is going to be a great place. I don't know what we're going to call it yet. And Bugsy said, well, let's call it the Flamingo, because that's my nickname for my girlfriend, Virginia Hill, because she has really long legs. So we're going to call this place Flamingo as like, you know, a little wink toward her. And Bugsy was suddenly in the casino resort building business. SPEAKER_17: And he got in even further when Billy Wilkerson couldn't pay him back, because Bugsy said, well, I'm going to kill you if you don't give me this hotel. And that was the exit of Billy Wilkerson and the real entree of Bugsy Siegel into Las Vegas, which established the mafia, the syndicate, the mob as we know it, into Vegas. And this was about the mid 1940s. Yeah, he really, and by the way, Barry Levison directed Bugsy, so I was wrong on that. SPEAKER_16: Okay. But it's still really good. Barry Levison didn't direct many bad movies either. Didn't he do Diner? Yeah, great movie. Okay. You didn't like Diner? SPEAKER_17: I haven't seen it. I was just, I was legitimately asked. I wasn't throwing shade on Diner. No, no, no. But when you said, okay. SPEAKER_17: Oh, I know. I could read between my own lines, but I didn't mean to write anything there. SPEAKER_16: Oh, well, that's a good quote. So he really got involved in this casino, like the building, the design. Like he wasn't just like, all right, I'm going to sort of run this thing now and just let everyone do their thing. He was involved in like the minutia of the detail of the design of like picking out the bedsheets and like, you know, the artwork that hung in the rooms. SPEAKER_16: Like he was really, really, I think he kind of found himself, like he went to L.A. to try to be an actor. He was no good at that. Like he always felt like he wanted to be something more than like a two-bit mobster, which is what he was. Well, no, he wasn't two-bit. He was like the biggest narcotics importer on the West Coast. SPEAKER_17: Yeah, yeah, I didn't mean two-bit. I just meant he didn't want to be looked at as the mobster. That's why he tried to be an actor. SPEAKER_16: Gotcha. He tried to be a hotelier. Right. Hotelier? But, you know, none of that stuff was working out, including initially at least the Flamingo, because when they opened it, it was not a big hit right out of the gate, much to the chagrin of the syndicate. SPEAKER_17: He lost $300,000 in one week the first week it was open. And it was such a huge loss that he had to shut the place down so he didn't lose any more money and he had to get back to kind of reconfiguring things. Apparently, they didn't have rooms ready when they opened, so all the gamblers came and then took their money elsewhere. All of those details that he had personally selected were really expensive. The original price tag was a million dollars. It ballooned up to past six million. So, yeah, there's a very widely held belief that Bugsy was in hot water with the Mafia partners, including Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, who were backing him and his venture into Las Vegas. The thing is, he supposedly, when he reopened, out of the gate, the Flamingo in 1947 started to become profitable. So I've seen people say, like, no, he actually wasn't in hot water with his Mafia people. And the reason why it matters is because six months after it reopened, or a few months after it reopened, in June of 1947, Bugsy Siegel was assassinated, hit in his own home, well, Virginia Hill's home in Los Angeles. Yeah, hit through the window, from behind, kind of sitting on the couch. It's a great scene in the movie. SPEAKER_16: His, you know, the traditional thinking is that Lucky Luciano and the syndicate was behind it. Right. Meyer Lansky, who was his sort of oldest friend throughout this whole thing, because they were buddies back in New York in the early days, I think just it was sort of seeing the sad demise of his friend and what was going on. SPEAKER_16: Ben Kingsley is so, so good as Meyer Lansky in the movie. I'm sure. But not everyone believes it was a mob hit. There's a guy named Bernie Sindler, who was an emissary for Lansky back in the day. And back then, he was on the record of saying, like, I don't like a lot of this doesn't add up as being a mob hit. I think it was one of Virginia Hill's brothers, one of her Marine Corps brothers that was angry that she was like wrapped up in all this stuff. Yeah, he makes the point. SPEAKER_17: This guy was literally here at the time. Like, he was working in Vegas with Siegel and others at the time, so he knows what he's talking about. He was saying that Siegel was legit enough that you would have had to have gotten permission directly from Lucky Luciano, or the order would have come directly from Lucky Luciano to kill Bugsy Siegel. And in this guy's opinion, Meyer Lansky never would have allowed that. He wouldn't have just stepped aside and let his old friend be murdered, hit. And again, like, he wasn't apparently in-hoc to the mob in any way that he couldn't repay. So yeah, this guy said it was one of Virginia Hill's brothers. Also, he's got some pretty good points. One, he said that was not a mob hit. The mob doesn't use M1 carbines and shoot through an open window. Like, they take you on a car ride and the guy seated behind you in the car shoots you in the head so they don't miss. Yeah, that's how the mafia hit you, right? So he's like, it just didn't add up to a mob hit. So that's a pretty interesting, surprising thing. But if you think about it, Bugsy was there for just a couple of years, but the gains he made and the groundwork he laid for the mafia is what led directly to that huge boom in the control of the mafia of Las Vegas that just erupted in the 50s. SPEAKER_17: Oh, yeah. SPEAKER_16: And then, you know, into the 60s, it was firmly entrenched as, like, a mob hangout. Obviously, a place where you could gamble, where you could go and get married in two seconds or divorced in two seconds, where sex work was legal. SPEAKER_16: I think in 63, these guys, Dick Taylor and Pat Howell, wrote a book called Las Vegas, not a colon, but a comma. Rare. SPEAKER_16: City of Sin? And that's where, supposedly, the name Sin City came around. Really kind of linked up well with everything that was going on there at the time. Great movie, too. Sin City? I remember it was, like, based on a graphic novel. SPEAKER_17: It's got, like, Clive Owen and... Oh, yeah, yeah. SPEAKER_16: SPEAKER_16: Oh, man, that's so good. That Sin City? That was good. Yeah. Like the black and white? Yeah. Yeah, really good. And the other big thing that happened in the early 60s was McCarran Airport opened up in 1962, which all of a sudden, you know, that Southwest Airlines flight could start happening. Although, I don't know if it happened back then, so don't Google that. Yeah, so it wasn't just people from L.A. and, you know, Arizona coming to Las Vegas. SPEAKER_17: Now, all of a sudden, it was people around the world. And apparently, by the 70s, the largest population of tourists in Las Vegas were Midwesterners. Yeah. SPEAKER_16: Yeah, pretty funny. SPEAKER_16: Oh, as residents? No, no, no, as tourists, as visitors. SPEAKER_17: Oh, okay. Oh, of course. The airport really changed things. Sure. The only big thing that changed things in the 60s for Vegas was Howard Hughes. So I said before, it looked like the mob's grip on Las Vegas was irreversible, and it may have been if Howard Hughes hadn't shown up. And he did a couple of things. One, he started buying casinos and hotels from the mob directly. Yeah. So for, I think, a little period in the 60s, maybe 70s, he was the single largest casino owner in town. So he just basically took over from the mob by buying them out. And then also, he proposed that Las Vegas and Nevada, the gaming commission, change their rules about corporate ownership. Because before, if you were a corporation and you wanted to own a casino, every single shareholder had to pass a background check. SPEAKER_17: You could be talking about thousands of people. It was just untenable. You couldn't do it. And he said, why don't you just make it so that the key players, like the real high-up execs who are going to be running the place, just do backgrounds on them. Forget the shareholders. And the gaming commission said, that's a really good idea. And now, all of a sudden, the mob had competition from Wall Street and huge corporations that were coming in. SPEAKER_17: And they ended up getting muscled out. SPEAKER_16: Yeah. I mean, that was it. That was either the beginning of the beginning or the beginning of the end, depending on which way you want to look at it. But once Wall Street corporations could kind of stroll in there and just start buying up these properties that, you know, this is in the 60s and 70s. SPEAKER_16: So this is still like a boom time for Vegas. It's a city that's seemingly always expanding and under construction. Like, I don't remember going to Vegas. I started going there in the, I guess, like 1991 or so was my first trip. And every time I've been, it's just struck me as like, are they ever going to stop developing and building in this town? SPEAKER_16: No. SPEAKER_16: And probably not, because it continued all through then. They've had their lulls. I think there was, you know, some years here and there within decades that things aren't as robust and where they were, you know, where the gambling industry and the whole sin industry sort of took a little bit of a hit, but not that much. Well, it wasn't even necessarily that it took a hit. SPEAKER_17: It was that Vegas, it just lost its glitz and glamour, especially starting in the 70s and in through the 80s, where it just became tacky. That's what everybody thought of. It was tacky. The entertainers who used to like draw crowds internationally, they weren't there. The people who were performing in Vegas, their careers were washed up. Right. So like that was the kind of- The food wasn't great yet. Nope. The food was terrible. Like all you can eat prime rib for like $5 kind of stuff. This idea of Vegas in the 80s, it was just decrepit and a place you went like as a lark or if you had like a serious gambling problem and like $5 prime rib, right? Yeah. SPEAKER_17: And in the same way that Howard Hughes kind of came along and was like, I'm going to save this town, Steve Wynn did the same thing. At a time when Vegas was viewed as super tacky and backwards and just lame, he invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the Mirage and he opened it, gave $30 million to Siegfried and Roy and completely changed the face of Las Vegas, completely changed the market, who they were trying to attract. They were suddenly attracting families. Like it was okay to bring your kids to Vegas now. Like there was something for everybody and he completely saved Las Vegas. Yeah, for sure. SPEAKER_16: I think like a place like Caesars before that did a lot to sort of raise the perception of Vegas, but it wasn't like in the family way. No, in like the fantasy way though, like that. They definitely started that I think. SPEAKER_17: Yeah. I mean, when they started building casinos with roller coasters and playgrounds and more family friendly shows, because you know, at one point Vegas, like all those shows were like topless basically. SPEAKER_16: Right. SPEAKER_16: And then all of a sudden, if you had family friendly stuff going on, it was like, hey, you don't have to just, you know, the gambling addict in your family isn't the only one that's going to want to come here now. You can be that and drag your kids along and they can go see a kid friendly show. SPEAKER_16: Yeah, they're like, definitely bring the gambling addict in your family. We want them there. SPEAKER_17: But you guys can come too, right? Yeah. SPEAKER_16: Yeah. And it got a lot more expensive. I mean, the old Vegas days, even when I first started going there, you could get a pretty cheap room and a pretty cheap meal. But that all changed. Vegas is not a cheap town to visit anymore. SPEAKER_16: No, it changed things to Steve Wynn and that whole shift. And now it kind of shifted again to this kind of like ultra luxury destination. That's where we are right now. SPEAKER_17: Yeah. Well, that's Las Vegas up to basically now. I know we said we're going to go to late 80s and 90s, but we took it even further. So if you didn't like that, sorry. If you want to know more about Las Vegas, start reading about it. Go visit it. Whatever you want to do. And since I said whatever you want to do, it's time for listener mail. SPEAKER_16: This is gasoline cleaning mystery resolved. We had a few people write in about that. In the episode, the Telesin massacre from December 2020, you discuss how the instigator and murderer at the scene of the crime was an estate worker named Julian Carlton. While retrieving the gasoline that caused part of the fire incident on the property, he told his boss that he was getting the gasoline to clean a rug. Why do I remember this tiny detail? Because at the end of the episode, Josh says he found Carlton's grave on the website, find a grave and rather innocuously a pop up bubble on the site, prompting the viewer to write a moving memory said, what is one thing you'll always remember about Julian? Chuck answered that question by saying he could really get the stain out of a rug. And I found that joke absolutely hilarious. Love the show, guys. Can't wait for you to come back to Cleveland. I'm the manager of the largest site seeing shipping Cleveland on Lake Erie in the Cuyahoga River. The Good Time three. And Chuck, I'm also a graduate of the University of Akron. Go zips. And that is from Luke. UCBO is how I'm going to pronounce that. SPEAKER_16: Very nice. I got it right, Luke. SPEAKER_17: Thanks a lot, Luke. Eat your heart out. Good times one and two. If you want to be like Luke and tell us how much we cracked you up, we love hearing that kind of thing. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. SPEAKER_12: Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. SPEAKER_17: You know, in today's world, it seems the best treatment is reserved only for a few. Well, Discover wants to change that by making everyone feel special. That's why, with your Discover card, you'll have access to 24-7 live customer service as well as $0 fraud liability, which means you're never held responsible for unauthorized purchases. Finally, no matter who you are or where you are in life, you'll feel special with Discover. Learn more at Discover.com slash credit card. Limitations apply. SPEAKER_07: So listen to the history of Curb Your Enthusiasm on iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you happen to get your podcasts. SPEAKER_11: Hey, this is Dana Schwartz. You may know my voice from Noble Blood, Hayleywood, or Stealing Superman. I'm hosting a new podcast and we're calling it Very Special Episodes. A very special episode is stranger than fiction. SPEAKER_01: It sounds like it should be the next season of True Detective. These Canadian cops trying to solve this mystery of who spiked the chowder on the Titanic set. Listen to Very Special Episodes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.